Word: herzing
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Electronic games like Pac-Man, Tetris, Doom and Myst are the totems of a generation and have etched an indelible imprint on the American psyche. Or so J.C. Herz, the 25-year-old author of Joystick Nation (Little, Brown; 230 pages; $23.95), would have her readers believe. For as Herz sees it, video games aren't just kid stuff; they are "theme parks of the mind" that reflect the fears, fantasies and desires lurking in every human soul...
...witty manifesto, Herz correlates each major genre of electronic game with an age-old impulse: shoot-'em-ups like Doom tap the primal instinct for survival, while puzzle games like Tetris satisfy the need for order, control and reason. The games' larger-than-life superheroes are interpreted as contemporary reincarnations of mythological figures like Zeus and Prometheus...
...zeal to convey the importance of the games, Herz occasionally loses her edge and blindly defends them against all criticism. Her responses to the bimboesque portrayal of women and the questionable values that the gorier games convey to children, for example, feel as shallow as an Aqua-Fresh smile (a Herzian saying). The games' shameless pandering to adolescent fantasies is explained with little more than a breezy "what teenage boys want, teenage boys get," while growing parental concern is briskly dismissed as "adults freaking out about their precious darlings being driven to new heights of deviancy by popular media...
...value is Rilke's text for the fourth song, "The Crown of Dreams," but the musical hair-raisers were the first ("Night") and seventh ("Summer Days"). In each, Upshaw's intonation and delivery etched certain phrases in the mind: "Gib acht" ("give heed") in the first song, and "O Herz" ("O my heart") in the last. Goode continued to be a disarmingly responsive, if sometimes noisy, accompanist...
Flames, myths, MUD's, MOOs, caffeine and sugared cereals. For months, such was the life of J.C. Herz '93, former CrimeEd, as she immersed herself in the culture and subculture of the Internet to research her debut effort, Surfing The Internet (Little, Brown, & Co). The result of sleep deprivation and stimulant overload is a sassy, hypercharged piece of cyberculture shock which reads like an extended Internet session and takes J.C. to the furthest points of cyberspace and back. Through virtual worlds full of meaningless babble and technological romance, around connection obstacles and cultural consequences, Herz's faster-than-a-speeding...