jaime woo

“Rob Ford should indulge in throwing a handful of glitter, taking a picture with a drag queen, and getting blitzed—just like the rest of us. Because, in the end, the population of the “rest of us” continues to grow every day and, in the disappointment of realizing just how outdated and humourless our mayor is, it seems worthwhile to remind him that there’s still room for him to join the party.”

“There are video games that are silly, juvenile, and pedantic—how many titles featuring disproportionately endowed women in skimpy clothes in combat do we need?— but that’s a problem in any medium. These are just gaming’s American Reunions. What’s missing from the highbrow journalism is a knowing context that separates the idea of crap in an industry from a crappy industry.”

“The concept of embarking upon a journey is a well-tread territory for videogame players. Many game developers draw their stories from a homogeneity of sources—Tolkien, Roddenberry, and Lucas—and thus a surfeit of videogames are recursive takes on the archetypal monomyth. This is perhaps more of an observation than a criticism: given the interactive nature of the medium, inhabiting the role of an adventurer is a natural fit; however, the failure point of such works occurs when the makers of videogames fail to differentiate them from the legion of existing games.”

“I can report that growing hair on my face hasn’t actually made me more manly—my tree-chopping skills have not improved, unfortunately; my desire to shoot things has stayed at the same level; and my applications to become a samurai are still being turned down regularly.”