The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
Dating Advice From . . . Engineers by Steph Auteri Q. For optimal functionality, what should go into a first-date emergency kit? A. Fine wine, road flares, a snake-bite kit and Ghirardelli chocolates.
Preparing this issue has been a lesson in humility for
Nerve's editors. Our knowledge about video-game development has been
routinely scorned in editorial meetings by the relatively plugged-in members
of our staff.
So in the spirit of competition on which Space Invaders was invented,
we found six experts — among them, author Steven Johnson and designer Brenda Braithwaite — who know even more about the subject
than our techies.
Our esteemed panel will engage in five lively e-mail
conversations about questions such as, when and why did people in their twenties
and thirties become gaming junkies? Is Hillary Clinton's campaign against
Grand Theft Auto as laughable, and as doomed, as Nancy Reagan's
against drugs? And how far off is satisfying video-game sex?
Take that, everyone who mocked us for not knowing the Xbox was wireless! The
rest of you, enjoy. — Ada Calhoun
The Participants:
Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good
for You, Mind Wide Open and Emergence. His writing has appeared in The
New Yorker, Harper's, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal. Johnson was
co-founder of the award-winning websites FEED and Plastic.com. He teaches at
New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and hosts
a weblog at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com.
Brenda Brathwaite is a twenty-three-year veteran of the video-game industry. She has worked
on twenty-one published titles, most recently Cyberlore's Playboy: the
Mansion. She is the founder and chair of the International Game
Developers Association's Sex Special Interest Group, which aims to promote
discussion about the adult-content-development community and its unique
issues and challenges. Visit her weblog at www.igda.org.
Ian Bogost teaches classes about video-game ethics and philosophy at Georgia
Tech, and is the author of a forthcoming book titled Unit Operations: An
Approach to Video Game Criticism. He is also the founder of Persuasive
Games, a game studio that designs and distributes electronic games for
persuasion, instruction and activism. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from UCLA.
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer living in New York City. He runs gameLab, a game development company focused on independent and experimental games that he founded in 2000 with Peter Lee. He also teaches, writes and agitates about games. His latest book is The Game Design Reader, co-edited with Katie Salen for MIT Press.
Henry Jenkins III is the DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT
Comparative Media Studies. He has spent his career studying media and the way
people incorporate it into their lives. He is the principal investigator for
The Education Arcade, which is examining the educational
potential of computer and video games.
Rob Levine is a New York-based freelance writer who contributes to the New York Times, Playboy and Spin, among other publications. He has been an editor at Wired and New York magazines, and he contributed to 20 Years of Alternative Music: Original Writing on Rock, Hip-Hop, Techno, and Beyond. He has an M.S.J. from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a B.A. in politice from Brandeis.
Katie Salen is a game designer, writer, and the Director of Graduate Studies, Design and Technology program, Parsons School of Design. She is co-author (with Eric Zimmerman) of Rules of Play and The Game Design Reader, and is a contributing writer to RES Magazine.
Question 1: Is the sex-and-violence content of video games a legitimate social concern?
Or are Hillary Clinton et. al. criticizing games for easy political points?
And why is there so much more violence than sex? Read the discussion
Question 2: If the average age of a gamer is 30, when did video games become more for grownups than kids? (Was there a Gladwellesque tipping point?) Did the
Nintendo generation grow up without growing out of games, or was there a
latency period in between? Is it attributable to regression or midlife
crisis?Read the discussion
Question 3: How will video games affect the future of online social interaction? Will
they develop into an extension of online dating and IMing? Read the discussion
Question 4: As video games' interactive worlds become more complex, what ethical issues might arise that need regulation? What about commerce in gaming - do you foresee it? Read the discussion
Question 5: What is the future of sex in video games, and where does the 20th-century
idea of virtual reality fit in? Read the discussion
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
