June’s article, The Mummy, is a review of the 1999 movie with an Egyptology bent.

While The Mummy is an enjoyable two hours, Egyptology 101 it is not. Okay, yes, there are a few other oversights that are not related to Ancient Egypt, but most of the glaring problems were based there.

The first thing that I noticed was the setting itself. The virtual reconstruction was beautiful, but two major issues jumped out at me- the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Both of these objects, while certainly personifying Ancient Egypt, are located at Giza. The scene was supposedly taking place at Thebes. This is nowhere near Giza and could not, therefore, have either of these objects in the skyline.

May’s article, Gaming Communities: Real or Imaginary?, focuses on communities in online games and is a critique on a newspaper article on the same issue.

Why is it that the most visible critiques on video games come from people who are obviously not even casual gamers? I always hear “violence” and “sexually explicit content” thrown around without the writer having an understanding, or offering an in-depth critique, on what those words mean for video games. I find that these so-called “anti-game crusaders” often buy into alarmist extremes, thereby misrepresenting the influence of videogames, without ever asking why such a correlation exists. Most times, this perspective misses the intricacies of the games and, in the case of online games, the gaming communities.