The Flaneur art blog - VIP newsletter:

Author Archive
Video Games as the Patchwork Art

Video Games as the Patchwork Art

Share Art, to me, is wonderful because it has no rules; when you start to add rules to art, I feel it cripples what you can do. -Jim Sterling I have spoken before of Bioware’s Mass Effect 1 & 2 in generally high esteem. In addition to having well balanced, evolving gameplay, it featured Bioware’s...
Dawn of the Digital Dinosaurs

Dawn of the Digital Dinosaurs

Share The release of Bioware’s Sci-Fi RPG, Mass Effect Three, was met by the mainstream media with generally positive feedback. However, in addition to marking a milestone in Bioware’s history, it has become a popular icon of the dawning age of Computer-Centric Games. As anniversary upon anniversary rolls past the ever-popular PlayStation Three and X-Box...
The Universal Status of Online Games

The Universal Status of Online Games

Share I bought Blizzard Studio’s seemingly ancient title Starcraft about two years ago. The game itself was a major hit at the time and reshaped much of the way Real Time Strategy games are made even today. A multitude of professional tournaments have been held in East Asia and a three-part sequel began episodic release nearly...
United, We Type

United, We Type

Share “You bust throught the door and create a diversion. They all turn and aim at you. You try to sweet talk them out of blowing your brains out, while I sneak around back, bust in, and *really* surprise ‘em.” A while ago I wrote an article about Interactive Literature that concerned namely the popular...
On Skateboarding in Video Games

On Skateboarding in Video Games

Share Nintendo Entertainment has been the hub of casual video game entertainment since the point in time at which video games began to emerge as being a casual thing at all. However it is not my intent to make an address to casual games as a whole or even Nintendo’s in specific, but rather a facet that...
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Share On this previous Friday (the 11th) Bethesda Studios released their fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls video game series: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. And as is the case usually with games as physically large as this: one either loves it or hates it, and as for why – that is often a matter of personal...
On Interactive Literature

On Interactive Literature

Share I was an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons kid, you know, all the fantasy stuff that stimulated the creative mind that was actually about telling interesting stories with positive outcomes. Ben Croshaw of The Escapist Magazine Years ago, on one of my many ventures into the High Museum of Art, I saw a sculpture in a room of...
Humanity in Design

Humanity in Design

Share “What can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two buildings have the same purpose. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it is made by one central idea…A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth…and to serve its own single purpose…The...
On the Thematics of Infamous

On the Thematics of Infamous

Share “Government unorthodoxy, judgment of morality, and origins of evil.” These are the great thematic discussions Sucker Punch Production’s Infamous subtly has with those who play the 2009 PlayStation 3 exclusive title. While these are things we all know much about, it bares mentioning here due to the fact that rarely do you play video...
On Google ShootView

On Google ShootView

Share Though it had been, for the longest of time, a powerful search engine by which much information has been passed to the individual, in recent years Google has emerged as a multitude of tools for internet users by providing navigation, email, a word processor, web browser, developer tool kits, and even an operating system...