Digital Cream

Gday me heartys! So it be that on Talk Like A Pirate Day a story swings upon me decks. Though ‘t be a sore burden t’speak o’ video game laws in this gamesome tone, the laws o’ the sea be the laws o’ the sea, and speak like a landlubber may I not.

Grab yer tankard and roll a barrel to the foredeck as I give ye the news from Oklahoma, far over the rollin’ waves in the New World. It just so happens that a right wise wig-wearin’ man o’ the law there, deemed he a stop t’a law forbiddin’ young scalawags from buyin’ certain video games. (continued »)

On Friday night my son Dylan took my place playing BioShock on the 360. I’d had my couple hours and couple beers, and was starting to make dumb mistakes as he watched with gentle sniggers of amusement. I know he’s a far better player than me, so I was expecting to be pretty impressed when he took the controls. What I was not expecting was the realization that my son is a species entirely different from, and superior to, my own.

The forward edge of this realization came last year when I watched him play Battlefield 2 on the 360 (which, I know, to many is like painting with a bar of soap, but it was fun for a while). I noted that he could do a couple things I had not mastered, such as to run backwards with a zoomed-in sniper scope headshotting the hapless guy trying to nail him with an SMG. I consoled myself that I’d not had as much practice, and anyway, Dylan is smaller than me; his nerve pathways are probably 25% shorter.

But watching him take over BioShock led me to inescapably conclude that while his arms and nerves have gotten longer, they must have dropped in temperature to become some kind of supercooled nanoconduits autoconnecting to a hyperbrain the size of a planet. So I really should not feel bad about the pwnage; it is simply a cross-species competition, like a jaguar racing a mollusk. (continued »)

I’ve been playing BioShock on the 360 for a few weeks now, often in the evenings when my brain is too puddly to code but not ready for sleep. My son Dylan has been watching me and he has been playing it himself. I will likely write a few posts about it. In this post I want to extol the game’s overall mood of imposing, sinister breakdown and corruption. I was a great admirer of its ancestor System Shock which had a similar mood. (continued »)