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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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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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‘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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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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