In Planescape: Torment [1], you play a scarred immortal searching a fantastical metropolis for the truth about your identity. You’ve forgotten everything about yourself, including your name. If you lie to enough people and give them the false name “Adahn,” the city, empowered by the strong belief that an individual with this name exists, spontaneously generates a […]

“Like the hands of the correctional officer on my abdomen,” Sable Elyse Smyth’s Landscape III begins, “searching for metal—rather—groping for the sake of taking over—for possession.” [1] The poem continues for a total of eight lines, and evokes violence and sexuality, how the two can be intertwined, and how one’s experience with the carceral system […]

Piled in a corner, at the nexus of walls and floor, are hundreds of multicolored pieces of candy. The cellophane wrappers glint in the light. Your docent invites you to take one. To eat part of this sculpture, to slowly diminish its weight until, dozens and dozens of visitors later, there’s little left of the […]

When JK Rowling unceremoniously announced that beloved wizard-headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay, the hundreds of fans packing Carnegie Hall apparently all fell silent—before bursting into applause [1]. Most fans, myself included, rejoiced. The Potterverse was gay! It was only later that I realised that my reaction was a little peculiar. Nowhere in the text does […]

Games fetishize heroes. Traditionally, games devote their attention to the Hero and the details of their epic quest. We players, bloodhounds slavering for plot, fixate on this Hero. We tear into them, inhabit them, and through their agency, we exert change on an authored world. Killing is often involved. (The bloodhound metaphor still holds.) * […]

The first time I took up a pencil and underlined a sentence in a novel, my hands shook. The line winked at me cheekily, sat smug and brazen under the typography. Outrageous and provocative, it wanted its own label: Marks in a Novel Biswas (2012) Graphite on Paper It chuckled. One did not write in […]