Who cares wins…
But for a bed, a dresser, a mirror, a desk and a few scattershot piles of junk, the room is empty. The door is locked. Time is perilously short: you have 10 seconds till your abusive partner swaggers in, spoiling for another fight. Can you evade the seemingly inevitable? Now you're a lonely parent, trying everything you can to quell the distraught cries of your terminally ill child. Now you're an immigrant, fresh to America, hawking newspapers on the commuter trail. Sales are few and your rent is high. You arrive home to your forsaken flat to find a scrawled note from your landlord: lose the cat - your only companion - or face eviction.
In the beginning, video game designers looked not to cinema but to sport for inspiration. Pong, Atari's rudimentary game in which you bat a phosphorous ball across an onyx screen, is tennis redacted. Space Invaders is clay pigeon shooting on the day of Armageddon. Pac-Man is a game of famished hide-and-seek. These days, however, video game designers are searching closer to home for inspiration. 10 Seconds in Hell uses the medium to communicate the abject terror of the domestic abuse victim. That Dragon, Cancer is an unflinching document of a family's experience of a child's illness and death. Cart Life offers an affecting study of contemporary life in America for those working on the poverty line.
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