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Category: Excerpt

Feature Excerpt
In a screenshot from Demon's Souls, a beleaguered knight stands in the ruined courtyard of a great grey cathedral.

Why Aren’t There Treasure Chests in Demon’s Souls?

By Jon Thumas • May 25th, 2022

Not having treasure chests is a provocative decision for a Japanese action RPG to have made in 2009, but it was far from a transgressive one.

Feature Excerpt

Cyberpunk 2077 is a Haunted House

By Alma Roda-Gil • May 24th, 2022

Just because death permeates Night City doesn’t mean it’s a privilege afforded to everyone.

Feature Excerpt
A red-headed woman rides a bicycle down a cobblestone street, scarf flying wildly behind her. A man in jorts and t-shirt chases after her on foot, arms flailing.

Imagine the Possibilities

By Noah Hertz • March 23rd, 2022

How a college course in Second Life taught me everything I needed to know about the Metaverse.

Feature Excerpt
A silver sports car makes a left-banked turn on a professional racetrack. Lush trees line the outer perimeter of the track.

Missing Mediocrity

By Evan Dennis • March 22nd, 2022

The extinction of regular cars in racing games.

Feature Excerpt
Five soldiers in heavy gear and camouflage fatigues wade through what looks like a pool of fiery lava.

Hell is Other Shooters

By Andrei Filote • February 22nd, 2022

If we organize our play to prepare for the demands of later life, then is it possible to create a new set of values simply by the games that we choose to play?

Feature Excerpt
A giant human eye is projected on an electric-framed screen in a room that seems to exist in a liminal space.

Comfort in the Abyss

By Luke Rotella • February 21st, 2022

My relationship with That Night, Steeped By Blood River.

Feature Excerpt
The top of a towering spire disappears into stormy, swirling clouds.

Become Cursed: Doubt

By George Umbarger • January 21st, 2022

Slaying uncertainty via an unusual in-Spire-ation.

Feature Excerpt

Children of the Night

By Alma Roda-Gil • January 20th, 2022

Vampires, blood libel and Midnight Mass.

Feature Excerpt

The Sixties That Weren’t, or, How Psychonauts 2 Forgets Politics

By Christian Haines • December 22nd, 2021

Double Fine’s videogame Psychonauts 2 draws on the experimental energies of the 1960s only to mute that decade’s political fervor.

Feature Excerpt
An angled shot of a laser-lit, futuristic shop called "Citiadel Souvenirs."

This Is My Favorite Shop in the Citadel

By Emma Kostopolus • December 20th, 2021

The ethics of Mass Effect roleplay.

Feature Excerpt

Roleplaying Freedom: Joel Rosenberg and White Fantasies of Oppression

By Noah Berlatsky • November 23rd, 2021

Rosenberg’s depiction of liberation is less about those liberated and more about the moral awakening of the white liberator.

Feature Excerpt

Rebels Without a Cause

By Gerry Hart • November 19th, 2021

Watchdogs: Legion could have been a powerful or at least insightful piece of cultural commentary. It’s more like the Kylie Jenner Pepsi advert.

Feature Excerpt
A screenshot from the Pendragon videogame.

Pendragon and Anti-Fascist Medievalism

By Ruth Cassidy • October 29th, 2021

“Camelot has, for the moment, fallen, but the dream of Camelot – of a sane Government by consensus, led by an Arthur and not a Mordred – must and will live on.”

Feature Excerpt
A mummy reaches for a man lying in bed.

A World Beyond: The Inadvertent Sci-Fi of Universal’s Original Mummy Sequels

By Orrin Grey • October 27th, 2021

If you think about it, mummies are the original time travelers.

Feature Excerpt
A black and white drawing of an old time canon.

Blasting the Canon

By Andrew Goddard • October 7th, 2021

What classical music can teach us about constructing a videogame canon

Feature Excerpt

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s Crises of Faith

By Ryan Stevens • October 6th, 2021

Assassin’s Creed has long been able culture clash, but what about clashes of faith?

Feature Excerpt
A naked person holds a tamed snake up for entertainment.

On Orientalism and Exoticism in Videogame Music

By William Dowell • August 18th, 2021

The insidious way that Orientalism exists in videogame music.

Feature Excerpt
The Vault Dweller from Fallout 3 walks among the ruins of Washington DC.

The Mutated City

By Zsolt David • August 17th, 2021

The world living in the husk of another.

Feature Excerpt
A house with a filter showing multiple time periods.

Ecstatic Truth in Games

By Ben Rueter • July 28th, 2021

What nonfiction games offer if you can find them

Feature Excerpt
Tasi sits against, a wall, illuminated by only a lantern. A massive shadow is cast behind her.

Mother Loves You: Monstrous Parenthood in Amnesia: Rebirth

By Emma Kostopolus • July 27th, 2021

There’s a deeper, more metatextual horror to Amnesia: Rebirth.

Feature Excerpt
The desert landscape of Tatooine whips past with two pod racing engines connected by a purple beam.

Podracing Towards an Absent Future

By Samuel Kendall • July 26th, 2021

Because Star Wars isn’t really Star Wars anymore.

Feature Excerpt

Imagining the Future in Games

By Ruth Cassidy • June 24th, 2021

A vision of tomorrow, today!

Feature Excerpt
A living room with an empty pizza box and a couch with cushions strewn about.

The Personification of the House

By Matthew Brown • June 22nd, 2021

The walls could always talk, we just have to listen.

Feature Excerpt

Dancing in Solitude

By Clint Morrison Jr. • June 10th, 2021

Dance has a long history of media representation during and following “plague” years.

Feature Excerpt

Your Dearest Kin Below the Skin

By Emily Price • June 10th, 2021

Liquidity in Hades.

Feature Excerpt
An armor clad figure draws their sword to do battle with a dragon.

Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Middle Earth

By Jamie Redgate • April 29th, 2021

How does one go about making a modern fantasy touchstone?

Feature Excerpt

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.

Feature Excerpt
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.

Feature Excerpt
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?

Feature Excerpt
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.

Feature Excerpt
Videri String Quartet

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.

Feature Excerpt

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…

Feature Excerpt

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.

Feature Excerpt

Birth of Masculine Bodies

By Zsolt David • December 17th, 2020

Press button to move legs.

Feature Excerpt

Who Firewatches the Firewatchers

By Caroline Delbert • December 17th, 2020

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

Feature Excerpt

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.

Feature Excerpt

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!

Feature Excerpt

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.

Feature Excerpt

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.

Feature Excerpt

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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