I keep trying to play this game. I can not pass the 4th level. It's probably me, but I'm just sick of it and I'm not playing it again. The controls, even though driven by a mouse, feel imprecise and I'm never sure which circle will connect to its neighbor. If you're more dexterous or patient than me, maybe you'll like it.

SUPERHOT has incredibly precise, exciting gameplay. The slow-fast motion gives the player a chance to feel like a superhero and action-movie badass while simultaneously watching the glorious results of their murderous rampage unfold in slow motion around them. This slow motion makes for an experience that is more aesthetically pleasing than many FPS games. Even in great games like Doom (2015), action can fly by so quickly that the player can't really revel in the experience. SUPERHOT gives you the time to really feel each shot, to literally watch the bullets find each enemy and watch them disintegrate like so much shattered cinnamon glass candy.

Unfortunately, the game is great, but short when it comes to the narrative. For the price (especially at a discount on Steam) the game is a great value, but the narrative doesn't deliver fully on the promise of the concept. Just as the game starts to get really interesting, and you start to put all of your skills together, the final sequence ends. The ending doesn't provide much in the way of resolution or closure. It's understandable that the game's creators would leave room for further explanation of the game's concepts in later installments, but the end of the game doesn't go quite far enough in telling the player what was actually going on. Because most of the levels in the game relay little narrative information, almost the entire narrative comes through the DOS-like shell that also functions as the menu. The last few levels of the game carry some narrative import as well, but there really is a feeling that, as the in-game story tells you to stop playing, you have no idea what the consequences of your character's actions are in the game.

I would recommend this game unequivocally to anyone. The aesthetic is coherent, the controls are sharp, responsive, and precise, and the story is fascinating (if truncated). I look forward to more SUPERHOT in the future.

I've only played through what seems to be the first act of the game and a little more, but I don't see myself finishing it so I'm writing up the part that I've seen. I'm 3 hours in according to Steam, essentially where the quick look picks up.

I was interested in Dust: An Elysian Tail mostly because of the discussion that surrounded it when it came out. The characters are anthropomorphic animals. On playing the game, it isn't apparent to me why this is a big deal, but the game apparently got a lot of backlash for being about "furries." I had a friend in high school who used to draw a lot of furries, had an online persona that was a rabbit (he probably still does) and it was really weird how much he seemed to think the furry-world was at least as real as the real actual world, but if people are into that, who cares? This choice on the part of the game's creator doesn't detract from the game - the art is striking, and the story has started out with some interesting themes. So far, you could reskin the game and it really wouldn't have to be about furries. I don't know if that's entirely to the game's credit (why make that art choice if it doesn't inform the story and gameplay?) but it does mean that the game's creator wasn't making something so weird and niche that a non-furry-enthusiast player can't follow what's going on.

The game is a 2-D beat-'em-up with Metroidvania elements (you can see things you can't access until later, your powers get doled out to open up new areas) and a Castle Crashers-esque leveling up system, and some RPG elements like side quests you can get from townspeople, and light item crafting. The Metroidvania and quest elements are the crux of why I'm not coming back to finish Dust: I just don't want to spend the time walking back and forth across the maps any more. The combat is a lot of fun, but my character has become plenty powerful to just wade across each screen in the map, and so I just walk from one end to the other, mashing the attack button without really paying attention. This is even worse in towns, where you might have to spend an interminable time wandering from one side of the town to the other in order to find a shop or turn in a quest. This really slows the pace of the game, and despite the cute dialog and beautiful art of the towns and surrounding wilderness, I just find myself without the patience to sit through these section. I feel like it might be an indication that parenting and my phone have destroyed my attention span to the point that I can't spend 40 seconds idle, and that soon I'm going to need Adderall to focus long enough to tie my own shoes. I also feel like it's a shame that this has put me off the game, because it has a lot going for it.

