Burke's Joystick

Nothing from me today, but here is an excellent post from a former GameSquad alumnus who has just effectively and succinctly called out politically correct game reviewers for their cognitive dissonance.  Check it out! Dub's Diatribe: Misogyny Bad, Violence OK. : I must admit that I am probably bothered by Gamespot's recent review of Grand Theft Auto V and the subsenquent response to the review ...

Seeing how I had planned on playing countless hours of Creative Assembly's Total War: Rome 2 by now, I knew that any blog posting I managed to squeeze in would probably begin with  Emperor Augustus' anguished cry at the loss of his legions in the Teutoburg Forest (actual quote: " Quintili Vare! Legiones redde!" Transaltion: "Quintilius Varus! Give me back my legions!") .  Of course, I am not playing Rome 2 because it arrived in CA's habitually buggy and incomplete state (yet further reinforcing my belief that game design has now become so complex that gamers will need to "lay down" their games for a period of time so that they can fully mature, just like wine).  So I needed to find another reason to use the quote (skip it?  Never!).  With that in mind, blogging about Arcen Games' masterful AI War: Fleet Command seemed to fit the bill nicely since it did, in fact, get me to exclaim something similar! Briefly, AI War is a wonde

One of the things I have tried to show via this blog is how modern video games, like a good book or a good movie, can shed light on geopolitical events.  This is not that startling: military and political scientists have been using "games theory" for a very long time to simulate the world of realpolitik.   Games are very good at this because they can smartly abstract the salient military and political principles that are operative in our world, thereby making them easier to digest.  So, for example, in my last post I showed how DICE's first-person shooter Battlefield 3 captures an essentially correct vision of high-intensity warfare in the Persian Gulf, making it a game I believe every politician should play at least once before glibly voting for another Gulf war (especially in light of the fact that a mere 21.8% of congress have actual military experience).  In the specifics, it might not come close to real combat, but it does capture the fundamentals of it, a

Did you hear?!?  American troops have engaged Russian forces in combat in Syria!  It's true!  Here's the footage: Darn intro text got cut off!  I am still not good at video editing! Okay, okay, that wasn't actual combat footage, but footage from one of my recent sessions in DICE's Battlefield 3, a first person shooter that revolves around American and Russian troops fighting it out in the Middle East.   So that wasn't real...but I find it a strangely compelling vision of just what a larger international conflict might look like in Syria.