It’s possible to love a video game. To be devoted to it, to value what it does for you, and how it makes you feel. To want the best for it. Not in the same way you love a person — or at least, I hope not. But take a look at any major fan convention for video games, movies, TV, or almost anything that develops a subculture, and you can see this love is real, active, and powerful. And of course, profitable. And if it’s possible to love a video game, then of course it’s possible to fall out of love. To feel disconnected from what first drew you to it. To realize that it isn’t giving you everything it once did, and you can’t give it what it needs from you. Especially if what it needs is regular digital purchases in order to get a competitive advantage in gameplay. I loved Overwatch once. I don’t anymore. How that happened is, I think, worth examining. This Dear John letter is a broad history of the game Overwatch itself, and its relationship with both its own players and the company that made it. The honeymoon phase In 2016, Overwatch was a big deal. A Team Fortress 2-style team shooter, made by the people who brought us Starcraft and Diablo, with incredible character designs that looked like Pixar had decided to reboot G.I. Joe? Players couldn’t get enough of it. And indeed, for the first couple of years Overwatch was a 600-pound Winston of the gaming landscape, dominating game coverage, showing up constantly on Let’s Plays, and causing an excited... Continue reading at 'PC World'
[ PC World | 2022-11-01 15:51:22 UTC ]
Here is the best new Korean literature in translation, from science fiction like Counterweight by Djuna and translated by Anton Hur to literary fiction, short stories, and poetry. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2023-07-27 10:30:00 UTC ]
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The Beauty and Importance of Our Names: A Conversation with Yejide Kilanko, by Darlington Chibueze Anuonye Interviews [email protected] Mon, 07/24/2023 - 09:09 Photo by Oluwafikunmi KilankoAmong the shortlisted short stories for this year’s edition... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2023-07-24 14:09:47 UTC ]
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Stories Are All about Taking up Space: A Conversation with Ekemini Pius, by Darlington Chibueze Anuonye Interviews [email protected] Thu, 07/20/2023 - 15:08 Photo by Offlong EkpenyongThe first week of July, the Caine Prize for African Writing... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2023-07-20 20:08:39 UTC ]
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Just five months after Anthropic debuted its ChatGPT rival, Claude, the company is back with an updated version that promises longer answers, more detailed reasonings, fewer hallucinations and generally better performance. It also now scores in the 90th percentile of graduate school applicants... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-07-11 16:00:53 UTC ]
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Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Marrying Friends, the forthcoming collection of short stories from Mary Rechner, which will be published by Propeller Books in October. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: When her troubled husband dies unexpectedly, mercurial Therese... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-07-11 15:00:43 UTC ]
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Author of a series of comic novels that focused on the tragi-comic nature of relationships and the general absurdities of lifeMavis Cheek, who has died aged 75, was the author of a series of comic novels that cast an acute eye on middle-class marriage and relationships and marked her out as one... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-07-04 16:07:50 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Mexican Movies’ is a short story from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a 1991 collection of short stories by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). In the story, a young Chicana girl describes going to her local movie theatre to... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-07-03 14:00:35 UTC ]
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Small presses have been publishing excellent work by writers who you may not know (yet). From compelling short stories to heart-wrenching novels, these books will take you on a journey across states and countries, into the past or to the future, as well as deep into the minds of richly-drawn... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-06-30 11:00:00 UTC ]
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In a literary culture obsessed with self-disclosure, her brilliant short stories — and, now, a new novel — have always been about art, not autobiography. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2023-06-17 14:55:00 UTC ]
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Kenan Orhan’s debut, I Am My Country, feels like much more than just a book of imaginative short stories set in and around the author’s ancestral homeland of Turkey. The powerful collection could be said to comprise a series of real “small rebellions” — enacted by its characters, prose, and the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-06-13 11:01:00 UTC ]
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“The Boogeyman” is just one of the short stories in the 1978 collection that cemented Stephen King’s status as the master of horror. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2023-06-01 18:18:34 UTC ]
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A profound and deeply funny examination of loneliness in many of its forms—romantic, familial, artistic—Courtney Sender’s book, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me, explores feminist millennial rage and the ways the trauma of the Holocaust has been passed-down through Jewish... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-05-23 11:00:00 UTC ]
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These must-read short stories on audio will help you break out of reading slumps and give you a taste of an author's style, like Some People Have Real Problems by Brit Bennett. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2023-05-17 10:36:00 UTC ]
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Do you like the Best American series? Of course you do! Each book in the annual series showcases of best short fiction and nonfiction in a given year, from short stories to essays, science and nature writing, to food writing. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-05-16 15:00:45 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What are the best short stories about painters, artists, and the world of art? From Gothic pioneers like Edgar Allan Poe to realist writers like Edith Wharton, masters of the short story have often touched upon the subject of art and painting, using... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-05-10 14:00:48 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Many notable short stories focus on the rough passage from childhood to adulthood. Of course, the transition from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ does not happen overnight, and is not the result of a single epiphany of crucial moment, but writers of short fiction... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-05-01 17:00:31 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Long Rain’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). Although Bradbury preferred to describe himself as a ‘fantasy’ writer, this story is most accurately categorised as... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-04-28 14:00:00 UTC ]
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Marriage is a key theme in literature, of course: a fact which need hardly surprise us when we reflect that many people spend the majority of their lives married to somebody else. Marriage also touches upon other prominent themes, including love, commitment, having children, lust, conflict, and... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-04-26 14:00:21 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ This line is a quotation from one of the most disturbing short stories of the entire twentieth century; but what does it mean? Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, published in the New Yorker in 1948, has been read […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-04-25 17:00:58 UTC ]
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Jamil Jan Kochai wins the Aspen Words Literary Prize for his short stories focused on the absurdity and violence Afghans have endured. The post Jamil Jan Kochai Wins $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2023-04-20 08:22:53 UTC ]
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