It's hard to exaggerate how impressive the game is in terms of creativity and the visual presentation. The animation is incredibly fluid and beautiful, with an anime-like feel (although with more frames of animation than most anime I've seen, everything is smooth). There are little touches that really give the characters life, like the way the eponymous main character strikes incredibly cool swordsman poses during the combat animations, the way downed enemies peel themselves up off the ground, and the way that your flying foxy companion's hands shake when it is scared. Not only is the animation beautiful and detailed, but it avoids the problem the I thought Skullgirls had - so much animation flying past so quickly that I couldn't really register what any of it actually looked like. The images themselves are also striking. It evokes feelings of nostalgia or regret, even though I have nothing related to this game to regret or feel nostalgiac about. The art is full of color but avoids being garish, and the game makers have very artfully managed to put a screen full of enemies and the Player Character onscreen at once in front of detailed backgrounds without making it hard to track the action; I never felt like I was losing track of the characters. You can see in the screenshot above how the bright "action" area stands out from the dimmer background and foreground, and the lighting helps to highlight the player character. It's subtle enough to look natural, but works very effectively when you're wiping out hordes of "monsters."

The game hints pretty heavily even this early on that all these things you're killing are actually just innocently trying to get by, and your character is a part of the army of the General that is setting about a genocidal mission to kill all of the non-cute furry critters, and in resisting him or helping him or whatever you're going to kill your old girlfriend or wife or sister or whatever that female character is that you meet early on.

And hordes is no exaggeration. You leave a pile of flashing-before-they-disappear corpses in your wake as you trudge from one side of the game to the other. For me, the combat ended up being rather tedious. Maybe I just haven't gotten far enough into the game to really get challenged, but playing on the default difficulty, I find myself more annoyed at enemy encounters than excited or even frustrated. Since enemies repopulate after you leave an area and return to it, I found myself, even early in the game, slogging through areas for the second or third time, mashing the attack button in a state of near-catatonia. Every once in awhile, the combat would ramp up or get more complicated and I'd really enjoy myself. The boss encounters I experienced were all fun, if not particularly challenging, and gave me a chance to try some more advanced combat techniques like parrying. Dodging became more important as well at times, particularly when there were environmental obstacles or really large crowds of monsters. Popping up enemies with the combos and flying around the screen chopping them in half with your sword starts out being extremely fun, but when it's in service of just getting to another place, it just wasn't enough to hold my attention, no matter how curious I was about the story.

The writing in the game is very good. The characters engage in anime-style banter, mixed at times with anime-style philosophizing and moralizing. The funny parts are definitely funny, and the heavy parts of the game feel like they aren't just an attempt to be shocking (looking at you, Homefront), but actually are an attempt by the game makers to deal with a serious topic. That might seem like an incongruous goal for a brightly colored brawler, but the fact that the game seems to comment on the massive amounts of violence the player character is perpetrating as you play earns it some room to be taken seriously. Like a good war movie, the game presents the juxtaposition that life presents to all of us: moments of hilarity often arrive adjacent to tragedy, the absurd and the grievous come without regard for one another. This doesn't result in a tonal mismatch when it's well done, it feels realistic, and in the case of Dust, those shifts in tone fit in well with the overall experience. I have to admit: I'm curious to see what happens to the game, but I just can't be bothered to walk across it to find out.

I wouldn't want this essay to push people away from playing the game - I think most people will find it to be a worthy experience, just as I did. Certainly, it is well-crafted and interesting. Particularly for people with more time (or patience), I think this game would be worth playing. Despite that assessment, I'm putting it down for now, but I won't be uninstalling it just yet in case I decide to give it another chance.

Grow Home is a lovely game that perfectly balances frustration and progress. It's about a red anthropomorphic robot who has an uncanny ability to climb, and who grows a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-style beanstalk from sea level to space, where its trusty spaceship is waiting. To grow the space stalk, the player has to plug vines that the robot (B.U.D.) rides like the dragon dog from Never Ending Story into green energy islands that float in the air. As the stalk gets successively further from the ground, the tension grows, too, because falls can hinder your progress, and your robot can even be shattered into itsy-bitsy pieces by a long fall.

The game has a surreal, trippy style, from B.U.D.'s unconnected limbs, to the bizarre plants growing in the alien world, to the wry text messages the spaceship's computer sends when you plummet like an adorable red meteor. It's rendered in bright colors and really has a fun, children's-imagination feeling. This includes the way B.U.D. moves: when climbing and especially when running, he has the drunken not-quite-falling-over-but-almost run of a toddler, and his big eyes really give him a childlike appearance. This all could be taking place inside the mind of a kid playing in the yard, climbing a tree and pretending it was a stalk to space.

