Joseph Bernstein

How long will it really take for eSports to rival real sports?

Major League Gaming CEO Sundance Giovanni revealed the scale of his ambitions to PC Gamer yesterday: “I see eSports rivaling the UFC within 5 years. There’s no reason that we can’t rival even the NFL eventually, we just need to continue to evolve.”  That’s quite a claim, and of course businessmen ha

Super Mario Bros is great but let’s not go overboard

The Ideas Channel dude – you know, the gingerbearded Seth Cohen type who talks really fast about culture – had an idea about videogames. It is: Super Mario Brothers is the world’s greatest piece of surrealist art.  To summarize, because the visual elements of the Mario universe are as weird and appa

2012 was a bad year for developer closings

The big studio implosion of 2012 was unquestionably Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, former employes of which are the defendant in an ugly lawsuit brought by the state of Rhode Island. 38’s failing was so spectacular, however, that you may have missed some of the other studio closings of 2012, which inc

The game author is dead. Meaning comes from the gamer

One of the things you learn about books when you study literature in school is that analysis through the lens of authorial intention is generally a fool’s task; analysis is its own act of creation, not some disappasionate accounting of biographical clues. Remember Wilde in The Critic as Artist: To t