Steven Poole put it beautifully in his book Trigger Happy (2000): “the jewel in the crown of what videogames can offer is the aesthetic emotion of wonder… such videogames at their best build awe-inspiring spaces from immaterial light. They are cathedrals of fire.” Cathedrals of fire. Sit on that for
A massive mountain stands before you, its miles-high peak slashing at the clouded skies. All around you stand enormous trees and tall volcanic boulders, their jagged surfaces covered with moss. A mist hangs in the air. Taking in your surroundings you set off into the mist, towards the mountain, your
We remarked back in July last year that Richard Whitelock’s upcoming “simple stone throwing game” Quiet as a Stone turned nature into your own personal playground. But it seems a better metaphor would be comparing it to the Mesopotamian mud flats where it is thought humankind’s first buildings were
Right now, Paris is hosting the United Nations conference on climate change. It’s the 21st session to be held since these events started, and the 11th meeting since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997. These events tend to be underwhelming—a smattering of watery half-promises and spurious statisti
A video of a landscape: trees dance as what might be wind sings. The sound becomes more intense, revealing itself to not be wind but rain, though the image does not at first reflect it. It carries on, and as the branches move, they blur, as if they were never video but rather paint that has not drie