To climb, you use the triggers on your game pad to operate the suction on either of B.U.D.'s hands. The game provides a reticule for each hand, and so you can climb hand over hand up anything by alternating hands. It's fun to climb, and having the manual control of each hand actually creates a physical correspondence between the effort of B.U.D. and the physical effort - however minor - on the part of the player. B.U.D.'s controls can become frustrating now and then, when you're trying to make a difficult maneuver, or on a small platform, when he's as likely to trip over his own feet and send you tumbling over the edge as he is to stubbornly refuse to move for a second before taking off at a run. Precision moves just aren't really possible. Most of the time, they aren't necessary, but when they were, especially when far from the last checkpoint, it lead to me putting the controller down and ending my play session for the day.

The reason that this doesn't just become impossibly frustrating is that the game makers have cleverly tuned the game to keep giving you second chances, and speeding your progress. The small amount of air control the player has when falling allows you to turn a disastrous missed handhold into a small setback. The Teleporters spread throughout the game keep you from having to replay sections unnecessarily, and the weird plants that grow on the sky islands around the stalk allow you to float in the air or glide rather than plummet. The plants and leaves that grow on the stalk itself act as catapults and trampolines, again speeding the B.U.D.'s ascent and keeping the sometimes-tense-sometimes-tedious climbing from being the player's only way up the stalk.

The thing that made Grow Home feel so rewarding to play was its open-ended game play. The game provides a wide variety of options - if you wanted to, you could avoid using the other plants, and climb only using your hands. Or, you can grow a ladder of vines that lead wherever you want to go. Or, you could combine all of these approaches. Because the game world itself can be shaped by your actions, it really is up to the player to create solutions and think creatively, rather than being required to find the solution the game makers want you to use. Similar to games like Terraria, the freedom to solve problems and make your strategies a reality is fun.

I'd recommend this game to anyone, and particularly to people who are looking to get their kids (older kids like 8- or 9-year-olds) into games, since this has a fun feeling, enough challenge for an older kid, but nothing that could be considered inappropriate for younger audiences.

Full Disclosure: I think I've played something like 2/3 of this game, based on the in-game meter that seems to tell you how far you've gotten.

To the Moon is a game that I feel like I should enjoy more. I'm a bit concerned that part of the reason I didn't like it is that I played it on PC in a different state from the original game or something, because most of the screen shots that I've seen look quite different from what I experienced. In all, I'd say it's almost clever and charming enough to overcome the unbelievable boredom of the game play. For me, that wasn't enough to get through to the end, but it was enough to inspire some admiration.

The premise of the game is that you're a team of memory-trekking "doctors" whose job it is to grant a man's dying wish.

presumably, so that he can unwind some kind of unconscious problem he has. It turns out that in the process, you reverse-learn a whole lot about him and his wife, and the connection they have to a significant object.

a lighthouse

and other things that they are attached to. In terms of game play, this amounts to participating in long sections of pixel-hunting, reading cleverly written and charming - but expository - dialog, and solving some simple puzzles.

The strongest point of the game is its writing. The dialog is funny, and the characters are clever. I laughed out loud a few times, and found myself moved by the melancholy of the relationships the dialog sketches. The game even manages this while still holding to the level of humor that one would expect from a JRPG, so corniness and G-rated jokes abound, but that doesn't end up grating or infantile. Particularly, the relationship between the 2 main characters winds up being entertaining and touching, even before the game ends. There are other characters that show up as well, and these also have witty dialog (even if the overall characterization is a little bit cliched). As a whole, the game is well-written and interesting in terms of character and dialogue.

The problem with this is the game play. Just as the last game, Space Ace, had a problem in that the art didn't justify the gameplay, To the Moon has the reverse problem, that the game play just doesn't justify the benefit I gained from the artistic direction. In between the dialogue sections, the game amounts to a pixel-hunt, in which you have to search around levels that are essentially devoid of interactive objects, until you find the three-to-five objects that are attached to their memories and collect them. Getting around the maps isn't fun, and there isn't enough interactive stuff to make it entertaining. It's like in an adventure game, you do the wrong thing, or go the wrong way all the time. In a good adventure game, the game makers have written some funny dialogue or given you other interactive objects that shed more light on the game world to keep this activity entertaining. In To the Moon, the JRPG style of the game really doesn't allow for that, and you end up just wandering around, looking for a place that your mouse will turn into the magnifying glass that indicates you found an interactive object. This is made doubly annoying by the fact that the game seems willing to let you skip this searching by giving you the memory-travel items sometimes, but other times forces you to slog through extensive searches of the local area, hunting for a jar of olives or a platypus doll.

