I'm fresh out of Inception and still grappling with what to make of it. For one...what? For two, I'm tending to agree with the web mumblings on the film's video game ties. The snow scene? I don't play Modern Warfare 2, but if I walked into the theater while those faceless-snow-warriors-on-skis were shooting at some undefined building in the middle of some undefined mountains, I would think I was in a teenage boy's video game lair.

Video games are increasingly an integral part of our cultural consciousness and tonight's lecture at YBCA is dedicated to this very topic. Jessie Shell, video game yoda (credentials include CEO of Schell Games, author of the Art of Game Design, professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon and former Creative Director of the Imagineering VR Studio at Walt Disney) speaks tonight on the next frontiers of the genre at the Novellus Theater. In what's sure to be an illuminating lecture, Schell will explore the social, cognitive and psychological trends of computer game design and use.  He even posits that to understand video games is to understand where society is going. Marinate on that. It might be even deeper than Inception.

Expand your mind tonight at 7 p.m. with Visions of the Gamepocalypse at YBCA