Tag Archives: video games

Finally, a reason to visit the museum

Miscellaneous, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is now featuring video games:

In a blog post by curator Paola Antonelli, it was announced that the museum has acquired and will exhibit games including Pac-Man, Tetris, Out of This World, Myst, SimCity, Vib-Ribbon, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw,Passage and Canabalt.

“Are video games art?” asks Antonelli. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design — a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The games will be exhibited as part of the museum’s Architecture and Design collection. It plans to add 26 additional games, to bring the total to around 40 in the near future, including Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Minecraft.

The games are selected based not only on their visual quality, but the elegance of the code and the design of the player’s behavior. They were looking for games that combined historical and cultural relevance as well as innovative approaches to technology. The curators have consulted scholars, critics and digital conservation experts to understand how to display and conserve these digital, interactive artifacts.

David Petraeus lives on — in Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Humor, Technology, , , , , ,

From Foreign Policy:

Like many of us, the makers of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which goes on sale this week, apparently didn’t see the David Petraeus sex scandal coming. As Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo reports, Activision’s much-anticipated video game casts the former general and CIA chief as the U.S. secretary of defense in 2025, serving a female president who, according to Totilo, “looks a whole lot like Hillary Clinton” (I don’t see the resemblance as much, and Petraeus refers to “President Bosworth” at one point):

At least Petraeus wasn’t spending his off-hours at the CIA working on the game, though maybe that would have helped him avoid his current jam. A rep for Call of Duty: Black Ops II publisher says Petraeus was “not involved in making the game.” Actor and political impressionist Jim Meskimen is credited with voicing the game’s Secretary of Defense.

Minor Black Ops II spoilers follow.

Petraeus doesn’t do much in the game, and there’s no sign of Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom Petraeus had his affair. When we first see Petraeus, he’s receiving a terrorist prisoner on board the [USS Barack] Obama. Another mission in the game starts with Petraeus and the Clinton-esque President Bosworth on board a futuristic version of Marine One before it is shot down over L.A. The crash should kill everyone, but this is Call of Duty. The important people tend to survive. We don’t see Petraeus again, but an audio message indicates that he survived.

You can check out the scenes Totilo describes here. Call of Duty, of course, wasn’t alone in predicting a bright political future for the general. After the election, a number of assessments of who would compose President Obama’s second-term national security team — including one at FP– floated Petraeus’s name.

And hey, a decade from now the folks at Activision could have the last laugh. If the long history of political scandals has taught us anything, it’s that we may not have seen the last of David Petraeus.