The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft

In 1995, former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin and ex-CIA Director William Colby collaborated in an unexpected way. They made a video game. The Great Game traces how both men rose to the tops of their fields following World War II, before falling out of favor with their respectives agencies — on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. For Kalugin, a growing discontent with the KGB’s treatment of Russians radicalized him against the institution. Meanwhile William Colby, an OSS operative and the CIA’s man on the ground in Vietnam, was fired by Pr...

Head Transplant and the Non-Existence of the Soul

A video essay by Jacob Geller analyzing the depiction of head- (or consciouness-) transplants in video games such as Wolfenstein 2 or Soma in parallel with the history of the almost-father of head transplants (his experiences having been limited to monkeys), Robert Joseph White. How did we end up moving the center of human consciouness from the heart to the brain ? Where does the soul come in to play here? When is the body / Theseus' ship no longer the body / Theseus' ship for having had its limbs / its wood transplanted too much ?