More fun than the pixel-hunts are the between-memory games, in which you play a mini-game that requires using logic to flip tiles in a picture so that the correct faces of the tiles are all facing up at the same time. This sort of puzzle is entertaining, but really doesn't connect in any significant way to the rest of the gameplay. I can see that there is a conceptual link - the flipping of the tiles represents the gradual reveal of information that the player is also achieving as the game world moves backward in time - but it still seems out-of-place and unnecessary.

Really, the game feels like a short story that someone turned into a video game. Except reading a twenty- or thirty-page short story takes about half an hour, but playing this game has so far taken me three or four hours. That's WAY more of a time investment than I'm willing to commit, particularly when I have a lot of the story figured out already, and it's just a matter of seeing the details of the connections more than the general outline. For some people, the details might be interesting enough to justify a few hours of game play, but for me, it just wasn't worth it. I kept trying to come back and finish the game, but every time the game jumped backward in the memory of the character, I thought, "Can't we just get to his childhood already and figure out that it was his sled or a platypus or whatever?" Seeing the interstitial parts of the game fleshed out the characters, but the game itself wasn't interesting enough to make that worthwhile.

I will say, however, that the music in the game was also a highlight. There are some orchestral songs, and some that are solo piano, and both of these types was well written and recorded, and contributed to the melancholy, lightning-and-rain-and-a-glass-of-wine atmosphere of the game.

Overall, I admired the game's character in terms of writing, but just couldn't get past the boring game play and reliance on pixel-hunting that made up the fundamental aspects of the game. For people that really want to take an emo journey into someone's past, or who have more time and rest (I have two young kids and don't get much sleep these days, and I fell asleep playing this game twice in my 4 hours of game play, which took place over the course of 3 days) it might hold your attention. I couldn't get away from the feeling that it would have been a lot more compelling as a 20-minute experience.

I've got a ton of games on Steam that I've never played but want to. I've also got some games that I never finished (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim!) and I want to wrap up. I've also got a game of Terraria going. There aren't any rules really, and I don't have a particular timeline, but I'll try to play a game and write a little bit about my experience whenever I can.

Today, I played Space Ace. I'm not going to explain much about the game in terms of the background of Don Bluth and Dragon's Lair. Laserdisc games are an offshoot (or maybe the progenitor of?) FMV games. Essentially, they let you use some simple inputs (in this case, 4 directions and an "action" button) that you try to match from VERY subtle cues in the game. If you provide the correct input at the correct time, you get the "win" animation, and the game continues on to the next section. If you don't, you get a death animation. That's it: make all the right inputs, and you get to see the end of the game. Mess up, and you cycle around again, and get another try at the input.

I'm old enough to remember paying games like this in the arcade. I have a very distinct memory of standing around a Dragon's Lair cabinet in my local Aladdin's Castle, the smell of cheesy, greasy, delicious pizza in the air. It was circa 1994, and I watched for a long time while airmen from the nearby Air Force base dropped a huge pile of tokens into the game. They were brute forcing it, trying every input at every opportunity until they proceeded. At 25 cents an attempt, and 5 possible inputs even if they got the timing right, the arcade got its money's worth.

I still miss that pizza. And when Dragon's Lair came out on PS3, I was eager to try it out. It had a great sense of humor, and the animations were imaginative, particularly the death animations. on PS3, I also didn't have to worry about the quarters issue. Or the subtle cues, or figuring out the correct inputs or timing, since the updated game had input cues built into it. Sure this was super-maxi-extreme-cheating, but it really was the only way to make playing it fun. Hell, if I'd wanted to I could have just watched the whole thing play out like a movie from an option in the Extras menu. But the truth is, in Dragon's Lair, the death and failure animations were funny enough to make actually playing the game entertaining, at least for the time it took to get the prompts right.

It's really an illustration of the difficulty in playing arcade-based games now: in an arcade, it would take a ton of time and a giant pile of money to get through the game. When you're playing it for free, the frustration isn't worth it, but seeing the whole game, and even playing the limited game play is fun enough, so long as the difficulty is toned down.

