“Avatar” is beautiful and otherworldly, but the film is so grounded in down-to-earth concepts that it restricts the viewer’s imagination rather than broadening it. An infinitely better and more complex recent space opera, “Mass Effect 2,” comes in the form of a video game. Is it art? Yes.
By Justin Marble
Over the centuries the [...]

Author Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that each of the sometimes tangentially related processes in a video game shapes “the audience’s experience as fundamentally as the specifics of the images used in a motion picture.”
Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 480 pp, $34.95.

Reviewed by Mark Nolan
How [...]