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 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.
Feature Excerpt Watching Myself Die By Phillip Russell • September 22nd, 2020 On Blackness in The Last of Us
Feature Excerpt Four Brief Discussions of Cultist Simulator and Planescape: Torment By Violet Adele Bloch • September 22nd, 2020 A sketch.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt Maternal Legacies By Emma Kostopolus • July 30th, 2020 Death Stranding doesn’t erase motherhood: it is, in several important ways, defined by it.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt Digital Phantasmagoria By Phantom • July 6th, 2020 On the art of DataErase – glitch witch, anime porn historian and DIP switch devil.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
Feature Excerpt 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.
