“In the midst of far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.” It was a rare day on the Isle of North Uist – a winter afternoon that was neither wet nor windy, as is most common. The atmosphere was cold and clear, the sun was coming down, and the sky was a […]
“That looks a bit crap,” my dad said whilst looking over my shoulder. I was playing some pixel-art throw-back, all blocky and two-dimensional. He wasn’t commenting on the subject or mechanics of the game, simply the visual fidelity – how it looked. My dad isn’t a regular player, but he’s seen games through the generations […]
Every work of science fiction has what the Croatian literary critic Darko Suvin called a “novum”: a hypothesis or premise, some new technology, being or social organisation that radically divorces the fiction from reality. Elite: Dangerous’ novum isn’t difficult to identify—you sit inside it for the entire game’s duration. Your spaceship forms the focal point […]
There are a few different definitions of “investment”. One is time, energy, or their representation, money, spent in the hope of accruing some future benefit. This is a definition that easily fits the kind of exchange involved in one of the world’s largest crowd-funding platforms: Kickstarer. Kickstarter is a website that allows companies or individuals […]
Democracy 3 is a truthful representation of contemporary governmental politics – a slick but depthless experience that unfortunately rings hollow. You can play the role of one of six powerful, western governments, gradually altering policies via sets of sliders, in order to please various factions of voters – a popularity contest if you will. Those looking […]
Artwork by JonasDeRo At the recent FutureFest conference in Shoreditch, journalist and Culture and Digital Editor at Channel 4 News, Paul Mason, gave a short lecture on the future of society and the economy. Most important to his discussion, which ranged over economic history and recent cultural and social trends, was the question of whether […]