When it comes to Space Ace, much of the charm is missing, and the pace of the animation is so frenetic that I often wondered whether the PC app had some kind of problem. In Dragon's Lair the game was fun to watch, the deaths were hilarious, and the actual animations (even though the scenes were often made of a lot of short cuts) were slow enough that you could see what was going on. In Space Ace, the actual animations fly by. The space setting actually hurts the game also, since it doesn't have the sort of comedic and creative freedom that the fantasy setting of Dragon's Lair does. Dragon's Lair was just plain weird, and seeing more of the weirdness really made the game worth seeing. Space Ace, on the other hand, just doesn't have that much interest. The space stations and ships are pretty generic, the villains and monsters are relatively boring (just people with funny-colored skin), and the action itself doesn't have the surreal elements that the magic from Dragon's Lair made possible.

It took me about 20 minutes to finish the game with all of the help turned on. Without the help, there is absolutely no way I would have had the patience to try to finish the game, because the content just wasn't interesting enough. Even with them turned on, the task of completing the game was a chore, and the sections I got stuck on seemed to be the most boring to watch (like when I repeatedly missed the timing on driving a space motorcycle back and forth). This is all made worse by a number of sections in which the game reuses the same animations, just rotated or mirrored, to pad out the length of the game. Given that the animation is the only draw for the game, having elements (again, usually boring ones) repeat just serves to discourage people from dropping in another quarter (or in my case, another moment of their time).

As a piece of video game history, I would give this a pass. Dragon's Lair is really the thing you want, and it's a better game, more entertaining, and more historically important since it came out first. I wouldn't even recommend Space Ace to Full Motion Video enthusiasts, since the whole thing is just boring and frustrating. If you're really curious, watch the video play out somewhere online, but even that probably isn't worth it.

On Jar Time With Jeff (11-1-2011), Jeff made an interesting comment. He said that what bothered him about the portrayal of game characters as sexy for the purpose of alluring leering men into buying the games offended him. He was careful to say, on the other hand, that it wasn’t the sexism of the portrayal of women in this way that bothered him. Then he went on to say that he particularly found offensive the idea that people suggest that it would be better for Whiskey or GB if they replaced all the dudes with sexy ladies when it came to on-camera content. Again, the implication that seemed to bother him was that people thought that the sex appeal of the ladies could or should be a selling point on its own. He backed up that statement by talking about a ladies poker tournament and women’s gaming clans, saying that it seemed needless, unless the intention was to again use the “all ladies” nature of it to create an atmosphere of sexiness in order to sell the event to men, again reiterating that he found that proposition distasteful.

In doing all of this, Jeff backed into a position very close to the one he said he wasn’t taking: that what bothered him about these tactics was that they are sexist. He was participating in a common behavior - espousing feminist ideas while trying to avoid the label of feminism (I’m making the argument here that calling something “sexist” is analogous to labeling yourself as a feminist). This behavior has been observed in a lot of contexts and studied pretty extensively by social scientists (a bunch of them are cited by the Wikipedia page on feminism). There are a lot of reasons people propose for this, but it seems that most people have negative connotations associated with feminists that they don’t attach to the ideals of feminism (other examples of this are visible in the comments on Rorie’s discussion of Twilight on Screened).

And in some ways, this isn’t surprising. Particularly to people who haven’t been exposed to inequality a lot, having inequality pointed out can seem annoying and obnoxious. It’s a bit like when you’re singing with headphones on: when you’re the one with the headphones, you can’t hear yourself and you don’t realize how what you’re doing impacts other people. People’s advantageous positions in society act like the headphones, and make it hard for them to realize that the people around them don’t experience life the same way and don’t have the same advantages.

That doesn’t, however, mean that the people who don’t have advantages aren’t disadvantaged, and it doesn’t mean that those people shouldn’t try to make the more advantaged people know about the unfairness. It does, however, cause the advantaged people to complain about the grievances of the disadvantaged, and those complaints can give the disadvantaged who fight for justice a bad name as troublemakers and boat rockers. And that can lead to exactly the sort of thing in the video: people espouse ideas that match a particular identity, but struggle to separate themselves from the stigma of that identity.

Feminists (and a lot of other social justice advocates) are regarded as troublemakers and people who “get in the way” of everyone just “getting along.” But it only appears that way to people who are already getting along just fine. While many men and some women might not like feminism, most of them are members of the groups who benefit from the inequality that feminism attempts to combat (men, and women who fit into “normal” ideas of womanhood).

