L.B. Jeffries is the pseudonym of a law student from South Carolina. After majoring in English, L.B. wandered around the resort scene in California, taught a little creative writing in Vermont, and ended up dead broke on the lower east side of Manhattan. A year of working for the government convinced him that there are some things worse than death so he took the LSAT. He continues to maintain his sanity and artistic sensibilities by posting a weekly on the PopMatters blog, ‘Moving Pixels’, providing game reviews, and whatever else captures his fancy.
Features
Tuesday, January 19 2010
The Film Noir Roots of Cowboy Bebop
The animated series Cowboy Bebop is a blend of classic film noir motifs mixed into a futuristic setting that reverses the roles of gender and character.
Wednesday, September 30 2009
The New American Spook Country
Spook Country is about America’s loss of innocence, its various ways of remembering the past, and an attempt to find a way of reconciling those memories with the present.
Thursday, June 18 2009
The New Games Journalism
The most useful moments for New Games Journalists are ones that occur in multiplayer, describing experiences that could never occur during just a general session of play.
Wednesday, March 18 2009
Does Video Game Criticism Need a Pauline Kael?
Kael, much like video game critics today, was faced with a massive philosophical shift in her chosen artistic medium that large quantities of critics were against.
Monday, December 1 2008
Does Video Game Criticism Need a Lester Bangs?
Part of the reason Lester Bangs was a great rock critic was because he reflected the virtues and vices of his medium. Yet as a critic Bangs provided a lot of personal standards that could be easily applied to multiple mediums.
Columns
Monday, October 4 2010
Shattered Horrors: Fragmented Perspectives in 'Fatal Frame 2'
Leaving the dark unspeakable evil unexplained is best because the moment that you reduce such horror to words or images, the player’s imagination no longer feeds it.
Tuesday, July 27 2010
Morality in Mystery Dungeon: 'Shiren the Wanderer'
The moral of Shiren the Wanderer is one of the few that only a game can truly teach; aspects of the story, new locations, items, and characters all have far more emotional resonance if we have to struggle for them.
Tuesday, June 1 2010
My Own Private Architecture
When you get to know those hallways during your game experience, when you think of them as hubs wherein change occurs rather than mere passageways, that’s when the transition from a designed space to a personalized space begins.
Tuesday, April 6 2010
The Mass Appeal of Farmville
By integrating itself into Facebook’s social network, Farmville magnifies a sense of accomplishment because the challenges come from the way that you are perceived by a community, rather than on the whims of an unknown developer.
Tuesday, February 2 2010
The Art of Place in Hitman: Blood Money
A game isn’t just its content or game design alone, but rather, the space created when all these pieces come together.
Reviews
Monday, December 6 2010
Dragon's Lair Trilogy
There’s still no video game quite like this, but that probably has more to do with the death of the arcade rather than with the nature of the game itself.
Wednesday, November 17 2010
Saw II: Flesh and Blood
Conceptually the series was always a modernized take of the morality horror films of the '70s and '80s, modern in this case being a combination of the rhetoric of Fight Club alongside video game elements.
Wednesday, October 20 2010
Dawn of Heroes
On paper, a simplified tactical RPG probably sounds like a good idea. Games like Pokemon have shown that the formula can deliver to younger audiences. The reason that Dawn of Heroes bombs is that it doesn’t really pay attention to what the player wants to do in this type of game.
Friday, September 24 2010
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
For longtime fans of horror games, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a breath of fresh air in a genre that is now more about thrills than genuine fear.
Monday, June 7 2010
Iron Man 2
The game has the charming habit of freezing intermittently, which I discovered when it did so in the opening cut scene. I’m not sure if the error ever repeats because I got pretty comfortable skipping the plot after a while.
Blogs
Wednesday, December 1 2010
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, PC) [$19.95]
Tuesday, October 12 2010
On Design-Centric Game Criticism
L.B. Jeffries bids adieu to the Moving Pixels audience, but before he goes, he has a few words to share about writing game criticism, noting that "the difference between a critical analysis and a game FAQ is that somebody who has never played the game can still gain something from good analysis."
Tuesday, October 5 2010
Music, Space, And Your House
"If you grew up thinking that the stage/arena show is what live music is supposed to be, it’s jarring to be confronted with a band playing two feet in front of you, running into you, spitting in your face, hitting you with their instruments."
Tuesday, September 28 2010
The Multimedia Diet
People may not listen when they feel like they're being preached at, but raw data has a voice all its own.
Tuesday, September 21 2010
Filling in the Details in Video Game Worlds
When an author constructs an entire world, they tend to want to show it off as much as possible and provide explanations to game players. That's when games get stuck, especially if borrowing from sci-fi or fantasy literature.