Well, I disagree with your premise. I think you’re recalling the perceived regional divisions of 2008 in a way that isn’t reflective of reality, the desire for reform was certainly there. Moreover, there’s this perception that, were it not for “the politics”, more would have or could have been done, and I think that…

The indictment of Obama is that he ran promising structural change when the country was especially eager for it, and then, poof, he was pretty close to a Third Way Democrat. Maybe that can be explained away as an eagerness not to alienate more conservative members of his own party, but I think his unwillingness to…

I’ll have to check it out, thanks.

If games are art, we must treat them that way. ... The broadening of an audience means accounting for shifting tastes and sensibilities.

I can understand it in the sense that it’s kind of a cynical money grab designed in part to capitalize on that childhood and the nostalgia it entails.

You doing ok there buddy? Having a bad day? Hopefully your week will end well and you’ll have a chance to, you know, relax.

Eh, if repeat viewing was part of the scoring criteria end of year best lists and award shows would have very different entrants.

I don’t really see how that video displays a juvenile view of politics, care to expand? My read of it is that they were originally going for an ultra capitalist faction versus a socialist or communist one. As for saying things with his philosophies, I tend to think that Bioshock Infinite in particular is less about…

Power asymmetry isn’t static, yesterday’s oppressed can be today’s oppressors, there are certainly historical examples where authoritarianism took hold and massacres were perpetrated under the banner of equality and democracy. Even though Infinite is kind of notorious for previewed or otherwise mentioned content being…

That’s fine to believe, I suppose, but I don’t think it reflects broadly accepted thinking in any real regard, and I think it might even conflate concepts or get into semantic knots.

The money and resources were there. Eastern Europe had, at the end of the Cold War, pretty advanced heavy industry, advanced agriculture, a good amount of natural resources, and a very highly educated workforce. The shift towards economic inequality and, in some examples, plutocracy wasn’t a result of money or…

Which part of Eastern Europe? On the whole, the region has experienced a rise in economic inequality, reaching a level that even outpaces the rest of Europe, with the sole exception probably being the U.K., all while starting with a level of inequality lower than western counterparts. It also shifted so far to the…

The majority believed that it’s “unjustified or unduly burdensome” because court precedent requires that disclosures must remedy a harm that is potentially real and not hypothetical, which they believe the state legislature didn’t do. And even if the harm was real, the majority considered it a burden on protected…

Without looking any further into it, it might be a strategic result of NIFLA v. Becerra, where a California law requiring crisis pregnancy centers (basically anti-abortion family planning centers masquerading as, I dunno, quasi medical providers) to disclose that free or low cost abortions are available elsewhere and,…

To answer your question you need only look to PC gaming. Where console gaming received pretty strong pushback on digital distribution and single-use install codes when they became possible in the last two generations (really just the last when it comes to digital distribution) of consoles, PC gaming adopted it to the…

It might be worthwhile to actually consider exactly how much of gaming has been based on tech progress, because if you do you might come away with the impression that good gameplay often trumps cutting edge tech. And, more importantly, that good gameplay is rarely dependent on the existence of boundary pushing tech,…

Perhaps. I think Splinter Cell and the other third person action games Ubisoft has done in the last 17 years are a good indication that a more intuitive and streamlined gaming experience was possible. Dead Space is another example. Without delving too much into it, just taking an anecdotal view of games I’ve played,…

I don’t really see the distinction here, it’s all based on the construct of what if X worked this way. Kojima isn’t, I dunno, Tom Clancy writing material for people who get off on references to page 75 of Jane’s Fighting Ships, he does ridiculous stories. I could understand complaining that his version of genetics…

Narrative inconsistency isn’t Kojima’s issue. Take your example of MGS1, in a setting with a walking tank, a psychic soldier, a cyborg ninja, clones, and a shaman with a rotary autocannon you’re complaining that its treatment of genetics and viruses is unrealistic. That isn’t an example of narrative inconsistency or…

Say what you will about the French Gestapo, but at least when they tried to drown you in an ice bath they had the decency to dry you off in a bathrobe, rub you down in cologne, and give you a glass of cognac afterwards. Of course the whole process would repeat if you weren’t forthcoming, but still, cognac.