BOOK COLLECTOR

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Crown Publishers, 374 pages, $24. 2012 Prometheus Award Nerdgasm: 80s pop-culture, a VR MMORPG Easter Egg, retro-VGs, & one hell of a BIG BOSS!  Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One , already has a reputation that precedes itself. Published only three years ago, this genre-expanding dystopian YA adventure-quest bestseller (that’s not a mouthful) has already climbed the cult-status pantheon. Just flip to his dust-jacket bio and you’ll see Cline posing in front of a DeLorean --a vehicle that makes its fair share of appearances in the novel--along with the claim that “his primary occupation [in spite of everything else] has always been geeking out”. If Ready Player One is any gauge for Cline’s ability to “geek out”, then he’s written an exemplary CV.  Jump to a resource depleted America circa 2044, where the Global Energy Crisis has nearly wiped out suburbia. As a result, urban populations have become swollen with th...

Nine months ago--June 2012--, feminist vlogger and pop-culture critic, Anita Sarkeesian, riled the video-gaming community when she proposed a Kick-Starter project to investigate the sexist tropes of women in video games. The modest $6,000 proposal outraged some among the online community, calling it "exorbitant", "excessive", & "undeserved" (since most YouTube game-reviews are made by fans for free) but by the end of the KS project, nearly 6,000 supporters donated close to $160,000 to Sarkeesian's project. What exactly set Sarkeesian's proposal apart? What launched her project into lucrative overdrive?  While noting the malignant "sexism" that is rife and altogether obvious in classic video games isn't anything new--feminist researchers have been writing intelligently about the topic for over twenty years (see here , here & here ), Sarkeesian applies a distinct blend of ideological savvy & reference material with...