This is evident in other contexts too; for instance, in the case of race, you can see that black people have very little difficulty talking about racism and labeling things racism and discrimination, but white people in the U.S. are much more hesitant to do so (Bonilla-Silva talks about this a lot in his book Racism Without Racists). This is at least partially because white people have less experience with the pain of racial inequality, since they are the beneficiaries of that very inequality. So, they are much more likely not to want to talk about racism, because to them and people like them, it can only be disturbing and uncomfortable (it points out that they may have unfair advantages over other people).

Most people don’t like to hear that, and so they make arguments to say that the inequality doesn’t exist (even when it is empirically demonstrable) and that the people who point out inequality are bad people. The result is that people don’t want to admit to being feminists, even when they have feminist ideas, because it will label them as a making trouble, rather than label them correctly as fighting for fairness and justice.

Apple banned Phone Story. In doing so, they attempted to keep control of the space of ideas that you can access in the Apple space; whether you believe Apple's story (that the app violated their terms because it depicted abuses of children or other violations of the terms for the App Store) or the dev's story (that the app was banned because it was critical of Apple), the truth is that Apple was putting boundaries around what the thoughts are that they want people to have while they're using Apple devices. In particular, Apple wants to set outside the realm of thought the possibility that owning an apple device has a moral or ethical cost alongside a monetary one (or that abusing children is entertaining), and to prevent people from believing that a world without Apple devices might be a better one. This is an excellent example of Herbert Marcuse’s ideas from One Dimensional Man.

A little background: Herbert Marcuse was a part of the Frankfurt School of sociology. The Frankfurt School was a group of mostly German sociologists (who ended up working out of the United States as a result of World War II) who were neo-Marxist in orientation. In essence, they weren’t satisfied with Soviet Communism, but neither were they willing to accept that the final word had been entered and that Capitalism had won the day. Instead, they believed that both arrangements were defective and destructive to the humanity of the people who participated in them. In particular, Marcuse argued that the arrangements of modern capitalist life were just as totalitarian as those of Soviet Communism, but that instead of being imposed by the threat of force or punishment, they were enforced in capitalism by people trading cheap rewards for the more profound freedoms they were giving up. In other words, people are willing to be enslaved to the capitalist machine, as long as they have (in Marcuse’s day) TV, microwave dinners and cars or (in our day) an iPhone or Xbox or porn on their PC, etc.

Marcuse argued that the reason these things are totalitarian is that they make people forget that to get those things, they have to toil at wage labor their entire lives, and that in the end, their spiritual well-being and human development aren’t helped by the possessions and cultural materials they consume. This is very similar to the scenario depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World . For instance, Marcuse makes a distinction between the idea of “relaxing” which is an activity you fit in between sessions of work in order to enable to to do more work, and “resting” which is something you undertake solely for the purpose of personal solace and development. When you get drunk on Friday at Buffalo Wild Wings so you don’t have to think about work on Monday (or spend time playing video games or watching movies), Marcuse says you’re not actually resting and restoring yourself. What you’re doing is numbing yourself to the fact that you spend your whole life toiling essentially to neither rise in society nor to become a better person.

So, most of us think one dimensionally when we say, “I know that Foxconn is a terrible place to work, and people are miserable there, but if they don’t work there, I don’t get my iPhone, so really, that’s just how the world is and I might as well take advantage of the fact that I’m well off enough to buy the iPhone.” This is one dimensional, Marcuse argues, because at the same time as we acknowledge that things are flawed (e.g. the people at Foxconn are miserable) we cut off the possibility of acknowledging that there is another arrangement possible (e.g. we say “but that’s just the way things are”).

We, Marcuse argues, have difficulty adding another dimension to our thinking, the dimension of which “negates” the way things are now. In other words, we never consider that a world might exist in which the people at Foxconn aren’t miserable, or in which people might be happy in general, rather than some people being “happy” by buying things at the expense of others’ misery.

Marcuse says, then, that this is one dimensional thinking. He says that all of the parts of a capitalist totalitarian economy are built to prevent people from questioning the rightness of the capitalist totalitarian nature of their world. Phone Story is an excellent example of something not one dimensional, because it uses the iPhone to make the argument that iPhones are bad; it questions the goodness of the technological and capitalist world.

