Beautiful Weapons
An interview with Twine-game designer Porpentine about interactive fiction, “trash spinning,” and how to destroy the “completely unredeemable” games culture
Mind Games Forever
Eric Berne’s Games People Play offers a blueprint for making passive-aggressive manipulation into compulsive fun
Soundtracks for Virtual War
The Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri composes possible themes for the Gulf War video game of her childhood
Total Information Awareness
The NSA's recent history shows that PRISM is hardly an aberration, but rather the most recent program in the state's continuous search for total knowledge capture
Playing Outside
If video games want cultural legitimacy, designers will have to concede it's not all about fun
Own to Rent
Social gaming and cloud computing are powerful alibis for always-on digital-rights management, which makes players into tenants
Open Wide
Are digital and urban commons alike doomed to feed the hand that bites them?
Pasado Compuesto
The acts of dispossession that found the modern archive and establish the rules which make our histories count as plausible — or allow others to be dismissed as fictions.
Leak, Memory
Is the author of the Guantánamo memoir really the detainee?
Reign in Drool
Games are about accepting arbitrary authority, but play is about the Satanic refusal of rules, seeking limits beyond limits
After Infinitude
BioShock Infinite promises radical possibility but strips players of meaningful agency
Silence Is a Woman
Silence is a sounding thing for one who listens hungrily. Listening hungrily, I hear women’s bodies speaking in and through the silence.
Their Justice Shall Be Our Justice: A Dialogue on the ICC Witness Project
We aren’t the actual ICC witnesses. We watched as Kenya burned. We refuse to forget. We cannot afford to forget.
Melancholic Damage
Why should we presume that the Rihanna performed on Unapologetic is more damaged and fucked up than any of the rest of us?
The Art of Conjecturing
By writing prophetic rather than speculative science fiction, Stanisław Lem developed a philosophy of the constructed, not interpreted, future.
Trivial Pursuits
Why do we think of the kleptomaniac as being usually a woman, and why do we find her so alluring?