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For Insight Into #Gamergate, Look to Israel
For a few weeks now, the Internet—or one large and particularly nerdy corner of it, anyway—has been alight with furious debates about #Gamergate. The mercifully short version of this affair is this: a...
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Ralph Baer Didn’t Just Invent Video Games. He Turned Them Into a Religious...
Ralph Baer, the father of video games, died this week in his home in New Hampshire at the age of 92. Few of his heirs—the millions who spend hours each day playing video games—mourned. Most likely,...
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Article 33
Video games are not the medium most conducive to probing moral dilemmas. Slaying the undead? Sure. Leading the beleaguered Mets to the World Series? Why not. But pondering the meaning of life, the...
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Article 32
It was going to be a Shabbat to remember. After a long week of work at Tablet Magazine, I was looking forward to leaving the Jews behind and focusing instead on the ghosts. I left the office Friday...
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Article 31
It might’ve been my brand new iPhone. It might’ve been the Torah portion. It might’ve been the relentless rain that, at some point, began to seem like a punishment from the heavens. Whatever it was, I...
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Article 30
Possessing both a Ph.D. in video games and a giddily infantile disposition, I spend more time than an adult should with a controller in hand, slaying pixilated baddies or solving convoluted puzzles. It...
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Article 29
As Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is almost upon us, now is the time for soulful reflections. Here’s mine: a hardened technophile with a doctorate in video games, an obsessive geek whose home is a...
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Article 28
Whatever its earthly, economic problems, Greece owes me big. This week, I cleansed it of a three-headed Hydra, freed Athens from hordes of the undead, and gave Prometheus a hand with that pesky bird...
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Article 27
As this week’s parasha begins, Jacob, having just swindled his brother out of his birthright and his blessing, is on the lam, en route to cool his heels in Haran for a while. Before he can get there,...
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Article 26
There are biblical stories that resonate with clarity and urgency, that guide and inspire us, that lay in the sod of our souls the foundations of morality and lovingkindness. This week’s parasha is not...
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Article 25
Hey, kids! Excited about the new Nintendo 3DS? Can’t wait to play Portal 2? Forget such trifles: Your world is about to be rocked, courtesy the Council of Samarian Settlers, which recently released a...
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Article 24
Like meeting an old flame years later and finding out he or she did not age gracefully, revisiting the video games of our childhood can be a jarring experience. Those of us accustomed to lifelike,...
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Article 23
Facebook games tend to end up in the growing pile of cultural detritus, along with reality TV and tweeting congressmen. Usually, they involve coercing one’s friends to join in silly, virtual...
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Article 22
Last spring, I gave a tough assignment to the students in my NYU class on literary and cultural representations of the Holocaust. “By Wednesday,” I told them, “I want you to kill Hitler.” Their task...
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Article 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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God 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...
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Video 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...
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Liel 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...
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The 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...
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‘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...
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You’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...
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To 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...
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After 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...
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Munich 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...
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New 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...
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Psychologist 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...
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New 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...
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Are 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...
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The 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...
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‘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...
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Today 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;...
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A 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...
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How 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...
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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,...
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