rants « Popular Culture Gaming

The Pirate Academic in the Digital Age

Or maybe it should be the Digital Academic in the Pirate Age?

Anyway, I’m backing up my data including stuff I have on dvds since I’ve heard burned dvds might not last very long. I see that I have around 500 gigs of stuff including various videogame documentaries, news coverage, websites, interviews, youtube videos, and newspaper [...]

Roger Ebert apologizes to the “kids”

As was the case the last time Roger Ebert wrote about videogames, the gaming websites are all talking about his latest post about gaming. He writes:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom [...]

On Art and Violence

Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger [...]

Movies can be scary too…

Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.

I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something [...]

Where have you gone Jack Thompson

Once upon a time Jack Thompson was the nemesis of gamers. Then he got permanently disbarred but that didn’t stop him as he claimed to be fighting the Florida Bar and probably lots of other crazy things. He also started writing an occasional column for some online conservative site.

Now, however, he seems to have disappeared. [...]

Girls are dumb… …according to Sony

So this guy’s girlfriend is so dumb she doesn’t notice the guy pushing buttons on the controller or that certain scenes keep happening over and over when he dies? Or are they saying that Uncharted 2 is full of long cut scenes? It is nice to see Sony stretching out and advertising games to new [...]

Most Insulting Paper Title Ever?

I’m currently writing about LAN parties as third places and in doing some research I came across this article: Appeal of violent video games to lower educated aggressive adolescent boys.

Wow, could the researchers have a lower opinion of videogame players? So the only reason someone would like violent games is if they were uneducated and [...]

Resident Evil 5 Racism From Someone Who Hasn't Played It

“I didn’t see any racist imagery in it”
“No one says anything about the Spanish people in RE4”
“Why does it matter what color zombies are?”
“Why do people have to read so much into things?”
“Games are escapism”
“They didn’t mean to be racist”
“This is made by the Japanese so why would they know about racism?”
“Someone who thinks this [...]

Am I out of Touch?

I’m starting to wonder if I’m out of touch with the gaming community. I don’t have any of the current generation consoles. I have never played WoW. Because of this a lot of the stuff I read or listen to about new games doesn’t really apply to me.

I really got to thinking [...]

Where's my Valkyrie game?

So the film Valkyrie is out. In the film Tom Cruise uses Sientology to build a time machine to kill Hitler or something — I don’t know for sure, history wasn’t my strong suit. But what I do know is that it is a movie about killing Hitler. OMGWTFBBQ! If ever [...]

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