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Games

On Point and Click Adventure Games with Creator Joel Staaf Hästö

Point and click adventure games, says Kathy Rain and Whispers of a Machine creator Joel Staaf Hästö, hit a "sweet spot" between puzzles that exercise logical thinking and stories that stimulate emotions.
Recent
Books

Combating the Trap of Nostalgia in a Look at the Super Nintendo

Dominic Arsenault's Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware cuts through the nostalgia so sharply that it comes off as dismissive, hostile even, at least to someone used to reading the flowery prose of fan literature.

Books

Academic Gamers, Your Assistance with 'Gaming Representation', Please

You might care about the concepts raised in Gaming Representation, but you probably won't be able to understand them.

Games

In 'Mass Effect' While You Stare into the RPG, the RPG Stares Back into You

Just as you interrogate your companions and enemies in order to understand them and their worlds, the game reveals itself to have been questioning you. What kind of player are you? What kind of person?

Games

Community and Collaboration in 'Battle for Wesnoth'

The one part of gaming that can lay claim to true, untarnished ‘freeness’ is the open-source world, where other incentives besides profit drive creativity.

Television

'Westworld' Ponders the Lives of NPCs

Westworld seems less interested in examining traditional protagonists than interrogating the behaviors and abuses of a fictional world's props, its non-player characters.

Games

'Undertale' and Immanuel Kant: Ethics in Video Games

Undertale invokes (consciously or not) the ethics of Immanuel Kant, and in doing so, it ushers in a new era of video games as art.

Games

Best of the Moving Pixels Podcast: What's the Point of Points?

Do games teach that success is something that is clearly quantifiable?

Games

'The 100 Greatest Console Video Games' Chooses Style Over Substance

This is an accessible boilerplate encyclopedia of vintage game history that eschews analysis for rudimentary information and attractive presentation.

Games

Moving Pixels Podcast: The Greatest Couples in Video Games

Valentine's Day may be over, but we're still celebrating the most significant relationships in video games.

Games

Why Don't Videogames Have Their Own Criterion Collection?

Though the video game industry bases itself on forward progression, the rich history of the medium is being underserved by the lack of preservation for older, essential games.

Miguel Penabella
Books

'You' and the Minutia of Coding Vintage Video Games

Austin Grossman's You is kind of like one long advertisement for the sanctity of the video game and the coolness of working in the video games industry.

Games

A Space for the Boys: Considering the Gendered Quality of Arcade Culture

My own arcade was called the Gold Mine and featured a facade of a 19th century mine entrance as the portal to entry. Greeting one inside, though, were simply rows of machines spread across a rather filthy and threadbare carpet and a cacophony of bleeps and bloops. Most often there was nary a girl in sight.

Games

People Are Sickening: The Bug's Eye View of Pandemic Games

Pandemic sims like Plague, Inc. create a marvelous kind of satire with ecological undertones.

J. M. Miller
Games

Paying Too Often for Sex in Video Games

In film, the salacious is something to see. In video games, however, the salacious needs to be something to do.

Games

The Good, the Bad, and the Moral: An Exploration of Ethical Questions in the Gaming World

Modelled after the introversion of the comics on which it’s based, The Walking Dead tries to deal more with exploring the human condition rather than bathing in the fantasy of a zombie apocalypse.

Stephen Beirne
Games

The Pleasures of Playing in an Economy of Pain

The greater the failure of the video game player, the greater the financial reward of the video game machine’s owner. More frustration, more 'death', used to mean more quarters per hour. These days, it means something else, entirely.

Music

In Defense of Jay-Z as the Most Important Person in Hip-Hop History

In light of Jay-Z being named executive producer of the NBA2K video game franchise, we look at just how far Mr. Carter has taken the boundaries of hip-hop and success.

Games

U Mad?

It’s a very satisfying experience to kill in an online competitive video game. It makes one aware that one’s efforts are significant in, perhaps, the clearest, most visceral metaphor possible. I just made someone else dead.

Games

The Strength of Dialogue in 'Enslaved'

Last year’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West remains one of the best written games that I’ve ever played thanks to a script that goes out of its way to imply more than it explains.

Games

Self Indulgence or Self Realization?: Sony's “Michael” Ad

What Sony's ad might recognize about games is my own self indulgence, as constantly trying on the roles of heroes is a pretty narcissistic pastime.

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Is Being Difficult

The Moving Pixels Podcast considers how difficulty contributes to the pleasure and pain of gaming.

Visual Arts

On Costumes, Video Games, and the Art of Pretending

A little nostalgia goes a long way. Sometimes, you get so lost in looking at a thing that you forget that it's not real. Or at least, you want to forget that it's not real.

Games

The Problem of Genre in Video Games

Despite the wide variety of forms that games come in, the number of genres and the distinctions between them are confusingly small.

Games

The Art of Place in Hitman: Blood Money

A game isn’t just its content or game design alone, but rather, the space created when all these pieces come together.

Reviews

The Guild: Seasons 1 & 2

Only a keen understanding of the gaming culture could generate such a dedicated, enthusiastic audience.

Games

The Hipsters of Gaming

The new role of the hardcore gamer in their own subculture.

Games

DHARMA's Bent Reality: The Video Game Sensibility of Lost

As a "virtual" landscape, then, The Island is, naturally, bordered on all sides by an impassable boundary, the ocean, and invisible, in a sense, to the "real" world around it.

Elwyn Palmerton
Games

DHARMA's Bent Reality: The Video Game Sensibility of Lost

In this light, it actually seems as if "The Looking Glass" in season three is basically the show's token "underwater level".

Elwyn Palmerton
Games

DHARMA's Bent Reality: The Video Game Sensibility of Lost

Perhaps the most complete and fascinating assimilation of video game-type content into a different medium at a deep and thorough level occurs within the narrative world of the popular television show Lost.

Elwyn Palmerton
Games

"Technology for the Masses": An Interview with Nolan Bushnell

"The games got too complex and violent. The complexity lost the casual gamer, and the violence lost the women."

Ryan Smith
Books

Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark

Gamer Theory concerns itself with more than just the interpretation of video games; it's about gaming ambience -- that is, gamespace -- as the kinetic field within which game players exist.

Vince Carducci

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