Michael Thomsen

New Splinter Cell: Blacklist lets players yell at guards with Kinect.

At Microsoft’s E3 media briefing today, Ubisoft announced a new entry in its stealth action series Splinter Cell: Blacklist. The on-stage demo was set on the Iran-Iraq border and showed series’ protagonist Sam Fisher shooting, strangling, and mauling “terrorists” in conveniently de-personalizing hea

Should free-to-play games pay their players for their time?

Are you being used? Are companies taking advantage of your enthusiasm to enrich themselves through the abstract new mechanisms of social networking? In a jointly reported story on the New York Times’ Bits blog, Facebook users were asked to comment on the network’s practice of using a person’s “likes

On the messy morality of Hitman: Absolution

Ed. note: This piece sparked a lot of debate in the comments and elsewhere. We’ll be looking at the trailer and the surrounding issues at greater length early next week. In the meantime we’ve amended the original headline for insensitivity. -Jamin Ed. note #2: We’ve since apologized for this piece.