-
Subjectivity and The Garden of Forking Paths
[Spoilers for The Garden of Forking Paths] Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths ends in a tragedy. The death of Stephen Albert seems at once fated, yet coincidental. His death was due to an unfortunate coincidence in names, yet it seemed that fate brought the killer to him. Our protagonist Yu Tsun’s arrival was expected…
-
The Magic Trick in Deus Ex
I’ve been obsessively watching old clips of the TV talent show Penn and Teller’s Fool Us recently. The show’s premise is this: magicians come onto the show and perform a routine in front of Penn and Teller along with a live audience. At the end of their routine, Penn and Teller discuss amongst themselves and…
-
Seeing the Bones in Speedruns
During Tomatoangus’ (aka Tomatoanus) speedrun of the Fallout anthology at the recently concluded Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) 2020, he whips out a hastily constructed sculpture made of plastic cups and cardboard, igniting a wave of laughter from the audience present in the conference hall. You see, he’s about to execute a trick that will…
-
Shooting the Baby
So there was a new Call of Duty game. I hope that was not a surprise. They crank them out like Funko Pops, and when you crank something out like Funko Pops, you probably need some means of making your latest Funko Pop stand out from all the other Funko Pops, otherwise it’ll just blend…
-
Jojo Rabbit’s Cardinal Sin (and why it’s a good thing)
[Spoilers for Jojo Rabbit] Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit does the one thing you shouldn’t do when depicting Nazis: make them sympathetic. On the surface this might seem like a deplorable artistic choice – the idea that a Nazi, the universal villain, is somehow worthy of understanding and sympathy. What Jojo Rabbit does though, is the…
-
The Real Monster in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki
[Spoilers for Junji Ito’s Uzumaki] Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, on first encounter, seems like a body horror manga. It tells the story of a town seemingly cursed by the geometric form of a spiral. Inhabitants become obsessed with the shape to the point of insanity. As chapter unfolds after chapter, they find their bodies twisted and…
-
Press G to Wipe Mask
There is a bandwidth asymmetry inherent to videogames. Millions of bytes of image data are streamed to our retinas every one sixtieth of a second and in return, our input devices send back, at best, several kilobytes of user input. This asymmetry often leads to laughable juxtapositions. Press X to Jason. Press F to Pay…
-
Mr Robot: The Machine that Whiterose built
Mr Robot’s episodes are peppered with Chekov’s guns. An insert shot of a Signal message. A spoken line cut off mid-word. You can practically hear the metaphorical rounds loaded into the metaphorical rifle. It means something right? It has to. Sam Esmail is no J.J. Abrams right? The secret box isn’t empty. And the guns…
-
Disco Elysium
“There is a specter haunting Europe: the specter of communism.” Disco Elysium embodies these words, but probably for the opposite reasons Marx and Engels wrote them. They ushered in the rise of communism with these words, but Disco Elysium speaks of its fall. In Revachol, communism is a *thing* that happened, but in the fog…
-
Sayonara Wild Hearts
Rhythm games can broadly be broken into two camps. There is the Guitar Heroes and DDRs, which are very much about rhythm and anticipation of beats. Then there is the Rezs’ and Audiosurfs, which are more about manifesting flow and a zen-like state. Sayonara Wild Hearts is both. It phases between Audiosurf-like ‘driving’ sections and…