the mediocrity codex

Games Journalism is a necessary evil, as regarded by gaming vets. We all know the score, they're out to sell more copies, get more hits, and make more of the almighty dollarinos. This means they've always got ulterior motives: unbalanced reviews, fawning editorials, and of course page-crushing interactive and flash-based advertisements. Games Journalism, what is it good for? But the sad truth is that the emphasis of the phrase is not the "evil" but rather the "necessary": we all need somebody to fish out that ocean for us from time to time. It operates on the same principle as the good ol' fashioned industry it's fathered by. Without it, we'd either be stuck following only what we know and referred from place to place by one samey individual to the next, or worse be completely devoid of contact with human life and degenerate into HG Wellsian troglodytism. Is there a middle ground to be had? Recent coverage of Deus Ex: Human Revolution may h...

The entirety of this blog has been dedicated to gaming. Some of it is dedicated to the industry, some of it is dedicated to criticism, and the majority of it has been dedicated to game review. However, this most dominant of things is actually the thing that I loathe and love the most. Games review is inherently subjective. It’s also largely used as a compass, and in this sense it is viewed as an objective tool with which one can guide him or herself to their desired gaming destination. In this light it’s easy to see why the ambivalence exists, and so strongly: who really knows where they want to end up, and how many of those people actually know how to get there? And yet therein is my implied task: to guide and direct the flow of fulfillment.

This is a personal piece I submitted to another site, but was rejected due to "style" issues. So I thought "well that blows" but then realized I have my own blog where I publish stuff all the time, on which I'm the style nazi, and in which I can choose to publish what I choose. So I'm publishing it here. enjoy.

Fun is really hard work most of the time. Real Life necessitates it: a night of heavy drinking is always accompanied by a terrible hangover no matter how good of a time you had that night, unless you take the necessary precautions and eat adequate amounts of food and space your drinks out by the hour with glasses of water (but it’s likely that if you had a good time, you were too busy doing that and not drinking glasses of water). Blowing up an old CRT monitor 10 miles from the highway in the middle of Death Valley by stuffing it with 20lbs of Tannerite binary exploding targets and firing a large-caliber rifle at it necessitates being 10 miles away from the highway in the middle of Death Valley to prevent the possibility of stray fragments landing in populated areas or roadways. Having fun, good, explosive, regrettable, coyote ugly-style fun, is annoyingly burdensome. Not so in videogames.

Title: Batman: Arkham City Developer: Rocksteady Studios Release : $49.99 (PC, Steam, Multiplat too) Batarangs, check. Batclaw, check. Batsuit, check. Psychopathic villains, check. Paradoxically benevolent sadomasochist ambivalent bipolar girlfriend, check. Superego-repressed narcissistic self-righteous chaotic good protagonist, checkmate

We are approaching a horizon. This media we engage in is growing more quickly than we imagined. Growing out of our control.

“It’s like you know you’re in the Matrix and you’re enjoying it.” – Adam Harshberger What should games aim to be? This is a huge question. It’s the question that looms large in some designer’s minds, driving them towards the completion of an idea or the eventual creation of a new one. It’s also a question that your average player never asks explicitly, but always implicitly. It is also the question which, when answered, determines the quality of the particular game being played.

I've been wanting to say a little something about this game for awhile now, but haven't yet found the appropriate time, space, or words that may adequately describe it. But the truth is there are no words that can. And there never will be. Not necessarily because the game is impossibly amazing and words can't actually suffice, but for a rather different reason. Honestly, there's a feeling that's been seriously nagging at me for the past few days that sounds like pure madness, but is of course perfectly logical: why do we keep writing about games?

Hi everybody, I've hit a serious block in terms of writing for the past few days. Granted, updating 3 or 4 times a week is a lot , but I guess I just don't LIKE IT when I feel like I can't write. So...not liking it right now. Though, I do have a review pending for Alpha Protocol. An unfortunate gem, I'd call it. The truth is is that I'm going through a really major period of transition right now and I really don't know what the future of this blog will be. So for the first time since I started posting 100% gaming-related material on this blog, prepare yourselves for: ADVENTURES IN PERSONAL NARRATIVE Starring "the me in team"

I've been hovering around this idea of morality and "rightness" and a kind of absolutism for a few weeks now, so I hope that you can bear with me as I continue to do so. I haven't yet been able to put a finer point on why it's a constant element on my mind, but I can tell you that, by Jove, it certainly has been coming up a lot. A lot. Of especial import today was a documentary I watched on netflix. I owe a huge debt to Netflix, as it's recently allowed me to reach unprecedented levels of both "hip" and "smarts" that had been hitherto unreachable at such a low rate, price, and convenience. I barely have time to read books because I'm so busy watching things I never knew existed! So the film was called "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*" with the asterisk cryptically stating "the side effects of being American". It's a documentary about the demonization of steroids and steroid use following a number of hi...

I like mad libs. If you don't know what mad libs are, they're a sort of a word game that was especially popular in the 80's, and less so in the 90's. The intrigue of this little activity came from the fact that you (the reader) were given the opportunity to obliviously insert your own choice of words (as long as it was the correct part of speech), into these pre-determined blanks. It was a play on the term "ad lib", which is short for the latin phrase ad libitum or "at one's pleasure". In a more practical sense, it used this phrase to conjugate itself with the idea of improvised comedy (also popular at the time). Some mad libs books perhaps gave you a title or a topic with which to guide you on your choice of words, but otherwise it was a laissez-faire carnivale of word soup by the time your words had been chosen (hence the "improv" part). As you read the story, you would then insert your nobly-chosen syntactic vittles when prompted an...

Recently I've been spending many of my hours listening to and reading a number of articles on STR.org (Stand to Reason), a christian apologetics website, which address various philosophical and intellectual challenges to a christian worldview. It's a cool resource, and a great way to pick your own mind and plow the fertile ground of thought for new ideas and clearer thinking. At the same time, there are a number of formidable and useful secular sources that also address these challenges in a decidedly christian-less way. Which camp do I fall into? Well, I'll let you figure that out as we go along. What I've been thinking about most recently though is the idea of "good" and "bad" (I also posted something on this a little while ago, though, admittedly, with a lot less thought and research). It's also been presented as "the problem of evil" or Euthyphro's Dilemma (a discourse by Plato, where Socrates is having a dialogue with a man n...

Borders is going out of business! Well, it has been for awhile . How does a 40-year old company with 19,000 employees go bankrupt? "A series of missteps". It's funny how easily that simple phrase can be used to characterize any number of tragic failures, business or otherwise, that have come and gone. Take the Black Death for example. Who knew that not rushing to bury the rotting enemy corpses that were flung (by them) into your town but instead making your swift escape would bring a disease so contagious and lethal that it would end up killing a third of the population of western Europe over the next 2.5 years? A series of missteps, indeed. Or take President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an otherwise meritiorious individual who did well beyond his duty for the good of men, who, through a series of missteps, ordered the internment of 120,000 people in the interest of "national safety", in spite of the fact that many of them were legalized immigrants and even ...