Watching Gangs of New York last night, I was struck just by how much our fiction is primarily about superhuman characters.  Like ancient mythology, we need larger than life heroes who can completely heal from terrible mutilation, or overcome any obstacle if it lies in the way of their dramatic goals.  And certainly there’s no amount of branding that can be done to the pretty face of Leonardo Di Caprio that he won’t be able to shrug off in a matter of minutes of screen time.  Even the “terrible scars” …

Hanging out in dorm room, listening to Dark Side of the Moon is a rite of passage, or at least it used to be. It was easy to get lost in those psychedelic riffs, spacey hooks, and mind-blowing jams while doing nothing more than chilling out and starting at a tie-died sheet on the ceiling. And while his name and face are gone forever I can still remember the dude who harshed my mellow, “Man, that’s totally easy to play! I could do that on my guitar!”
Often in life you’ll …

There’s an interesting article in Gamasutra that discusses game “feel” using the Mario series for its examples. It’s a little pedantic in parts, but I think it does manage to lay out some of the difficult issues that a designer can face when trying bring a character to life, and then hand control of it over to an anonymous player.
However you describe it, it?s hard to deny that the sensation of controlling a digital object is one of the most powerful — and overlooked — phenomena ever to emerge from …

There’s an interesting article up on the Escapist discussing Mario’s place in the videogame universe and how he got here.
 As far as I can tell the article doesn’t actually deal very much with the character’s marketability, even though the title claims he is “unmarketable”. The author also points out that a top-selling multi decade icon is really hard to create, and that icons launched in the past wouldn’t always translate directly into the present. But I think that’s true for almost any name brand character.  Would the sexist, liquor swilling, arrogant James …

Now that I’ve completed it, I can’t avoid saying something about just how much of an impact Portal has had on me.
As I mentioned last week, it only took playing the first hour of the game to convince me that I had to finish it.  But finishing it has convinced me that it’s truly one of the best games of the year, and that 2007 is turning out to be a renaissance in video game narrative.
 Portal and Bioshock are, in many ways, two perfect bookends of the same idea.  They …