Author: Samuel Santiago
Buildings and Brutality in RoboCop
Cyberpunk, as a subgenre of science fiction, speculates more about socioeconomics than it does technology. While imaginary gadgets of all sorts still populate cyberpunk settings, the genre predicates those settings upon worldbuilding features such as transnational monopolies and governments dominated by corporate interests, exaggerating the trends witnessed in our late-capitalist reality. As illustrated by the
Neoliberal Vantages in Cyberpunk Video Games
Particularly within visual media, genre may be thought of as a way of looking, a kind of thematic and ideological point of view (POV) that distills the innumerable complexities of reality into narrative and aesthetic patterns that work toward imparting rhetorical stances to audiences. For example, the generic POV of the Western privileges guns and
Ghost of Tsushima’s Interactive Haiku
The PlayStation game Ghost of Tsushima (2020) sold at a record-setting pace, globally netting six and a half million sales as of March 2021.[1] In the game, players take on the role of Jin Sakai, one of a few surviving samurai present on Tsushima island (located right between South Korea and southern Japan) during a
Is Rap Poetry? – Let’s ask Google.
The titular question of this blog post is one that I’d subconsciously filed away under “yes” quite some time ago, a question I’m now realizing I’d never considered with much rigor. The answer still remains a yes after further looking into the subject—albeit with some minor caveats. I will go over those caveats, but before
Poetic Politics in Watchmen and “Desolation Row”
It’s no secret that Bob Dylan’s lyricism was a crucial point of inspiration for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal ‘86–‘87 comic, Watchmen, in which the superhero narrative comes under a gritty and subversive lens intended for mature readers. The comic depicts an alternate 20th century history where a number of masked vigilantes (costumed, but