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Isolated Incidents: A Quarantine Diary

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/inside-zadie-smith-roland-barthes-vladimir-nabokov-tell-us-video-games/"></div><p><em>Inside, </em>a video game from 2016 by Arnt Jensen and Playdead studios, is entirely free of speech or text. The player controls a young boy, dressed in a red t-shirt, as he runs one long dash from the left side of the screen to the right. A dreary proposition for a story, you might think. A story suggests telling. The earliest movies, however, told their stories through gesture and sound, light and shadow. So do classical story ballets, and certain symphonies. Sometimes a story is less told, more conveyed.  <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/inside-zadie-smith-roland-barthes-vladimir-nabokov-tell-us-video-games/#more-5583" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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<em>Inside</em>: What Zadie Smith, Roland Barthes, and Vladimir Nabokov Tell Us About Video Games

Inside: What Zadie Smith, Roland Barthes, and Vladimir Nabokov Tell Us About Video Games

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/return-rapture-celebrating-legacy-bioshock-10-year-anniversary/"></div><p>In Charles Onyett’s original review for <em>BioShock </em>— which this month is celebrating its 10-year anniversary — he predicted that the video game was “the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured.” Celebrated as a literary achievement on its release, <em>BioShock </em>even appeared in the <em>London Review of Books</em>, where John Lanchester called it “visually striking, verging on intermittently beautiful, also violent, dark, sleep-troubling, and perhaps, to some of its intended audience, thought-provoking.” Although Lanchester recognized the game’s achievement amongst gamers, he remarked that among non-gamers, “I have yet to encounter anyone who has ever heard of it.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/return-rapture-celebrating-legacy-bioshock-10-year-anniversary/#more-4904" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Return to Rapture: Celebrating the Legacy of BioShock on its 10-year Anniversary

Rennie McDougall is a writer in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in&nbsp;<i>Lapham's Quarterly, The Village Voice, The Observer,&nbsp;</i><a id="LPlnk896969" href="http://frieze.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">frieze.com</a>,&nbsp;<i>Hyperallergic,&nbsp;</i>and&nbsp;<i>Gay Magazine,&nbsp;</i>among others.