Free Play: The politics of the video game: Kevin Parker's article on the implicit ideology in video games. Intro: "In 1979 kids and their quarters descended on convenience stores and shopping malls to experience the latest in digital entertainment: breaking rocks. The video game Asteroids boasted that its "explosions, laser blasts, [and] fragmentation of space debris" were "realistic," and by the standards of the day they were. A quarter century later, as you’d expect, game pyrotechnics are much more advanced. But so is something that was harder to predict. Arcade action is being upstaged by social simulation." (via TerraNova) Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]