M as in⦠Mancy?

Presumably the six degrees of freedom required for arbitrary position and orientation in space. You use three numbers to specify your position in space along the x, y, and z coordinate axes. Then you use three numbers to specify how much you have rotated around each of the axes. You can think of all six of these numbers as positions on six axes in six dimensional space. Why would you want to do that? So that you can have a cool palindromic name for your controller like SIXAXIS.

pop culture today is primarily a technology story

Is it really? I think the problem is that we want it to be. Lester Bangs wrote about rock. Rock would not exist withoug electric guitar, tape recorder and analog amplifier. Could Lester Bangs fix a broken tape recorder? Was he a great critic because he understood how a guitar works? No. He wrote about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, not a technological one. I see crisis in videogame criticism precisely in the fact that there are too many technofetish geeks covering it. We read too many reviews focusing on technical details - what 3D engine was used, how many frames per second you get in given resolution, what are the system requirements etc. We read too few focusing on the storyline, character development or the background information. It's like art criticism focusing only on chemical composition of the paint used by the painter. Ever since Gutenberg, culture ALWAYS was a technology story, but what we need now are critics writing about stories and meanings, not about the 3D engines, pixels and frames per second.