Mocking German Censorship, Israelis Develop Video Game with A Menacing...
Released this past October, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a blockbuster video game in which the protagonist, William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz, is a hardened Texas Jew who fights the Nazis who,...
View ArticleHow the Shin Megami Tensei games make appropriating Jewish culture fun.
A couple of months ago, the Kabbalah center down the street from my house closed down. I wasn’t surprised at all. I’m not trying to knock Madonna, or any of the other devotees of appropriated Jewish...
View ArticleA New Video Game Raises a Thorny Question: Can the Medium Address the Holocaust?
The Call of Duty franchise is to video games what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is to film, a fertile source of sequels that make big bucks irrespective of quality. In 2016, the series hit $15 billion...
View ArticleToday on Jewcy: Nazi-hunting video game protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz is...
Like a vaguely exotic Golden Age film star, rumors have been circulating for years if William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz is secretly Jewish. Of course, Blazkowicz isn’t an actor, or even a real person;...
View Article‘The Last Guardian,’ A New Video Game, is a Meditation on Empathy
It’s 2016, the topsy-turvy year that saw a rodeo clown ascend to the highest office in the land, so it makes perfect sense that the rawest, most profound expression of empathy and compassion we’ve seen...
View ArticleThe Summer’s Hottest Video Game Hero Is a Brainy Jew Named Hershel
Jewish mothers worried that their darling ones are spending too much time playing video games may find comfort in knowing that one of the summer’s hottest gaming titles features a well-educated young...
View ArticleAre Chicago Eighth Graders Using A Video Game to Bully Jewish Classmates?
Are eighth graders in Chicago using a video game to bully a Jewish classmate? That’s what one parent is alleging. Chicago Public School officials are investigating whether eighth grade students at...
View ArticleNew South Park Game Lets You Play the Jew
Please don’t send me any emails today. Don’t call. Don’t expect attention, affection, or even basic human acknowledgment. As soon as I can, I’m running home, turning on my PlayStation, and jumping...
View ArticlePsychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair on the Perils of the Digital Age
If you’re a parent living in the 21st century, chances are you have occasionally used digital technology for back-up when your patience is wearing thin, either to escape into your own work or social...
View ArticleNew Video Game Tests Out Ties Between Bureaucracy, Obedience, and Evil
This week is the year’s biggest for video games. With two new gaming consoles—the Xbox One and the PlayStation Four—released for the first time in nearly a decade, and with a slew of new titles...
View ArticleMunich Designer Creates Anne Frank Video Game About Life in Hiding
A Munich game designer has created an interactive video game that reenacts a day of hiding in the life of Anne Frank, with the hopes of memorializing the Holocaust for the millennial generation, JTA...
View ArticleAfter Nintendo Passed On Holocaust Video Game, Developer Seeks Crowd-Sourced...
The Holocaust-themed videogame “Imagination is the Only Escape,” a work by game developer Luc Bernard that was rejected by Nintendo several years ago, is meant to teach its users a lesson about life as...
View ArticleTo Restart Mideast Peace Talks, John Kerry Should Look to Video Games
Forget Big Data. Think not of crowdsourcing. Disruption, our sincerest apologies. But of all the insipid terms that the tech industry, an industrious mint of trendy terms, has ever coined, gamification...
View ArticleYou’ve Read the Book of Leviticus. Now Play the Video Game.
As the game begins, cartoon animals go flying in the air, and players must slash their throats by swiping a finger across the screen. Like many similar video games designed for the iPhone and the...
View Article‘Adolf Critler’ and the Question of Video Games and Free Speech
Poor old Adolf Critler. All he wanted to do was bum around Tyria for a while, hang out with his friends, and seek and destroy the armies of Zhaitan, the undead dragon. Instead, he was ejected from the...
View ArticleThe Demise of Herbert Moon
Below is the link to a deleted scene from the (unknown to me until now) video game Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. In the scene, a Western storekeep blames the Jews not only for killing Abraham...
View ArticleLiel Leibovitz on Wolfenstein 3D
Video games, observes senior writer Liel Leibovitz in his “Arbiter” column today in Tablet Magazine, are the only appropriate medium for revenge, because only in them is the cause for vengeance...
View ArticleVideo Games, Especially ‘Wolfenstein,’ Are All About Revenge
The Arbiter is a weekly column dedicated to revisiting canonical works of art, high and low alike, to reevaluate their merit. All media are considered; none are pitied. As an homage to the greatest...
View ArticleGod and Video Games
Part of my week each week is spent at Tablet Magazine, where, among other things, I write this column of Torah commentary. Another part is spent at New York University, where I teach and research video...
View ArticleArticle 21
As a professor of video games at a major university, I spend a lot of time, well, playing video games. So when Marc Tracy posted a trailer for NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, I was thrilled. The game...
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