The third part of Josh Forman’s 3 part series on gamasutra about storytelling techniques inspired this post, although it’s not required reading. Still, it might help to read his ideas about medium before reading this. Here’s a link.
Anyway, to point:
Games are built on abstractions, both from the design standpoint and the player standpoint. There’s no point in “real life” where pressing X makes a person perform a jump, or a kick, or whatever. It’s an abstraction. Game designers provide a world where players connect the relationship between pressing X and …

The Expendables has everything I could ever want—hilarious one-liners, over-the-top action scenes, complete disregard for human life, ignorance and simplification of exotic cultures, and unabashed, flaming homoeroticism.

Trends in popular literature come and go all the time, but ever since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, people have had a fascination with the walking dead that has only grown as time has gone on. The funny thing is now that so much zombie media has been produced over the years many fans become defensive about what view of zombies are the “best.” Is it the slow, shambling, glassy-eyed zombies of early Romero fame, or the new generation of vicious, sprinting, diseased sort-of-undead horrors common to the …