(I don’t speak German; the title is what FreeTranslation.com came up with for “The Uncanny and Video Games.”)
Here’s the problem with human character models in modern video games: animators are just good enough to get themselves into trouble. Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, calls it the uncanny valley: the point at which things aren’t quite human and aren’t quite alien. Anything stuck in the valley tends to freak the hell out of us.
9 Comments | 
Uncategorized | Tagged: Final Fantasy, Freud, Lost Odyssey, Mario, Masahiro Mori, video games | 
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Posted by Gordon Levine
With a ten million subscribers, World of Warcraft is the undisputed king of the Massively Multiplayer Online jungle. Between sales and subscription fees, it grosses almost $1.5 billion a year and, as of today, has well over 50% market share in the MMORPG business. The game’s so addictive it causes not-infrequent divorces and forms the basis for hilarious satire.
Why is WoW so addictive, though?
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: blizzard, video games, world of warcraft | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
Boy, but do we love us some zombies. I’ve just finished reading World War Z by Max Brooks and am absolutely in awe of the novel’s poignancy. Reviews of the book will go on and on about all the reasons I loved it, so I’ll skip those and focus on this—Brooks’s novel is so compelling a read that I have to remind myself that I am not simply awaiting an outbreak. It’s not only unlikely, it’s just fiction. I’m clever, pretty well educated, and good looking reasonable. I shouldn’t have to keep telling myself zombies aren’t real. But I do—and I think it’s pretty obvious as to why. Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments | Critical Theory | Tagged: Headshot, Max Brooks, Nazis, Red Vs. Blue, Wolfenstein, World War Z, Youtube, Zombies | Permalink
Posted by Genghis Philip
Tim Gunn, former Chair of Fashion Design at Parsons (The New School for Design), recently said some incredibly humane things about fashion on the Daily Show. The best part of the interview (starting around 3:30 in the clip) was Gunn putting Fashion in its place:
“Fashion — I mean, I’m the first to encapsulate this realistically — nobody needs it. We need clothes, but do we need fashion? No. Fashion, when it’s good, it comes out of a context that’s societal, cultural, historic and economic and political, so it’s of a time and a place.”
Those ten seconds of interview probably made Gunn a class traitor to rigid fashionistas around the world. Was Gunn really taking fashion down a few notches, though? Or was he reinforcing something those same fashionistas have been saying for years: that Fashion is Art?
7 Comments | Fashion Studies, Semiotics | Tagged: Fashion, jon stewart, the daily show, tim gunn | Permalink
Posted by Gordon Levine
Protesters in Berkeley, California have pushed a motion through local government that declares military recruiters ‘unwelcome’ and ‘unwanted.’ The motion was directed at a local Marine Recruiting office—located just off of the UC Berkeley campus. However, the phrasing of the item says that ‘recruiters,’ if they choose to stay, do so as ‘intruders.’
You can see the CNN article here: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/02/07/berkeley.protests/index.html
The rhetoric flying between sides is absurd. I’m certainly no supporter of our wars abroad, but really, Berkeley? Really? The United States Military is not entitled to occupy a legally obtained piece of property? The protesters in the CNN article cite the recruiters lying and misinforming young recruits—something I concur with. Military recruitment is a testament to what persistent patriotic persuasion can accomplish. Service is also, in many cases, made out to be something it’s not. Still, this means that the recruiting center is no longer welcome? The town of Berkeley is effectively painting the Marines as an occupying force on American soil.
Leave a Comment » | American Politics, Rhetoric | Tagged: Berkeley, Message Control, Semper Fi | Permalink
Posted by Genghis Philip
[This piece was originally given as a symposium on April 19, 2006]
By now, the blue jean should be tired cliché—overdone, co-opted by knock-offs, made into caricature. The personality that can be packed into a pair of jeans has made denim the uniform of casual. Blue jeans have joined America’s background noise: the word ‘jeans’ can even substitute for ‘pants’. It is their omnipresence that makes them interesting. Like every single thing we wear, jeans encode messages. They are so common, though, that we often ‘read’ them unself-consciously.
Our clothes talk to the world around us. With what we wear, we announce our allegiances, our moods, even our body image issues. When Umberto Eco says he is ‘speaking through’ his clothes,1 he (of course) does not mean that he replaces verbal language with the discourse of dress. He’s drawing attention to the idea that other people see what we’re wearing as part of us, no matter how much we try to play down the importance.
5 Comments | Fashion Studies, Full Papers, Semiotics | Tagged: Jeans, Culture of Fear | Permalink
Posted by Genghis Philip
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