video games
Making new worlds with gaming collective Babycastles
Syed Salahuddin cofounded Babycastles with Kunal Gupta in 2009 in the basement of The Silent Barn, a D.I.Y. performance space in Brooklyn. Babycastles was “the first permanent independent arcade,” Salahuddin told me last week when we met at NYU-Poly. “What happened was we basically started this thing where the entire indie game scene from New York would come and converge and talk and hang out. We didn’t even know that existed. We were really shocked. And so we became a place where people just hung out and met other people like them.” More
Video games should aim higher than Michael Bay movies
Last week, scores of gamers and video game industry insiders took to the warpath over a Capital article I wrote because it asserted that The Last of Us, a hotly anticipated new survival-horror game, left “nothing to the imagination.” More
(8)The Last of Us, and other video games that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination
At the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles earlier this month, a crowd of gamers cheered on a camo-clad tough guy as he went room to room beating people to death and setting them on fire. More
(21)Video-game designer Anna Anthropy describes the life of a radical, queer, transgender gamer
In 2002, Anna Anthropy, the prolific transgender video-game developer, decided to quit playing video games. At the time, she was a sophomore at Purchase College, SUNY, in New York, buried in the coursework and psychic burdens that come with double majoring in women’s studies and creative writing, with a minor in lesbian and gay studies. But she was also fed up with the big-budget games of the day, like Super Mario Galaxy and Metal Gear Solid II, which she found to be “stupid,” “patronizing” and “just dumb.” More
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