Tag: hunger games

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FutureGrind’s joyous bloodsport is worth the death toll

Following in the footsteps of last year’s rocket-car soccer game Rocket League, FutureGrind is set to be the next entry in over-the-top sports games that are built around being as dope as possible. With its bright neon colors, rad beats, and sick flips, FutureGrind imagines a future where the trappings of the EDM club have merged with motocross to become a national pastime. It’s a time and place where riders perform dangerous and sometimes lethal stunts to the bewilderment of thousands watching at home. Sure, FutureGrind may be about a game of death, but it’s about a game of death…
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The game design of the Hunger Games

Calling the design of the Hunger Games terrible is kind of missing the point, right? There’s no fairness intended, no logic, no rules. The “gamemakers” are industrial-scale butchers, striking a balance between mass execution and mass execution that’s fun to watch. They’re games only in the bread-and-circuses sense: distractions. Bloody spectacle. (The series’ ravaged, enslaved nation is called, in a Kojima-esque flourish, Panem.) Author Suzanne Collins famously says she came up with the idea for The Hunger Games books while flipping between reality TV and Iraq War coverage. That might be embellishment, but it’s also a cogent appraisal of the…
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This is probably the closest we’ll get to that Hunger Games videogame we want

When the reality show Survivor first aired on May 31, 2000, it almost immediately become a national phenomenon. Viewers tuned in to watch the drama of a group of supposedly average people trying to compete and survive in the harsh wilderness. Like loyal sports fans, they rooted for their favorites, and they cheered when their picks won the weekly immunity challenges, which prevented contestants from being voted off the show, which was the only real threat to victory the seemingly dangerous locales presented. Those immunity challenges, at their heart, were always a concession to morality. While people tuned in for…