Edit: Changed the title to make it a bit less controversial and more representative of the content of the article.
 
With the release of the kinect, there has been a lot of discussion in the comments and the forum about Jeff and Ryan, and their bodies.  As a social scientist I have complicated feelings about this.  Obviously, there is some aspect of G.I.F.T happening here, but even in more supportive comments, it's interesting to see the way cultural ideas about bodies - and what it's appropriate for bodies to look like - come out in the comments.
 
Look at my own comment, posted on the Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout quick look.  I give both Jeff and Ryan credit for putting themselves out there in the course of all of these Kinect quick looks; in other words, I give them credit for exposing their spoiled identities (that is for not having "appropriately" sized bodies).  This reflects the sociological concept of "stigma," which was described by Erving Goffman in a book titled, imaginitively, Stigma.  In it, he describes the ways that people react to people who fail to meet societal expectations (he used people with disfigurements, disabilities, and cultural identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation that carry with them the connotation of inferiority or moral failing).   It's important to note that neither Goffman nor I is engaged in the process of actually determining whether these groups actually represent a "failing" of any kind.  Rather, we are both only interested in what the people in a given context think is a moral failing.
 
People engage in a variety of behaviors through which they attempt to sanction people - that is, punish them - for failing to meet norms for identity.  But punishing people sometimes means that interactions break down.  So when you're trying to make smalltalk with someone, you can't laugh at their disability, or they'll stop talking to you.  Just so, you won't bother criticizing the morals of the person checking you out at the grocery store because they're wearing a LGBTQ ally button, even if you are homophobic, because it would probably result in you not getting your groceries checked out successfully.  Instead, people engage in a behavior called civil inattention, in which they do everything they can to avoid calling attention to the aspect of the person or the situation that is stigmatizing (the elephant in the room, so to speak).
 
However, in some situations, the stigmatized person has so little power, or is held in such low regard, that people don't feel any need to avoid the conflict created by pointing out their spoiled identity.  Because these people have so little power, we think it is no threat to us if we sanction them for not meeting our standards.  The case of bodyweight is a particularly visible example of this in recent years.
 
People might generally regard being overweight as a sign of some personal failing in American culture; they may believe that it indicates laziness, or a lack of effort or gluttony.  However, these things would hardly prompt the kind of punitive response that people seem willing to inflict on overweight people in society.  There is in face a moral element which causes people (at least, in my belief) to feel that it is acceptable to ridicule and otherwise castigate people who are "fat."  Because there is some connection between BMI and health (although there are methodological problems with this research), people feel that they have a moral obligation to punish "fat" people for the "harm" they are doing to themselves by "not putting down the cake."  This sort of social process is probably meant to be functional: we punish people who are doing stuff that might harm society or waste societal resources.
 
Unfortunately, many things which are functional also have "latent functions," or unintended consequences.  One only needs to read this article describing the effect of participating in The Biggest Loser on winner Kai Hibbert.  She experienced extreme emotional distress, depression, physical injury, and any number of other negative effects in pursuit of a "healthy" weight.  On a societal level, people experience similar effects as they struggle to achieve ideals they can't possibly hope to achieve without unhealthy behaviors and emotional effects (anorexia, depression, other eating disorders, and so on).  The Biggest Loser contributes to these individual and social ills by portraying this drastic weight loss as possible, reasonable, and appropriate behavior (when in fact, it is probably none of those things).
 
As someone who has an obese BMI (at 6'1" and 235lbs, mine is 31) but who is in the gym 200+ minutes a week, I understand the distress that these unreasonable expectations cause people.  Moreover, I understand how those expectations can get in the way of a more healthy approach to exercise, eating, and body image.  Because of all that I've said above, I do hope that Jeff and Ryan (and I) choose to exercise.  However, I hope that we choose to do it for the right reasons, which are to improve our physical abilities and to feel better, and not to feed (pardon the pun) feelings of inadequacy and failure.  I believe those latter factors are the things that The Biggest Loser and its attendant cultural products are designed to encourage, and so that is why I don't and won't watch the show or buy products associated with it.  If Jeff and Ryan do decide to participate in an endurance run, I hope they'd choose another Kinect title as the basis for their pursuit of health, and that they would choose to do so because of their own desire for the outcomes it promises, and not because of the criticism they might face from others.