Feature Excerpt 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 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 Missing Mediocrity By Evan Dennis • March 22nd, 2022 The extinction of regular cars in racing games.
Feature Excerpt 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 Comfort in the Abyss By Luke Rotella • February 21st, 2022 My relationship with That Night, Steeped By Blood River.
Feature Excerpt 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 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 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 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 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 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 Mutated City By Zsolt David • August 17th, 2021 The world living in the husk of another.
Feature Excerpt Ecstatic Truth in Games By Ben Rueter • July 28th, 2021 What nonfiction games offer if you can find them
Feature Excerpt 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
