One of my favourite satires is the Screwtape Letters, an epistolary novel by Narnia scribe C.S. Lewis. It consists of messages from an oily elder demon to his nephew about how to correctly groom the soul of an unsuspecting human being. It's a claustrophobic send-up of managerial politics and nepotism, with World War 1 unfolding in the background. A...

I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom...

Classic god sims like Populous and Black & White teach that deities love to reach their horrible holy hands into our world and mess with us directly. They teach us to see 1-1 divine intervention in every random house fire and every lightning bolt that miraculously strikes our enemies. By contrast, the forthcoming Zero Orders Tactics teaches...

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"Worthless,’ they'd declared. Most NFTs were ‘worthless.’ The greatest artistic movement since The Big BSoD, the greatest proof of the power of the blockchain, the very future of the whole funging Infobahn, and the hedgie soybean-counters say it's all ‘worthless’," once wrote the greatest living prophet of our era. Now, in an entirely predictable...

The line between escapist entertainment and Problematic fantasy can be thin, but I think Indiana Jones's dislike for the German National Socialist Party of the 1930s and 1940s is fairly clearcut. "Nazis - I hate these guys!" he says in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Let's play Devil's Advocate and try to Lionel Hutz that quote: "Nazis? I hate these guys!"...