How Portal portrays science

Portal presents a world that indulges in the idea of science. The facility of Aperture is a place of endless testing and research, where every placement and movement is calculated and pre-determined. It’s walls are endlessly white, it’s environments are

Sometimes games want you to think they're critiquing violence, but instead they legitimize it

There is a cost for everything. Video games, I worry, carry this unknowing. We agree to things that would be utterly horrific in the actual fictions of a game. I want to distinguish between the anti-violence, anti-“manshooter” rhetoric that most

The cold science of Pokémon

On the fifth of July, 1996, Dolly was born–the world’s first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. While Dolly was not the first cloned animal in the world, she quickly became a media darling and a cultural

Excessive Online Gaming Shown to Shrink Brain

According to the Scientific American, a study following internet addicts that spent more than ten hours daily playing online games showed that excessive gaming may shrink brains up to 10 to 20% in excessive cases. The study identified addicts by

Metroids Are Real

I’m not just saying this because I’m such a huge Metroid fan that I’ve become delusional about it’s fictional nature. I shit you not: Metroids exist. Tip of the hat to The Kartel, but we here at Nightmare Mode have

The Friday Post: Time to Do the Ham Song!

Hit it, Bachelor Bob Bachelor! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvnxV3W92ss&hl=en_US&fs=1&] Now that that’s out of the way, I bet you want some ham. Not just ham, but bacon, chicken smothered in cheese, and a nice, vibrant wine, perhaps from Spain. How was your week,

Friday Post: It's a Day! It's Friday!

You may have guessed by now, but my convention for picking a header for these posts is to search for the first thing that comes into my head, finding the first reasonable size picture, and running with it. In this