Maria Bustillos interview Tom Bissell, who wrote Gears of War, about the potentialities of video games as literature: http://nyr.kr/15YCl57

(Source: newyorker.com)

Nicholas Thompson asks, “Can Sony make the PS4 great? In other words, can Sony stop being Sony?” http://nyr.kr/W4nG7m

Deenah Vollmer on the “new breed of game-like book experiences (or are they book-like game experiences?)” on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair: http://nyr.kr/QrTjBH

Photograph by Hannelore Foerster/Getty.

Last week, it was announced that, after twenty-four years, Nintendo Power would halt publication. The final issue is expected to arrive in early December. 

Reeves Wiedeman remembers being under the power of Nintendo Power magazine as a child, before video games were a business: http://nyr.kr/PW5abB

Illustration: courtesy of Nintendo Power.

Nolan, though more critically praised than many directors and more commercially successful than most …has been dismissed by many cineastes as slick and quasi-intellectual.

I think this is because they misunderstand what his films are doing. Nolan’s entertainments, the best ones, anyway, are games. I don’t mean that they resemble puzzles or tricks (though they do that, too), I mean that they are most satisfying when understood as games, not as novelistic narratives. They are contests with rules and phases, gambits and defenses, many losers and the occasional victor, usually a Pyrrhus type.

James Verini on Christopher Nolan’s games: http://nyr.kr/LZ7KyO

Curt Schilling: Hardcore Gamer

This morning I asked Curt Schilling—winner of three World Series, two-time co-Sportsman of the Year, the Man with the Bloody Sock—how much time he spent playing video games when he was a professional baseball player:

“Twenty hours a week?”

“Way more than that.”

“Thirty?”

“More.”

“Forty?”

“Something like that.”

In This Week’s Issue

Ryan Lizza on how Washington changed Barack Obama; Hendrik Hertzberg on Rick Perry’s good idea; Adam Gopnik on the scandal of America’s teeming prisons; John Seabrook on Nolan Bushnell’s anti-aging video games; and more.

The Video Game Art of Fumito Ueda

“As video games have become more and more popular, the medium’s defenders have developed a misguided tendency to point to the ways that games are useful, practical, functional. I do not know if Ueda’s games will make you smarter, or improve your vision, or promote world peace. I very much doubt, in fact, that they will do any of those things. Emphasizing the ways that games are tools for instruction—whether intellectual, physical, or moral—is an unfortunate residue of their origins as children’s playthings. Abandoning it will be the sign, maybe the last one, that this new form of storytelling is all grown up.”

The New York Observer’s Dan Duray on a new twist in the $40-billion-a-year video game industry. (via utnereader)

This may not be such a surprising twist. See Nick Paumgarten’s recent profile fo Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Super Mario Brothers and Zelda, in which Miyamoto talks about how those games were inspired by his own childhood narrative.

This week in the magazine, writer Nicholson Baker tries his hand at violent video games. Here Baker talks with Blake Eskin about what it’s like for a “nontheistic Quaker” to play a first-person shooter, how a father-son duel can be a bonding experience, and how novel-writing compares to game design.

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