Aram Zucker-Scharff

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“We made MUD because the real world sucked. We weren’t supposed to be at university – Roy was from Wolverhampton, I was from Yorkshire and sounded like I should be working on a farm. It wasn’t a great atmosphere; we were looked down on because other people were at university for intellectual subjects not mind-numbing technology. We raged against that.”

“You shouldn’t have to be what the world defines you to be. You should be who you really are – you should get to become yourself. MUD was a political statement, we made a world where people could go and shed what was holding them back.”

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– We invented multiplayer games as a political gesture. 

“The campaign grew and morphed and got a name, “gamergate.” Very few people came out looking good in the ensuing hashtag war—an example of social media at its worst, with childish insults, sarcasm, disingenuousness, and threats of rape and other violence. Quinn fled her home in Boston and hasn’t been back in months. She periodically gets reports that strangers are lurking outside. She’s working with criminal prosecutors and the FBI on some of the more serious threats, but she says that her life has been practically destroyed. “I talk to my therapist,” Quinn says, via Skype from London. “She says, ‘I don’t even know what to tell you, this is so f-‍-‍-ing far outside anything I’m aware of.’ ””

– The Gaming Industry’s Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started.

A Quick Note About Politics, Video Game Reviews, and Grand Theft Auto V:

agameofme:

It doesn’t take nerve to side with the powerful and to punch down.

To call for an absence of “political agendas” in video game criticism is itself a deeply political agenda, one in defense of a very imbalanced status quo that many perceive as perfectly balanced. It is also to hope for the impossible, since most games are inherently political and therefore any review of such a game, whether by choosing to discuss the politics of the game or choosing not to, is assuming a political position of some kind. When people say “get politics out of my games and game reviews,” what they really mean is “Keep making games that reinforce my worldview, stop making games that challenge my worldview, and stop questioning the political values of the games that reinforce my worldview.” 

The Rise of the Professional Cyber Athlete:

Ben McGrath profiles Scarlett, StarCraft’s most compelling player.

This Canadian woman is one of professional gaming’s most accomplished players and riding the leading edge of e-sports’ rise. As the US joins other nations in officially recognizing competitive gamers as pro athletes what creates a pro gamer and what can we learn from those fast-clicking Dota and Starcraft masters?