Everything I know about Skyrim, I learned from Jorge Luis Borges
Bethesda’s modern day classic Skyrim owes some of its magic to an unlikely source: Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Diana Poulsen
Glue Gun
Are developers cut-and-pasting a new canon of crossovers? Diana Poulsen traces the art of collage from Cubism to World of Warcraft.
Stray From the Path
The Path capitalizes on the horror of imagined terrors in a no-win journey; contemporary art like Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy and Hein’s Invisible Labyrinth have similarly terrifying and labyrinthine aspects.
Our Future Past
What do Halo and Portal have to do with 1950s universitites? They tell a surprisingly similar story through the hard lines of Brutalist architecture.
Playing Tricks
We have come to expect everything from gimmicky machinations to pure innovation in videogames. But are they part of a broader historical tradition? Diana Poulsen delves into the Baroque to shed light on gaming’s modern tricks.
Augmented Remembering
Our art history columnist wonders if videogames will deliver on the promise of the socially-conscious Rosewood and the cyberpunk scenario of Total Recall—where the memories of others can be experienced vicariously, for the better. Her case? A lost boy in Heavy Rain.
Unraveling the Scarlet Crusade
Diana Poulsen investigates the role of architecture in World of Warcraft and other games.
Going for Baroque
How does FFIV, and all of its subsequent remakes, find their roots in 17th-century art? Diana Poulsen explains how FFIV (and other franchises) fit squarely into the context of Baroque seriality, how globalization and capitalism slowly brought about this repetitious trend—and how Poulsen herself cele