Category: Excerpt

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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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The New Age of Nollywood

By Oluwatayo Adewole • January 28th, 2020

A new generation of Nigerian filmmakers is finally putting quality over quantity.

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Undercurrent: Sea of Solitude’s Monsters Undermine a Mental Health Journey

By Caitlin Galiz-Rowe • December 20th, 2019

The protagonist’s inner demons seem to get the least screen time for a game about monsters.

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The Art of LARP

By Sharang Biswas • December 20th, 2019

LARPing is as much about community and art as it is about roleplaying.

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What Lies Beneath: Subtextual Storytelling Techniques in Videogames

By Jeff Spoonhower • December 2nd, 2019

Jeff Spoonhower discusses how stories can be told during gameplay through the use of powerful subtextual audio-visual techniques.

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Games About Death (Are Stuck In a Rut)

By Mark Hill • December 2nd, 2019

Why has the treatment of death in certain indie games become so predictable?

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The Horror of the Tortured Artist

By Rachel Watts • October 24th, 2019

Both Layers of Fear games tap into the horror of what happens when artists become desperate chasing their muse.

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Two Hands Off the Wheel: Learning to Embrace the Chaos of Zweihander

By R. M. Jansen-Parkes • October 24th, 2019

Most tabletop RPGs boil down to a roll of the dice.

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Grim, Perilous and Inclusive

By Adam Brown • October 24th, 2019

Zweihander: Grim & Perilous is a fresh take on dark fantasy and tabletop RPGs.

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Dwarves in Space

By Ian Williams • September 24th, 2019

The gig economy is everywhere, even in our videogames. At least Deep Rock Galactic makes it fun.

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Ghost in the Machine

By Harry Mackin • September 24th, 2019

Both the psychological thriller Personal Shopper and Breath of the Wild explore what happens when we allow technology to shape us.

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Taking Control of my Sobriety

By Blake Hester • September 24th, 2019

When you take addiction out of your life, you’re left with more hours in the day than you know what to do with. Luckily, there are games like Control.

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The Year Videogames Blew Up Shanghai

By Mark Hill • August 26th, 2019

Unlike most first-person shooters, these two titles make you think about the very real city destroyed in the wake of your protagonist’s outsider crusades.

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What Makes a Game Trash?

By Evan Dennis • August 22nd, 2019

While it’s easy for a game to fall into being trashy, it takes a bit of lucky circumstance for a game to be fully trash.

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I Wanna Be Your Dog

By Jeremy Signor • August 22nd, 2019

That awkward moment when giving up your free will to a supercomputer-powered hive mind brings out your inner sub.

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Silly Old Bear

By Dick Page • July 22nd, 2019

The review-bombing of Devotion was never about Winnie the Pooh.

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Springfield Forever

By Noah Springer • July 22nd, 2019

Some mobile games are only entertaining for a few hours. For Noah, The Simpsons Tapped Out has proven fun for nearly a decade.

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Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats To Have a Nervous Breakdown To

By Ana Diaz • June 25th, 2019

At least an entire generation working themselves to death can listen to some cozy beats while they do it.

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Order and Chaos

By Justin Reeve • June 24th, 2019

Behind Hitman 2‘s stark, modernist buildings lies a symbolic crusade to reclaim the architectural style.

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Godzilla is Political

By Haru Nicol • May 6th, 2019

It’s impossible to untangle Godzilla from the nuclear anxieties that lead to the kaiju’s creation.

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Hints of Depth in Pikuniku’s Flat World

By Jon Bailes • May 6th, 2019

While Pikuniku’s narrative mostly sticks to the shallow end, it offers neat observations about the distractions of consumerism

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Donut County and the Boisterous History of White Guilt

By Jason Dafnis • March 26th, 2019

The quirky indie game makes a statement on gentrification, capitalism, and – in the raccoon BK’s character – the weaponization of racial guilt.

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Replaying Deus Ex In An Age of Conspiracy Theorists

By Mark Hill • March 26th, 2019

Nineteen years after its release, Deus Ex’s story reveals its age far more than its clunky graphics ever could.

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A Legacy of Movement

By Khee Hoon Chan • March 1st, 2019

Doom may have defined the first-person shooter, but Mirror’s Edge made it flow.

Representing Disabilities: An Evolution in Gaming

By Quin Callahan • March 1st, 2019

We’re finally seeing more people with disabilities in games, but casual representation still pales in comparison to those defined by tragic backstories.

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Friday Nights in the Hostile Environment

By Rob Haines • January 28th, 2019

British developer PanicBarn’s Not Tonight offers a Brexit-flavored critique of the past ten years of the hostile environment.

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Teaching Crunch

By Melissa Brinks • January 28th, 2019

Many students enter the video game industry well aware of its infamous crunch culture. After all, their colleges groomed them for it.

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Videogames in Kuwait

By David Wolinsky and Tali XOXO • January 7th, 2019

David Wolinsky and Tali XOXO share their impressions of GX and Kuwait Battle Royale.

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Go to Jail: The Complicated World of Pirated Board Games

By Ryan Cooper • January 7th, 2019

Tabletop Simulator lets board game fans recreate their favorite games and craft a globalized shared space. . . even if that means breaking a few laws to do so.

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Scorched Earth

By Devin Raposo • January 7th, 2019

Fornite’s 50v50 mode can feel like performance art or improvisational city-planning, with outcomes based more on luck than coordination.

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Crack the Network: It’s Called Cyberpunk Not Cybersecurity

By Liam Conlon • November 23rd, 2018

While disappointed by Cyberpunk 2077’s announcement to exclude a non-binary option, Conlon thinks it’s necessary to desire more than small kernels of representation.

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Flash Forever

By Phantom • November 21st, 2018

A history of the delightful weirdness of Flash games.

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God of Shame

By Kenneth Shepard • November 1st, 2018

Violence is a language with meaning in God of War, rather than the gratuitous thrill of the game’s predecessors. And this legacy is exactly what Kratos means to hide from his son.

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A History in Translation

By Odile Strik • October 25th, 2018

Heaven’s Vault turns learning a language into a game mechanic.

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Your Hands Are Always Tied

By Adam Goodall • September 27th, 2018

A card game wrestles with the darker side of the clothing production and its own mission to change how players see the world.