Diary of a Maze Rat

The Personal Blog of Bronson O’Quinn

  • What is this? The Mausoleum of Gratuitous Fear is an homage to EC Comics, like Vault of Horror or Tales from the Crypt. A story is told through three different perspectives, much like how those books would have a “Crypt Keeper” or a “Vault Dweller.” The main difference is that my story is extremely mundane, taking place on a weeknight at an Applebee’s. The…

    Check it Out

  • Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back is a masterpiece by telling an emotionally resonate story without text, voiceovers, or cinematics.

    Check it Out

  • I conducted an informal survey among attendees at the Kentucky Fried Zine Fest and among my Facebook friends. The question I asked was simple: what’s your favorite video game? The responses were varied and insightful. Some people left one-word answers while others gave elaborate responses. I have compiled this into a printable zine that you can download here or from Issuu. Maze Rats Asks is…

    Check it Out

  • Joseph Bernstein’s article at Buzzfeed News — “Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream” — includes larger implications for the video game community. Bernstein creates a narrative from a series of leaked emails from Breitbart which show Steve Bannon giving directions to Milo Yiannopoulis regarding their white nationalist agenda. They also “out” several male members of the…

    Check it Out

  • In 2005, Steve Bannon got Goldman Sachs to invest $60 million in a World of Warcraft Chinese gold farming company. 1 Bannon eventually took control of the gold farming company, Internet Gaming Entertainment. Even though IGE flopped, Bannon said that these gamers were the pre-cursor to the alt-right. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power… It was the pre-Reddit.” In our previous…

    Check it Out

  • Last week, we examined how hate speech can be used as a way to intimidate and upset opponents. We looked at Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s use of the n-word as an example of how, even though he was playing a competitive video game, he wasn’t using it this way. It’s important to look at the reasons that people use hate speech…

    Check it Out

  • Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg recently said the “n-word” on a stream of the popular online shooter Playunknown’s Battlegrounds.1 For those who follow Kjellberg’s “antics”, this is no surprise; earlier this year, he paid two men in India to record themselves holding up a sign that said “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”. In a half-hearted apology, he placed a lot of the blame on the Wall…

    Check it Out

  • Hideo Kojima’s creative insanity began in the overlooked MSX Metal Gear games with themes expanded in the Metal Gear Solid extended universe.

    Check it Out