I don't blame you for going to bed - it's getting too late and I'm mostly done with my daily wine ration, so I'll be brief. (And, who knows, maybe we'll pick up this discussion again down the road.)

Well, the oddity is that a game doesn't need to be well-written or well-put together to be called art. It either is or isn't. I don't like Michael Bay and I think he's practically little more than a money-grubbing sludge factory, but does my definition of art include Michael Bay? Yes. People should be able to show him…

You've got a audience-end lyrical experience in the vein of a theatrical expression of Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author". It's art democratized (or republicanized, more likely - but critics prefer to skip straight to the term "democracy"), primarily designed to evoke particular emotions (lyric) through the…

While I agree on #2 (I'd love to be literary critic/theater critic myself), I totally disagree with his analysis of "video games as art". I haven't read his comments in a year or so, but, if I remember it correctly, he virtually ignores the entire field of legitimate criticism to stand behind an argument that artistic…

Fake journalist Emily Wong is also giving us live updates. Last we heard, the Reapers have made their way to Northeast Oklahoma.

Dark Souls contains every qualification needed to be called "art". I don't see why we'd push it off to the side simply because it isn't "story-based" (which is an odd comment, considering that Dark Souls has a narrative).

I've read Ebert's argument against the "video games as art" argument, and it's about as holey as a Swiss priest. (Couldn't resist the pun.) There's no qualification for works of art to approach "goodness"/worthiness and suddenly become "art". If we worked off of such incredibly subjective claims, I could very easily…

Corollary: Real gamers don't watch "The Dark Crystal".

I can pay $8 at Panera for a decent sandwich and some water... or I can pay $3 for 10 spicy chicken nuggets and some fries at Wendy's (and some water). Bring the fat.

Yep - Irish and Gaelic (being the Scottish one). I figured I'd learn both at some point, and I've gotten down "how are you" and "hello" after about five years. So... I'm feelin' good about it.

Yeah, but it looks cool - and that's what really matters.

This name underscores why I respect anyone who can speak and write an American language after transliteration efforts started. There are just enough differences between the transliteration of most of those languages and American English to put up a massive barrier for me. (I've tried learning Gaelic and Irish, and…

It's not that bizarre when you look at it:

Oh, no - no one used to speak like the Brits do now. I confused how "English" is at all associated with the English - they seem to do a great job of forgetting how to speak it. They don't even hang on to that old-fashioned rhoticism the Scots (and Americans) have managed to preserve. (Speaking in wild, mostly…

Something tells me the linguistic integrity of the game will be lacking, considering that I really doubt George Washington would have spoken with what sounds like a marginally Easternized version of a "Midwest" (read: Michigan, if you'd believe what Americans believe about their own form of English) accent. I'm just…

I don't normally have any particular feelings towards a company, but Bioware has done a great job of turning me from a fan to a critic in about a year or so. It's your opinion, though, and you should make your decisions according to your own thoughts on the subject. Haters gon' hate, and all that malarkey. Don't let…

Don't even get me started on Fable's morality system. You're not a badass if you go evil - you're just the biggest dick-face around.

I liked the Reapers on a conceptual level, but I'm still a little confused as to how Shepard manages to give the Reaper-controlled baddies in ME1 and ME2 a serious beat-down while I'm still supposed to be shaking in my boots about them. I suppose the only way I can really conceptualize this is to turn to other…

I think there's a pretty strong difference between someone who doesn't take nothin' from nobody and someone who, sometimes, seems to be that way and, at other times, more or less resembles a schoolyard bully. The more time I put in with ME2 and work through basically every possible quest, the more times I'm faced with…

A lot of ME chatter - naturally - has left me with a major problem.