Bam! Pow! Zap! Other sounds of beeping and blooping digital destruction! From Spacewar! all the way back in 1962 up to the present day, an overwhelming number of videogames are devoted to (or heavily feature) violent combat of some kind. It's something for which modern social critics and game designers often feel a kind of shame. “Surely, this is what's holding us back from true respectability as a grown-up medium,” we whisper in the shadowed booths of hookah lounges and bratwurst bars*, "This must be what makes us not quite as good as movies. Why are we so devoted to violence?” *Or wherever we hipsters nest these days. It’s easy to write this off with a simple "because teenage boys are the primary demographic, and teenage boys are awful." However, I think there’s a little bit more going on under the hood here. A quick aside: What do we mean when we say “game”? For our purposes, I'm go...
Happy Friday! For those of you to whom reality provides an insufficient amount of psychedelic, grave-robbing shenanigans amongst the rusting hulks and inhuman powers of the fallen future, I have another slice of Vim! ...Poor Grit the Quill is out of the snake-siege and into even greater insanities. If you'd like to start the narrative of our brain-damaged-eunuch-scribe-turned-tomb-raider/something-less-than-reliable-narrator from the beginning, you can find the first two chapters here: ( Read Part One here. ) ( Read Part Two here. ) And now, without further ado, Part 3! PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR WEIRD. The stone is sharp. They bring the infants up by helix steps to cast them down upon its point, and in that fall they read the fate and future. Such was my dream that I dreamt as we lay below the moon-glowing mirk and waited to be killed. The old wound hurts greater than the new. These are not my thoughts. They were germs on...