The Metaphysics of Nintendogs

Joshuah Bearman, an editor over at the LA Weekly, emails Game|Life to let us know about his new column "Pass the Paddles", which he describes as "short and (hopefully) smart essays on games as culturual phenomena"; "an attempt to write about video games with the some cultural criticism like the way, say, the New Yorker or the Times would write about movies and music."

Fantastic! Check out this piece on Nintendogs for a sense of what Bearman is doing. I like it:

Therein lies Nintendogs inexorable pull: It’s the first game powered by empathy. These things are much more convincing than the Tomogatchis, those rudimentary keychain creatures from the first virtual pet craze a decade ago. Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they’re a pretty good substitute.

Even if he misspelled Tamagotchi.