Genre Exercises

DOCUMENTARY: How The Original Futurama Transmuted America
The original 1939 Futurama was a revolutionary amusement park ride that enthralled World's Fair visitors with a utopian vision of a near-future America transformed by car-centric urban planning. This documentary explores the profound impact of this forgotten attraction, and offers a seriocomic critique of how we're all still contending with the seductive selling power of gee-whiz futurism today. (Best Documentary Short at the Silver Screen Film Fest)

BOOK REVIEW: REVIEW: From Above: An (Info)Graphic Novel
I pitched around a review of Martin Panchaud’s book that caused a huge sensation and won several awards when it was published in Europe several years ago, and it was just released in America for the first time last July by Abrams Books. No outlet took me up on my pitch, so I wrote about it here.

SLATE: Are Post Apocalyptic Video Game Adaptations the New Superhero Movie?

Studios are betting big on TV shows and films based on dystopic game IPs

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: How Andor Got its Backstory from a Tabletop RPG
In 1987, 'Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game' added vital details to the sci-fi universe that are still used today in movies, games, novels, and streaming series

ROLLING STONE: The First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics of 1972 How a Merry Prankster and an Annie Liebowitz Photoshoot Led to the First Ever Video Game Tournament

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: The First Movie Vampire Was a Woman

Before Dracula or Nosferatu, Theda Bara was "The Vamp," a sexy screen siren who fed on men

WIRED MAGAZINE: Futurama Is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In

David X. Cohen and Matt Groening explain how they created the geekiest show on DVD, and how DVDs saved it from oblivion

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: The Father of all Pop Culture Zombies

This travel writer introduced the undead to America. He also ATE HUMAN FLESH.

ALTA JOURNAL: Manga, a Bay Area Love Story

A new exhibition at the de Young Museum explores how the Japanese art form conquered the world.

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: The Origin Story of All Comic Book Mutants

How a 1953 article in Mechanix Illustrated spawned a new, atomic-powered breed of superhero

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: How newspaper comics created pop culture

A Q&A with Peter Maresca about the chaos and brilliance of 130-year-old Sunday funnies

CALIFORNIA SUNDAY: Master of Creatures

A special-effects legend — the Dinosaur Supervisor for Jurassic World — makes an old-school monster movie by hand.

ROLLING STONE: The Pioneering Tabletop RPG Behind Cyberpunk 2077

How "Maximum Mike" Pondsmith created the pen-and-paper RPG that inspired the developers of The Witcher to tackle it as their next big game

WIRED: Deadpool & Wolverine is a movie about the merger of two film franchises

The self-aware blockbuster tells a metastory about all of the failed attempts to turn comic book IP into cinematic gold.

WIRED MAGAZINE: Crowd Commander

Chris Roberts' enormous multiplayer universe may not be up and running for years. But that doesn't stop future users from investing hundreds of millions of dollars in its world.

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: Before the Humane AI Pin, There Was the Power Glove
The 2024 virtual assistant and the 1989 wearable controller both promised a radical new form of interactivity. One problem: neither actually worked

WIRED MAGAZINE: Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop

As the continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm, he is arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS: The 45th Anniversary of Gaming's First "Easter Egg"

The console game Adventure popularized the practice of burying hidden features in media

ALTA JOURNAL: Visiting Sacramento in 30,000,020 A.D.
In My Time Machine, Carol Lay imagines California's future

WIRED: Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap

Patri Friedman wants to make it easy for anyone to build an independent country: "If we make one seastead, there's room for thousands."

GAME DEVELOPER: Philosophy, God, and Robots: Writing The Talos Principle: Road To Gehenna

Tom Jubert, a writer on indie projects like FTL, Penumbra, and The Swapper, describes what it was like to co-create the world of The Talos Principle and its followup DLC The Road to Gehenna

ROLLING STONE: Why Pokemon Go Sucks in the Suburbs
How much fun the game lets you have is entirely dependent on your real world surroundings. Why? Because America has lousy level design

GAME DEVELOPER: The 4 years of self-imposed crunch that went into making Stardew Valley

Eric Barone says he used to spend approximately 70 hours per week hammering on the game. Now that it's out, he's spending far more time responding to player comments.

ROLLING STONE: Meet Dennis ‘Thresh’ Fong, the Original Pro Gamer
World’s first Quake champ created the paradigm of a cyberathlete who makes a living off of championship prizes and endorsement deals. (He also created the WASD key configuration)

WIRED: Playing This Board Game is Agony. And That’s the Point

An interview with Brenda Romero about her provocative, award-winning Train

KILLSCREEN MAGAZINE: ROMance
Game developer Mike Mika hid a marriage proposal in a Gameboy title. But he buried it so deeply that he had to provide a cheat code to help her find it.

SLATE: Keeping It Unreal
Metal Gear Solid 4 reveals the genius of the world’s greatest, weirdest video game designer.

WIRED MAGAZINE: Feeling lucky, steam punk?

Toys from WETA, the New Zealand f/x shop, evoke nostalgia for a sci-fi history that never was

WIRED MAGAZINE: A fawning Q&A with a CG starlet

Conducting a softball interview with the software creation S1MONE (via filmmaker Andrew Niccol)

WIRED MAGAZINE: A World Almanac entry for a fantasy realm

This article treated the virtual world of MMORPG Everquest's virtual world of Norrath like any other country