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Continue reading →: Goodbye, Final Cut Pro 7So, I have a confession to make. Apple released Final Cut Pro X in June of 2011. I remember the moment well. In April 2011, the University of Chicago Film Studies Center was lucky enough to score a talk with the legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch, and the very first question he took…
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Continue reading →: Let’s Study Half-Life 2, Part 2: The HorizonPart two is up! It will likely take me longer for me to get part three up. (I’m thinking Monday, April 2nd, at the earliest.) This is the last video in the series that borrows heavily from my dissertation and prior course materials—subsequent videos will delve deeply into new material, which means they’ll be spaced…
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Continue reading →: Let’s Study Half-Life 2For the past couple of months, I have been hard at work at a new “Let’s Study,” the most ambitious so far. It’s for Half-Life 2, and I foresee it being spread over seven parts. Part One: Linearity is now posted. There’s a lot of material in this particular Let’s Study adapted from the first chapter of my…
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Continue reading →: Wednesday, March 14: Unlimited Animation: A Tribute to Hannah FrankWell, now that the “Heaven Is a Place” screening is over and done with (and what a screening it was! my hat goes off to all fellow filmmakers & artists), it’s on to the next announcement. It’s that time of year again: the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This year,…
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Continue reading →: Tuesday, March 6: Heaven Is a PlaceSo, this blog became something of a ghost town in February. The reason for that is that I’ve been hard at work on a number of projects, which means that the coming months will contain a slew of announcements. To inaugurate these announcements: this Tuesday, The Nightingale Cinema is screening a program entitled “Heaven Is a Place,”…
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Continue reading →: Depiction and Endorsement in 2018 (or, how to criticize Blade Runner 2049)I first envisioned this post as a “New Year’s Resolution,” but I got too bogged down with other stuff in January to post it then. Better late than never, though. Now that Blade Runner 2049 is out on video formats (meaning that I can take some lovely screenshots of it), I wanted to revisit the critical…
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Continue reading →: Interesting Games of 2017: Games Telling StoriesI’m facing a quickly-approaching deadline for some genuine academic writing, so I’ve got to put a cap on my efforts to play every game that came out in 2017. This is the final post of this series I have planned, and it’s admittedly a bit slapdash. The theme is basically just “remaining games that did…
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Continue reading →: Interesting Games of 2017: GUInessI first broached the topic of GUIness in the context of talking about cinema and television. In recent years, everyday, quotidian technology has thrown visual storytellers for a loop. Telephone conversations are well-built into the foundations of cinematic storytelling. Even the most mediocre director can successfully weave a phone conversation into a variety of scenarios, from…
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Continue reading →: Interesting Games of 2017: The Personal Is (Still) The PoliticalBack in November, I questioned rather “personal games” (or “zinester games,” or what have you) were still a thing. My provisional answer was that they weren’t, at least not in the well-defined “scene” sense that seemed to be the case around 2013–2013. There are simply far too many things being released these days. I can’t…
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Continue reading →: Interesting Games of 2017: The Dream of the ’90s is AliveIn the past 12 months, three full-motion video adventure games were released. The big tech companies are in the midst of a full-on push to get us to strap VR headsets to our face. And Hidden Agenda (Supermassive Games, 2017), specially crafted to highlight Sony’s brand new PlayLink system, looks for all the world like an…
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Continue reading →: Interesting Games of 2017: Six Worthy Follow-upsAmong the inordinate number of truly superb games released in 2017 were some hotly-anticipated (by me, anyway) follow-ups to indie games of past years. Some were sequels. Others were sophomore efforts. Whichever the case, 2017 was a very good year for promising indie developers releasing something new after a couple years of silence (or, heck, three…
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Continue reading →: Interesting Games of 2017: Labor Party‘Tis that time again: the waning days of December, when the unwrapping of gifts is accompanied by the wrapping-up of a year. I have been trying to keep up with interesting releases this year, and over the next several days I will be attempting a final run-down. (Just to be clear: “Interesting” is my way…
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Continue reading →: Let’s Study TacomaHello, dear readers. It’s been a while since my last post, and to make up for the gap, I have come bearing a video. Specifically, another video in my “Let’s Study” series. This one is fairly short, zooming in on the technique of “scrubbable narrative” in Tacoma (The Fullbright Company, 2017). Special thanks to Amy Stebbins on this…
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Continue reading →: Meta/stasis: Little Red LieAre “personal games” a thing, in 2017? They most certainly were a thing back in 2013, as evinced here, and here, and here. I think the case can be made that they were still a thing in January 2016, when That Dragon, Cancer, one of the most buzzed-about “personal games” in existence, finally released. But…
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Continue reading →: Wii Hardly Knew USo, last night, Nintendo pulled the plug on its Miiverse social network. This means I just lost a convenient method to take screenshots of Wii U games. Not only that, I also lost the only method I had to take screenshots of the video feed on the Wii U Gamepad.* I hope the screenshots I’ve saved…
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Continue reading →: Less Efficient MeansIn The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Bernard Suits offers the following definition of a game: [T]o play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules…
