Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Gaming communities are mourning the death of prominent transgender game developer Rachel Bryk, who committed suicide on April 23. Bryk, 23, was plagued by chronic pain, which she told friends was a result of rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. She took her own life by jumping from the George Washington Bridge, which connects Manhattan to New Jersey,…
Over the past week, I found myself at times so stricken by depression that I could barely move, only lie face down as if there were some great force pressing me there, leaden and slowly leaking tears. It was as rough as you might expect on the one hand, but on the other I wasn’t…
I followed a whim and clicked upon seeing the advertisement below, promising me “the hottest game 2015”. The focus of my experience, stressed the ad, would be “beautiful females”, but I was just as attracted to the clear trajectory outlined in its upper right corner: “Game Starts. Choose Story. Game Setting. Game Ends.” That sounds…
One advantage video games have over movies and books is that they are the only medium where you actually feel like you’re walking in the shoes of the protagonist — a good game will convince you that’s really you galloping across meadows, exploring futuristic cities, having sex with pigeons, etc. Or, you know, just being…
Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t need to be told that threatening to rape and murder women is not okay. It’s not a casual means of communicating disagreement; it’s not a hilarious riposte; it’s not a valid expression of frustration at being a sad and lonely individual. And if you know and understand…
I was milling around a videogames conference two weeks ago (Kill Screen’s Two5Six, holla!), and a friend kept saying he “kicked that” whenever one or another game came up as a topic of conversation. It took me far too long to figure out that he meant he backed the project on Kickstarter—I kept thinking, is…
Six legendary game designers. Six dream projects that were never meant to be. 1. Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims) “In the late ’90s, I started working on a game called Wild Geography Excitement. The object of the game was to steal bars of soap from fancy hotels and feed them to a dog. Each time…
What’s, like, the biggest thing on Earth? Well, Godzilla is big. And it’s a scientific fact that his femur is 33 meters long. Bucket wheel excavators used in mining operations, those are crazy giant too. The biggest man-made building (by volume) is Boeing’s plant in Everett, Washington. That’s totally ginormous. Let’s call it the biggest…
Angela Burnes left Baltimore in 1972 looking for freedom. Things would be different in Latin America, she thought. They had to be. But the main character of Sunset quickly finds herself trapped in a country torn apart by civil war. Can doing chores for a rich man help her tear down a military coup? Should…
News broke last week that Take Two, the rights holder to Grand Theft Auto (both as its publisher and as owner of Rockstar Games, its developer), will take legal action against the BBC in the UK over the BBC’s forthcoming TV drama Game Changer – which is all about the story of how Grand Theft Auto was…