George Benjamin Jones
21’s Private Life: where should we draw the line?
Rapper 21 Savage, born Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, was arrested by US immigration officials (ICE) in Atlanta on 3 February after allegedly overstaying his visa....
Made In East London
Voices – East London by Maryam Eisler is a lavishly illustrated book which uses the lives of East Londoners to show how “over the...
Method Acting: Vice or Virtue?
With the recent release of Adam McKay’s Vice, the concept of method acting has again become a talking point in the film community. I...
The Return of Survival Horror
The survival horror genre gained second wind at the end of January with the release of Resident Evil 2 (RE2), a current-generation remake of...
2018’s Games Of The Year
At the recent Game Awards actor Roger Clark (Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2) claimed that we are at the "advent of a golden age"...
2018’s Albums Of The Year
At the end of 2017 I had a relatively easy time drawing up a list of my top ten albums for the year. But...
The Death of the West…On A Screen Near You
Rockstar's prequel to their 2010 epic Red Dead Redemption is finally here - after eight full years in development. We've been playing it for the last...
Time Over for Game Development Overtime?
The scale and scope of computer games has expanded so much that to get them made developers and publishers are pushing their employees to...
Core Networks Are Here To Stay
The contemporary social network market is a battlefield. The biggest websites and apps continually evolve, occasionally lifting features from one another like some covert...
Deakins Films Which Deserved An Oscar
At the Oscars earlier this week Roger Deakins picked up the 90th Academy Award for Cinematography for his work on Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner...
Cloverfield’s Surprise Sequel
In 2008, Matt Reeves and J. J. Abrams released the successful but relatively self-contained Cloverfield. Its intimate perspective and self-restraint in showing the “Clover...
Monetisation and Moderation
Last month, I wrote about YouTube’s disastrous year. In 2017 the platform struggled under the weight of controversies involving their biggest producers, advertisers pulling...
Films and Gaming: Where Will the Tide Take Them?
If 2017 was a year of hard truths, 2018 will be a year of healing. The entertainment industry might have taken a knock, but...
2017’s Album Of The Year – Take 1
As I've established, 2017 was a great year for games. But it was also an amazing year for music. I've kept a running list...
YouTube Down The Tubes?
"PewDiePie ruined YouTube" was one of this year's viral online judgements. It was a flawed perspective, but nevertheless spread to every corner of social...
2017’s Games of the Year
As 2017 comes to the end, I am left reflecting on how solid a year it was; for game releases, console launches and platform...
How History Influenced Breath of the Wild
https://vimeo.com/244046027
The Kingdom of Hyrule in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a vast, fantastical world of mythical creatures, and the...
The Abusive Underbelly of Third Wave Emo
The last week has been a rollercoaster. Twitter and Facebook were flooded by a tide of accusations of misogyny and sexual harassment made against...
Fantasy For Real
Over the weekend, I attended the October MCM London Comic Con, the twelfth time the convention has been held. It’s always exciting to see...
Stranger Things Get Even Stranger
This review contains light spoilers for the first three episodes...
I’ll say it: Season 2 of Stranger Things starts out weak. The first episode was...
Ninja Theory Talk Games and Mental Health
This year's indie hit Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is two things: a fantastical odyssey into the depths of hell and an exploration of loss, trauma and psychosis....
More Than Just a Blade Runner-Up
Producing a Blade Runner sequel that lived up to the original could have ended up as a Sisyphean task. The original is exalted as...
Revisiting Blade Runner
With Blade Runner 2049 out now and under a new director, Rising East decided to get two reviewers to watch the original and review...
SpatialOS: ‘an entirely new approach to game design’
New cloud-powered technology could redefine what we think of as an indie game.
SpatialOS, created by Cambridge-based Improbable, makes development of bigger games easier and...
MCM Brings Star-Studded Line-Up To Newham
From the 27th-29th October, the biannual MCM will take place at London’s ExCel Centre at Royal Victoria Dock.
Each year, it’s exciting to see East...