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Now that I have showered some well-deserved praise on BioWare for Dragon Age II, and also engaged in the almost 60 hours that it took me to get to the bitter and mind-wrenchingly disturbing end, I have a few thoughts. For all of my waxing poetic about how fabulously progressive BioWare has been with their slick political messages and wiggling new ideas into the way we consume and play...

One of the most interesting panels I went to at SXSW was E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity, and Visualization of Identity on the Internet. It included Lisa Nakamura, Director of Asian-American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitizing Race; James Au, who literally wrote the book on the avatar universe of Second Life; and Jeff Yang, who writes the column Asian...

Perhaps inspired by her recent divorce from Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley, “What the Hell” describes kissing various people and blowing off societal expectations. Now, the song’s not without its problems. There’s the “crazy” issue, and the lyrics are addressed to an unhappy main squeeze, which begs the question of how consensual their non-monogamy really is. Still, as with the...

The Dragon Age games are some of my favorites, and while they are not without flaw, I have played my money’s worth of them for sure. Part of what has endeared them to me is the progressive feel of the character interaction and the way that they smartly raise political issues within story lines. Attentiveness to QUILTBAG issues is, in my mind, a welcome and refreshing thing to see...