News

An upcoming puzzle game tasks you with decoding classic literature

In the world of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, books have been outlawed and are burned en masse by the state, only kept in small collections by the occasional revolutionary. Instead of reading, the majority of people spend their free time in “entertainment parlors,” rooms lined with massive screens that constantly broadcast Dora the Explorer-style call-and-response programs meant to elicit the illusion of interactivity. It’s a pointed premise, conceived during the early years of the television’s rise to prominence in the American household. It also reflects a constant theme in Bradbury’s work: that with advances in technology, culture tends…

Feature

Kanye West and the gloriously messy Life of Pablo

Kanye West is making a videogame. Now, what that probably entails is Kanye approaching a group of game designers and programmers with, “Hey, nerds, make a game about my dearly departed mother entering the gates of heaven. And make it look dope.” Then, like, he signs off on their designs and whatnot. But you can feel Kanye’s pride when he unveiled the thing recently, and while the game’s depiction of the afterlife is as rote as can be (if there’s a hell in the game, it’s sure to be a lake of fire with pitchfork-toting imps nudging in agents, lawyers,…

Article

Two grown men debate the merits of Justin Bieber and One Direction

In the battle of Bieber and One Direction, everyone wins. Clayton Purdom (CP): David, defend One Direction. David Rudin (DR): I’ll get to One Direction, I promise, but first I want to discuss Backstreet Boys and Take That, because no boy band really exists in a vacuum. We like to imagine them as such, much as we like to imagine that our parents never had sex apart from the time they conceived us. It’s nonsense, sure, but it’s nonsense as a rite of passage. Consequently, my case for One Direction begins with the boy bands of my youth. This was…

News

The conspiracy theories are all true in this boy band dress-up game

What do aliens see when they look at One Direction? Do they see, a musical monstrosity straight out of Simon Cowell’s fever dreams, a band that can melt your heart with sincere ballads like the sublime “Gotta Be You”, or a blank cultural canvas that can be used to take over the world?  use your boy band to wipe out all of humanity  In Intergalactic Alien Boy Band Conquest, an entry in the 32nd Ludum Dare game jam, the aliens have gone with the third option. Using a boy band proxy, they are going to take over the world, and…