Category: Excerpt

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Dungeons and Comrades: The Capitialism Catharsis of Going Under

By Andrew Kiya • March 19th, 2021

“Disrupting” is great if by that you mean smashing up corporate hell.

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Painting of two people gathering potatoes.

Car Rides and Crooning: Bridging the Gap with A Woman’s Heart

By Christine M. Estel • March 18th, 2021

Music has a certain power to bridge the general divide.

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A poster of two people guarding against Morlocks.

Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism

By Noah Berlatsky • March 17th, 2021

What horror lies in the heart of men?

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A green and a pink inkling staring at each other with menace.

We Found Love in a Chatless Place: Community through Silent Multiplayer

By Emma Kostopolus • February 26th, 2021

Painting in a world where no one has mouths but they must speak.

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Videogame Chamber Music

By William Dowell • February 26th, 2021

“One Winged Angel” is plenty haunting to start but then you hear the string quartet version. Find out what goes into that.

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The Thrill of Being the World’s Only Active Player

By Henry Ewins • January 21st, 2021

I wanted to know how and why developers can be inspired to go so against the grain that they sacrifice what seems like the most fundamental of any creator’s wants – having an audience…

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The Plagues of Dunwall

By Alma Roda-Gil • January 21st, 2021

The rich and powerful never think that the problems of the common people will affect them.

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Birth of Masculine Bodies

By Zsolt David • December 17th, 2020

Press button to move legs.

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Who Firewatches the Firewatchers

By Caroline Delbert • December 17th, 2020

Marshall played Firewatch and thought being a firewatcher sounded good, so he volunteered.

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Keep Calm with a Cup of Coffee

By Katiee McKinstry • November 24th, 2020

Katiee McKinstry chats with developer Andrew Jeremy about the joys of chilling out in coffee shops.

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Oishi: The Yakuza and the Koan

By George Umbarger • November 24th, 2020

What’s the Yakuza series have to do with Zen Buddhism? More than you think!

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Dungeons & Dollhouses

By Orrin Grey • October 20th, 2020

I’m not going to claim that society didn’t yet have those concepts, but I hadn’t been exposed to them. I came up in small towns in the Midwest; gender norms were pretty rigid.

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A Friend at the End of the World

By Adam Goodall • October 20th, 2020

But what space do you and your camera occupy in this city? You’re far from an observer, an outside eye; rather, Faulkner positions the player as a site of tension in this world falling apart.

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Death is Not the End

By Nicholas Straub • October 20th, 2020

The inhabitants of the Dark Souls universe seek a hero to rekindle the first flame, for without it, they believe, all life will cease. But they are wrong.

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Watching Myself Die

By Phillip Russell • September 22nd, 2020

On Blackness in The Last of Us

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Four Brief Discussions of Cultist Simulator and Planescape: Torment

By Violet Adele Bloch • September 22nd, 2020

A sketch.

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Talkin’ ‘Bout Bugsnax

By Melissa King • August 28th, 2020

A look at how Kero Kero Bonito came up with gaming’s happiest bop of the summer.

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The Relatable Dystopia

By Mark Hill • August 28th, 2020

Mirror’s Edge is one of the few franchises to acknowledge that every dystopia is someone’s utopia.

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Your Choices Matter: The Real Power Fantasy

By Ruth Cassidy • August 28th, 2020

An interview with the co-narrative leads on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire about subverting that power fantasy of the Chosen One.

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Maternal Legacies

By Emma Kostopolus • July 30th, 2020

Death Stranding doesn’t erase motherhood: it is, in several important ways, defined by it.

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Being Alone

By Alma Roda-Gil • July 30th, 2020

When talking about the problems with Firewatch’s ending, general consensus is that it invalidates the events of the game – but that’s looking at it backward.

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Digital Phantasmagoria

By Phantom • July 6th, 2020

On the art of DataErase – glitch witch, anime porn historian and DIP switch devil.

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Still Fallen: The Delicious, Open World Mystique of Fallen London

By Khee Hoon Chan • June 5th, 2020

Failbetter Games’ impeccable prose has kept this browser game alive for a decade now.

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Everyone’s Already in Jail: Astral Chain, Freedom Wars, and Social Control

By Don Everhart • June 5th, 2020

While the main characters in one game are police and in the other they are prisoners, there isn’t much difference in the rhythms of their lives.

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Sticks and Stones Might Break My Bones But Words Will Never Hurt Me

By Autumn Wright • May 4th, 2020

Marvel’s New Warriors series is an attempt to land the most expensive “how ya doing fellow kids” meme in the history of late capitalism.

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In the Suburbs I: Stardew Valley and Arcade Fire

By Alyssa Hatmaker • May 4th, 2020

No matter what artists might be trying to convey in their music, we inevitably tailor their message to fit ourselves.

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Expanding Worlds with Video Game Tabletop RPGs

By Scott Roepel • April 2nd, 2020

Unlike in roleplaying videogames, for tabletop roleplaying, all you need is an imagination, a good storyteller and a set of dice.

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Carrington’s Dreamscape

By Daniel Lipscombe • April 2nd, 2020

Videogames, especially those of the horror variety, could seriously stand to take a leaf from surrealism’s book.

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Accepting Death as the Sun Goes Out

By Ryan Cooper • April 2nd, 2020

The Outer Wilds’ tragic time-loop helps Ryan Cooper process real-world struggles.

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Picking Fruit in Hyrule: Playing Breath of the Wild Like It’s Animal Crossing

By Alyssa Wejebe • February 21st, 2020

If you’re sick of emptying your pockets to Tom Nook and microtransactions, another Nintendo mainstay may be exactly what you’re looking for.

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Heavy Metal Hits the Tabletop

By Tom G. Wolf • February 21st, 2020

For both metal and tabletop gaming, the allure of the forbidden draws in similar crowds.

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Searching for Kirby(‘s) Air Ride, a Game that Does(n’t) Exist

By Don Everhart • January 28th, 2020

Nostalgic for a game that never existed, Don Everhart considers how he has carried a torch for the never-released Nintendo 64 version of Kirby’s Air Ride. Chasing an online game swap for the Gamecube game Kirby Air Ride may have been the next best thing.

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