Jarett Kobek

Firebrand novelists Jarett Kobek tackles the previously untold history of a computer game said to corrupt England's youth.

Boss Fight Books #15

Soft & Cuddly

Nathan Johnson

Let's move even closer to the source. Back to the early days. Think about Pac-Man, as primitive of a game as one can imagine. The narrative is still clear. Your goal is to acquire round glowing communion wafers while not having your Christian faith shaken by the presence of disembodied spirits, a process that occasionally requires you to don the armor of a holy warrior and defeat the evil of doubt by consuming ethereal spectres.

The computer and the console are not ideologically neutral. Like any technology, they carry the prejudices and political leanings of their creators.

Stealth imperialism comes in 8-bit color.

Thatcher looked at the Left — at all the wacky idiots who had immersed themselves in a rhetoric and praxis around the impossibility of truth and used these tools to stage puppet shows at anti-war demonstrations — and she applied their techniques to a higher form of untruth.

Soft & Cuddly Boss Fight Books #15

Highlights