announcement: hello world!

Welcome to my blog "transcending pixels."

Technically, it's just a(nother) game review blog; abstractly, it's the only place where you will find not just reviews, but discussions, arguments, and explorations of some of the best casual and Internet-based games and user-interactive media.

Knowing that the blogosphere is already overstuffed, I did my market research and found that, although other people have created sites for casual game reviews and walkthroughs, they treat the genre as casually and cheesily as the packaging on Tetris and Tomb Raider rip-offs (you know, the really tacky CD-ROMs in the $10 bin at OfficeMax that go like Skyscraper Mania 2.0 and Amy Gates & the Sword of Cancun). As you well know from the endless SomethingVille invites on your Facebook and the endless balloon-shooting banner ads cropping up everywhere else, the casual game market is sinking, drowning even under the weight of so... many... just downright crappy games. Anyone with a bit of ActionScript skill or access to a drag-and-drop-assembly engine can whip up a game in an afternoon and stick it on the web. Most of us regularly play or have played casual games, but their infestation of the Internet has consigned our opinion of them to the ground level, or sometimes even the gutter.

But every once in a while, among the rubbish and the muck, you'll find a jewel.

Therefore I, Alex J. Freemont, do solemnly take it upon myself to recover these jewels, polish them a bit, and set them not behind glass and lasers, but right in the middle of the public square, where everyone can touch them, play with them, and examine their architecture inside and out, because games are just as powerful cultural icons as books and music and cinema, and they deserve a humanist respect they've been lacking for almost 40 years. Hardcore gamers can joke about Farmville and Angry Birds all they want, but the truth is that casual games are still games, and they're making it possible for the game industry as a whole to gain more favor in the public view.

On transcending pixels, I intend to review only the social, mobile, browser, and other casual games ("pixels" in the triple-A-title dominated video game market) that stand out as quality works of art, of literature, of interactivity, of culture itself (in essence, "transcending" expectations). I don't expect that you'll agree with my recommendations of what I consider to be a "quality" game. Some of what I review may not even be considered a "game" in the way we're used to seeing the medium. That's good. Without discussion or debate, the game industry won't grow, and we'll certainly never see any better-quality casual titles.

So with that, let's get this game started. Hello world.