Monthly Archives: February 2019

The Devil Inside Shooter category

Title screen from The Devil Inside

If you watch cable TV on the west coast, you’re probably watching The Devil Inside, a live paranormal investigation show on the WWWL@ network. In a world of race-to-the-bottom reality programming, The Devil Inside is your chance to see real murder – ghost hunters killing zombies and demons, like a gory, supernatural episode of Cops, while the Los Angeles studio audience cheers them on. It’s the network’s biggest hit.

Plenty of movies, games, television shows, and other works of fiction deal with the idea of watching sensationalist depravity as entertainment. When The Devil Inside came out in 2000, the concept was newly relevant. Reality TV was exploding; Survivor and Big Brother would debut in America that year. Audiences demanded more even as they criticized it. It was ripe for parody.

The Devil Inside looks like it’s going in that direction at first. The television studio is decked out in ironic glitz and brassy theme music, like a pre-apocalyptic Hunger Games. But once it gets rolling, it reveals itself to be a dingy horror game, one that embraces the exploitation themes you’d think it was joking about. » Read more about The Devil Inside

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Eyewitness Virtual Reality Earth Quest Educational categorySoftware category

Title screen from Eyewitness Virtual Reality Earth Quest

The educational TV show Eyewitness has an instantly memorable opening hook. The show is set in museum – not an ordinary museum, but a building where science and history literally come to life. Animals roam the halls, the exhibits defy gravity, and the computer-generated walls are a perfect, spotless shade of white. Eyewitness was based on a series of informational children’s books by Dorling Kindersley, and while the books had great pictures, on television, learning became a destination.

It makes so much sense to adapt Eyewitness into a computer program. CD-ROM adventure games in the mid-90s were playing with the idea of being physical places you could explore from a first-person perspective, and multimedia software was taking inspiration from that. The Eyewitness museum was a cool visual on the TV show, and now it could be a place you’d actually visit to learn about science. » Read more about Eyewitness Virtual Reality Earth Quest

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Write your own history in the Lost Histories Jam! Blog category

This post is fairly late, but hopefully you still have an opportunity to participate in the Lost Histories Jam!

When we talk about the history of games, there tends to be a focus on famous milestone games, people, and companies. But gaming history is so much more than a list of greatest hits, and this week is a chance to fill in some of the gaps from our own experiences. From now through Saturday, February 16 [UPDATE: extended to Sunday],  Emilie Reed is running a writing jam about lost video game history, specifically personal histories, the ways that we’ve interacted with games that aren’t reflected in conventional stories of video game history. Quoting Reed:

Just think about it, what was something specific to the way that you played or experienced videogames that you feel like hardly anyone ever talks about? How can the community-based, experiential, specific, overlooked and personal enrich the common-knowledge history of videogames?

I’m extremely late posting this with only 3 1/2 days to go before the end of the writing jam, but that might be enough time for you to collect some thoughts about how your own experiences can inform the history of video games.

Even if you can’t enter, you can read along as folks add their entries to the Submissions page. I’ve already submitted mine, a rambling, stream-of-consciousness essay about the Mario fangame community where I spent my teenage years, viewed from the lens of a series of really bad games I helped make. It was awkward to write something so personal, but I think it’s worth opening a window to that and examining it.

Take some time on Saturday morning to write about something unique in your personal history with games and submit it to the writing jam! (I’m sure if you go over the deadline that’s okay!)

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