Sure, well every game could have been better. That's not really a critique. It was great at many things, and I thought the cohesiveness of it makes it perfect for GOTY. It was well executed and all the elements pushed you further into the game, not out of it.

I found the final confrontation in LA Noire to be more compelling than the Dahlia chase. It's so much more gritty, more down to the bone, and comes at the end of a long, twisted story. And the concluding video is heartbreaking. It's a great game.

Hopefully it's LA Noire, so that we can finally start rewarding games that presents exquisite story and atmosphere, and rewarding games crafted so that every element works together to heighten the interesting experience.

Wow. So literature reflects the times it's written in, and cynical literature is made more often in more difficult times. Gee. What an amazing, unexpected conclusion. Also: sky=blue, car=fast, carrot=orange.

It's an incorrect conclusion to say that just because there was cynical, dystopian literature, that was the majority of the content of science fiction in the mid 20th century. Literature now is simply more cynical, and reflects our slightly more difficult times. Nothing revolutionary here. Nothing.

Apart from that one, single song, every other song in that movie was terrible, ranging from forgettable-terrible to downright horrifying-terrible. I was sorely disappointed.

I really can't think back to reading the books or watching the original Swedish movies and recall any moment, other than perhaps the torture scene, where I detected a hint of "male power fantasy", or male sexual bias whatsoever.

The very idea of confronting a traumatic abuser with violence is the quintessential, archetypal response from a) a male, who has b) never themselves been abused. Look at the statistics for how few women and men even REPORT their abuse, let alone confront their accuser in COURT. The former is sadly tiny, the latter is…

Hooray! Nothing like a bunch of people who could care less about literature using literature to justify themselves to an audience who could care less about literature. Whoopeee. Thank goodness for the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, section: ART, or else these guys might have actually had to READ something written…

I'm pretty sure it's the second book in the trilogy. Girl who played with fire. It might be the third, as I didn't really pay all that careful attention.

But unlike Blomqvist, Salander is a Batman-style badass. Using nothing but high tech tools, her photographic memory, and an appetite for violent justice, she rights the wrongs that have been done to her. When the state puts Salander's finances in the hands of a cruel guardian who rapes her, we find out just how tough…

It's not about role models as in good or bad, that's facile. It's about role models as in how we treat women's sexuality, how we treat them as fully articulated human beings. Good and evil has nothing at all to do with how culture portrays their gender.

Male privilege exists but it is circular logic to say that it results in these sorts of depictions, and that these depictions, in turn, result in male privilege.

The argument that women can be sexy and powerful because they are "femmes fatales" is one that's not only ridiculous, but actually grounded in total inaccuracy.

As I know and care deeply about someone who suffers from dissociation due to childhood trauma, I am piping up to say that this article is fairly dismissive of a serious mental illness in a really bullshit way.

Aah I see I'm de-starred again on this site after being re-starred. Good. I'm glad whoever did it in the first place found some courage at last.

Lacan wasn't a philosopher. He was an actual psychoanalyst. Although one could argue in the days when the actual science was being built that the practitioners were as much philosopher as scientist. Freud certainly built his empire on thinking about literature, that's for sure.

why else develop video games, experiences that thrive on interactivity, and then plump them full of long cut scenes that owe their heritage more to film tropes than to gaming?

Also remember to breathe the right air. Break room air adds a subtle flavour of desperation and malaise to your coffee, while cafeteria air adds the subtle taste of fat foods and obesity. Don't breathe the air at your starbucks, as the idle money taste builds up on your tongue.

Aah I forgot how much of a shit many of the Io9 commenters were.