Archive for the ‘video games’ Category
Faint Cinder
Halt and Catch and Fire was one of the greatest character dramas made and no one watched it. Maybe its name scared too many away thinking it would be a smart-assed comment on technology, or another meander into 80s and 90s nostalgia. In its funny and passing moments it functioned this way but pushed far […]
Filed under: art, fantasy, feminism, film, television, video games | Leave a Comment
Tags: computer history, gaming, halt and catch fire, technology
The Present Alone is Our Sadness
For a plot summary you may go here. For another take see here. Firewatch has been generally praised as a playable narrative and less as a game. As a narrative, however, its ending has been critiqued as has the various details of its story. The supposedly anti-climatic ending is central to the theme of the […]
Filed under: art, comic books/graphic novels, film, television, trauma, video games | 1 Comment
Tags: affect, Bioshock, Firewatch, fps, William James
Planetary/Human Evacuation
One of things that troubles me about the prometheanism of accelarationism is the relation between one’s materials and the possibility ( to say nothing of the trajectory) of escape. Is it mainly a means of efficent breach – of leaving the ruinous mold of the earth behind after we’ve paid our due, or is it […]
Filed under: art, cognitive science, fantasy, nature, ontology, politics, video games | 2 Comments
Tags: accelerationism, Alex Galloway, Ben Singleton, deleuze, gamification, marxism, networks, Patricia Clough, post-planetary
Upcoming talks
Now that I’ve made it through my PhD comprehensive exams I will be able to update the blog more regularly though it will most likely take the form of working out some of the issues I will be dealing with in my dissertation. On an Ungrounded Earth is in the last stages of proofing and hopefully will […]
Filed under: Brassier, Deleuze, Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, nature, ontology, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism, video games | 2 Comments
Tags: Brassier, mark fisher, On an ungrounded earth, reza negarestani, Slime Dynamics, Speculative Aesthetics, Tristan Garcia
In a trilogy of posts about escaping the Earth, Land is in perfect form over at his blog Urban Futures. In the first part Land discusses how in exploring the Shanghai 2010 Space pavilion the future is bound to a lack of hardware and an emphasis on children as the potential inhabitants of outerspace. He […]
Filed under: comic books/graphic novels, Deleuze, fantasy, television, video games | Leave a Comment
Tags: accelerationism, capitalist realism, mark fisher, nick land, outward bound, sci-fi, sci-fi western, warhammer 40k
Michael ends a post partially in response to my last post that nature isn’t terrifying. Many of my posts here would seem to assert exactly the opposite – that a darkly vitalistic nature is a horrible monstrousity – but this darkness is a darkness for us and not in itself. This was suggested in comments […]
Filed under: nature, ontology, Speculative Realism, video games | 7 Comments
Tags: cosmicism, dark vitalism, flat ontology, levi bryant, lovecraft, metroid, proximal
The (holy) Spirit of Capitalism
/1/ – Figuring the field There is a series of small confluences that caused this post. The first is the (seemingly) rarely discussed issue of the concept of ‘Handelgiest’ or trade spirit. This is the uglier or perhaps just contextualized version of Hegel’s master slave relationship. As Paul Gilroy discusses in his text The Black […]
Filed under: marxism, religion, transcendental materialism, video games, Zizek | Leave a Comment
Spirits, Cyborgs and Bones
The recently released computer game Prey is not a great addition to the grossly unwieldy amount of first-person-shooters, it is a fairly entertaining and (fairly) original game. Gameplay features heavy use of dynamic portals (seamless, randomly appearing, neat looking), rooms with complex gravitational configurations (walking up walls, flipping the floor and ceiling etc.) and some […]
Filed under: Badiou, feminism, Hegel, psychoanalysis, video games, Zizek | Leave a Comment
Naught Thought 