Tag: Game of Thrones

LowPolyScenes
News

Iconic movie moments turned into gorgeous low-poly scenes

Brazilian artist Bruno Alberto is a man on a mission: take every movie you loved from your childhood, pick a scene from it, and turn it into a gorgeous low-poly animated diorama. So far, Alberto has only shared four on his LowPolyScenes Facebook page, but boy, they are a good four. Let’s start with his rendering of Free Willy (1994), which obviously depicts the scene where a henchman eats popcorn evil-y… OK, I may be lying. What other scene would you pick from this movie aside from the one where Willy, as promised, finally goes free? It’s a bit sped up, but everything…
News

Mourn your favorite Game of Thrones characters in this virtual graveyard

Warning: this story will allude to events up to Episode 5 in Season 6 of Game of Thrones. Featured image is censored because I don’t want to get yelled at on the Internet for spoilers. What is dead may never die. Valar morghulis. Hodor. HBO’s bleak fantasy epic Game of Thrones, based on the book series written by George R. R. Martin, has a number of recurring mottos. All mostly meaning, or leading to, death. The show’s made headlines often for killing off beloved characters in shocking, gut-churning ways. From the tense betrayal in the Red Wedding of Season 3 that offed…
Feature

The Year of Mom

It begins with her. Whether the birth of a nation or your own life, it all began with her. Inside her, existence takes shape. Outside her, the shape of her existence is forgotten. As American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich says, “Life on the planet is born of woman.” Yet, somehow, the begetter of planet Earth has been all but cursorily kept out of humanity’s central myths, social structures, and ideologies. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Rich weaves autobiography with literary and historical research to paint a universal portrait of motherhood as it exists under patriarchy.…
Article

The year in boardgames

“2015 is the year of the board game,” I told everyone I knew. I wrote it out in emails. I typed the words out in text messages. I casually said it over the phone. If friends or family wanted to get me something for my birthday, a PlayStation gift card would not do: I had a manicured Amazon wish list pruned with all the games I wanted to play. Sure, I occasionally played games on a screen. But people know, now: when they invite me over for dinner, they better be ready to play Love Letter or Netrunner or whatever…
Review

Can Telltale game design and the Game of Thrones universe coexist?

On paper, Game of Thrones’ complex medieval intrigue and Telltale Games’ unique brand of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling is a perfect match. And in the final episode of season 1 of Telltale’s series, the stakes are the highest of the whole season, not only for the characters beset with the inevitably bloody dealings within, but also for a game design thesis that has continued to promise and remind players that their choices will matter, steering the plot and shaping the characters. But now with season 1 at its close, it’s worth asking whether a plot that the player controls is really in the…
News

In the Game of Thrones season finale, you either win, or you respawn

Spoiler warning for everyone who is not caught up on season five /// A few episodes ago, in yet another classic Stannis-Davos argument, the false king declared his strategic position—while also basically summing up the entirety of the Game of Thrones fiction: “We march to victory, or we march to defeat. But we go forward. Only forward.” To a great extent, the forward momentum of the plot is how Game of Thrones sinks its hooks into us. As the titular allusion suggests, the fiction unfolds with the same kind of inertia as a game. The threat and possibility of winning…