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  • New York Times Magazine
    December 24, 2006. "The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion": "The G.O.P., the party of Richard Nixon's 1968 law-and-order campaign and the Willie Horton commercial, is beginning to embrace the idea that prisoners have not only souls that need saving but also flesh that needs caring for in this world."
  • Wilson Quarterly
    Summer 2006. "Playing With Our Minds": "The important thing to find out about video games isn't whether they are teachers. 'The question is,' as game designer Raph Koster writes in A Theory of Fun for Game Design, 'what do they teach?' "
  • Wired
    December 2005. "To Boldly Go Where No Fan Has Gone Before": On Star Trek New Voyages, Captain Kirk "is a professional Elvis impersonator, with muttonchops and a hornlike pompadour, who lives in nearby Ticonderoga. Spock works at a Virginia videogame store. And McCoy is an Oregon urologist." Chekov? Still Walter Koenig, the actor from the original series.
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    Sept/Oct 2005. "Last Man Standing": "While some Democrats remain skeptical of candidate Hillary's chances in a general election, Republicans have grasped her biggest strength: The former first lady may be the only Democrat man enough to take back the White House."
  • Legal Affairs
    Sept/Oct 2005. "On paper Paul Clement should be one of the capital's most divisive--if not reviled--lawyers. Instead, he looks to be one of the few members of the Bush administration who will leave office more respected by Democrats than when he started."
  • Wired
    August 2005. Is EverQuest a game, like Monopoly, or a place, like Canada?
  • Slate
    My old stomping grounds. My most recent contributions are a few "Gaming" columns, including this August 12, 2005, examination of Islamic video games.
  • Washington Post
    Book reviews, including Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary and Byron York's The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.
  • Boston Globe
    Sunday "Ideas" section, June 26, 2005. "Rather than providing a blueprint for how to match the Republicans' financial muscle, was the 2004 election a special case, a windfall that Democrats should not expect to be repeated?"
  • New York magazine
    April 18, 2005. "What’s emerged from Sy Hersh’s numerous speaking engagements—dozens of speeches last year, he says, which have drawn as much as $15,000 per university lecture—is a vast, tantalizing trove of what might be termed Hersh apocrypha: unpublished tales of official screwups, ideological intrigue, cover-ups, and government lies that have an influential—and growing—public life of their own."

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June 09, 2006

The Godfather: The Game, reviewed in Slate

Many people, particularly new acquaintances, ask me what I write "about," and I'm usually at a loss for a universal field theory that incorporates everything from Calvin and Hobbes to presidential campaigns. Lately,  I've been toying with responding that I write about news and politics, but my "20 percent time" is spent on geek culture, broadly defined. In that spirit, here's my review of The Godfather: The Game, which Slate published last week. I use the game to examine the often-misunderstood relationship between rules and fiction in video games.

Shorter Slate: "The difference between The Godfather, the movie, and The Godfather: The Game is best illustrated by their final scenes. In the movie, you see Michael, the new Corleone don, from the perspective of Kay Adams as a door slowly closes in her face. In the game, you walk through the door toward Michael, and he slowly reaches out to hug you."

Recycled Slate reviews: King Kong, Blitz: The League, Xbox Live.

June 09, 2006 at 01:04 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)