...will he ever win?

Cross platform installer for Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, others

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January 25, 2012 10:25 PM

I skipped my 10 year high school reunion. Travel was expensive, all I owned were t-shirts and unfashionable jeans, and I think I was supposed to water a friend's plants. That's what I told myself, at least. But really I didn't want to be reminded of a time when I was drowning in a sense of opportuni...

January 25, 2012 08:31 PM

A Doom source port developed from the original PrBoom project

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January 25, 2012 08:25 PM

Turbine today announced the second expansion for Lord of the Rings Online since the MMO's switch to free-to-play over a year ago. The expansion, Riders of Rohan, will increase the level cap to 85, send players across the Plains of Rohan and interact with the totally sweet Ents of Fangorn...

January 25, 2012 08:12 PM

Great news for 3DS owners - or, at least, those in Japan. Nintendo has announced that the NES boxing classic Punch-Out!! will be making its way to the system's virtual console on February 1. No word on a release outside Japan, but if past eShop happenings are any indication, it should see a wider release before long. The game will reportedly go for the same price on the 3DS Virtual Console as it does on the Wii Virtual Console (500 points, in other words, the equivalent of $5)...

January 25, 2012 07:14 PM

RTS with a Tower Wars genre

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January 25, 2012 06:24 PM

Radical Books of 2011, 9/10

Pale Fire: A Poem in four Cantos by John Shade, Vladimir Nabokov, Ginkgo Press, 9781584234319

Extracting the poem (which only exists as a sort of in-joke in the radical novel Pale Fire) from what is perhaps (according, e.g., to Larry McCaffrey) the major English-language novel of the 20th Century? It’s at least a very extreme move. This edition drops the prose like a bad habit, makes like a banana and splits it off, makes like a tree and abandons House of Leaves prose for Leaves of Grass verse. Does it work in the sense of presenting a beautiful poem freed from its chrysalis? No. Much of it is still most notable for building up, and then comically deflating, the explicitly implied author, John Shade. It’s better as part of a narrative than as language trembling between sound and sense. But John Shade’s “Pale Fire” is not too bad of a poem qua poem, and reading it alone can certainly enhance one’s appreciation of the truly incredible novel that has been shucked off here. I haven’t read the included commentary, but must note that including commentary is an absolutely hilarious idea.

January 25, 2012 06:00 PM

There are a lot of games featuring aliens on the various download services, as well as a lot of action puzzlers. So for an alien-centric action puzzler to capture your attention these days means it's got to bring some style and personality to the table. From what I've seen, Warp - coming to PC, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live later this year - does just that...

January 25, 2012 06:00 PM

Blizzard has announced that there will be no BlizzCon 2012. Instead, the next convention for all things Blizzard will take place in 2013. Blizzard explained that the need to focus on development of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and Diablo III was more of a priority...

January 25, 2012 05:26 PM

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

As demonstrated by Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 piece Domestic Tension, the internet and anonymity evinces a more visceral response from its audience than a live performance, independent of the social norms and pressures that typically hinder our most primal desires. In this piece, Bilal accomplishes this by inviting the internet audience into his home. Bilal’s website explains that Domestic Tension allows viewers to “log onto the internet [and] contact or ‘shoot’ Bilal with paintball guns” while he is confined to the gallery space, subsisting on whatever food or drinks were donated. Bilal intended Domestic Tension to protest the suffering borne by Iraqis throughout their daily lives, subject to constant monitoring and at perpetual risk from violence. However, the piece also serves as a chilling social experiment. By providing the web with 24-hour access to his life and the power to make him suffer, Bilal makes evident the cruelty that anonymity can bring out in otherwise normal individuals. In fact, within twenty days over 40,000 paintballs had been fired at Bilal, and over 60,000 individuals had fired at him in total by the end. This was countered by a kinder movement of individuals who would wrest control of the gun from the cruel, even taking watches to protect a complete stranger.

The gallery space was preserved after the demonstration ended. Over 60,000 paintballs were fired in this gallery over the duration.

This evidences the true power of the interaction between new media art and the internet. Since the internet vastly increases the potential audience of any performance at a negligible cost, messages such as Bilal’s can be easily spread. Not only were these 60,000 participants / audience members made aware of Bilal’s message, but they were also witnesses to the conditions Bilal protested. In other words, the integration of the web has created a new medium for artistic expression that reaches an exponentially larger audience than a mere play. Furthermore, Bilal’s piece itself communicates with us on a far more primal level: it is real, and it is the epitome of the age-old adage of “showing not telling.”

Domestic Tension also serves as a powerful social experiment reminiscent of Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments as well as the murder of Kitty Genovese. Milgram’s experiments demonstrate our capacity to do despicable things under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, Kitty Genovese’s story illustrates the Bystander Effect, whereby the crowd diffuses responsibility since each individual feels more anonymous. These two factors combine in Bilal’s piece: afforded freedom from liability due to anonymity, thousands of people did not hesitate to shoot at Bilal. Some even wrote scripts to subject him, a total stranger, to a hail of paintballs. Given the right circumstances—the opportunity and freedom from liability—they could not control themselves.

This poses a number of troubling questions. Are we truly the civilized people we fancy ourselves, governed by higher humanistic ideals, or are baser motivations such as self-preservation and social conditioning the only things keeping us in check? If we find ourselves outraged by this cruelty, as Bilal’s internet protectors clearly felt, why are we not equally outraged about larger-scale cruelties across the world, in war zones such as Iraq or third world countries?

January 25, 2012 05:19 PM