Anyway, here’s a quick run-down on the Stanford Prison Experiment and its many problems. I’m so excited this is in the news. Be mad about it. Tell your friends.

This article has a bad headline, but it’s spot-on about the way our literary canon perpetually asks everyone, women included, to care deeply about the sexual frustration of men who hate us.

Kekla Magoon on heroism and community. PS y’all should read The Rock and the River and How It Went Down because they’re extraordinary.

This deep-dive into Sherlock conspiracy fandom is absolutely weird and fascinating.

“Come on in; the water is sickeningly warm.” Rebecca Traister on Bill Clinton’s indignation about being asked to discuss his behavior towards Monica Lewinsky in the context of #MeToo.

Coming of age stories for girls in movies are overwhelmingly white (and wealthy).

Ellen Oh has some thoughts on writing while white and how to receive criticism.

Who gets to talk? Rabih Alameddine on purveyors of comforting myths.

The trouble with researching a historical novel is knowing when to stop, and what details to pare away.

Fighting fake reviews — in literature, in the restaurant world, on YouTube — has never been trickier.

I finally took a deep dive into that sex cult that one of the actresses from Smallville was in, and gosh, what an experience. Cults are WILD. Content note for abuse.

Here’s what you need to know about the world’s scariest scary film, Hereditary — whether you want to see it or not! See also: How to participate in horror movies when you are scared of horror, an article that is written by a totally separate human than me but it might as well be an excerpt from my autobiography.

Women use true crime as emotional catharsis and danger practice. (Not me though. I don’t fuck with true crime. No indeed.)

Have a wonderful weekend, internet friends!

The post Down with the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM. I found Death by Video Game during a random, but pleasant, browse through my library’s catalog, and it is exactly what I wanted it to be: A series of journalistic sociology essays about the worlds and possibilities of video games, from people dropping dead at gaming cafes after hours of play, to fundraisers that depend on gamers being willing to play mind-numbingly dull video games for hours upon hours, to games that realistically explore some of the most difficult and terrifying things about being human. And I came away from the book feeling how I wanted to feel: That there are worlds of knowledge under the sub-heading “video game,” and I should dedicate some time to learning more about them.

(Jenny Learns Something New and Gets Excited about It: An Autobiography in Infinite Chapters.)

Did it make me want to play video games? Yes, but not enough for me to actually do anything about it. Knowing my addiction to stories as I do, I am sure that if I got into gaming, it would quickly consume my life (very expensively!) and I would never get anything else done ever again. So I continue to opt out of gaming. I feel the same way, roughly, about getting your ears pierced. Earrings would delight me! I would have tons of them! And it would cost money and I’d have to keep track of all of them and it’d be one more damn thing for me to worry about when I’m getting ready in the morning.

“But what’s your favorite thing you learned from this book, Jenny?” Glad you asked! My most favorite thing is that the EVE Online, a science fiction video game, has an elected player council called the Council of Stellar Management that meets once a year with the game developers, CCP, in Iceland to talk about new planned features and to represent player interests to the company that owns the game.

“Council members can have very different ambitions and concerns depending on which part of space their hail from,” explains CCP’s Ned Coker. “You may have somebody who lives in the galaxy’s outer reaches and, as such, they will have a very different viewpoint to those that live in a more centralised area.”

Fascinating, no?

Parkin also talks about the way games encourage imaginative identification to an extent that less immersive media do not. In a game like That Dragon, Cancer, it becomes impossible to separate yourself emotionally from the experience of having a baby who’s dying, because the game forces you to experience it from the viewpoint of the caretakers. He rejects the idea that video games are “just games,” or that the worldviews of the games have no effect on the worldviews of the gamers. At the same time, he doesn’t delve very deeply into this topic (or any of his topics), since the idea is more to provide a window into the variety of games that exist than to provide substantial critiques of gaming culture.

Verdict: An excellent, readable introduction to the video games and player types that exist in our wondrously varied world.

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