Tag
Videogames
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“Conjuring and Reality”: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton
“Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both.”
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Queer Lives Are Not Side Quests
If you play a videogame and you avoided or never met a particular queer character, did they exist in the game for you?
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The Healing Power of Virtual Cuteness
Violence underlies the whimsical colonizing of an island in “Animal Crossing.” But perhaps it holds promise for political repair, too.
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Like a Viking
According to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the Vikings aren’t like the stereotypes you’ve heard. Nonetheless, the game lets you play as those stereotypes. Why?
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Why Play at Orientalism?
Games like Crusader Kings III build feudalism into their code, and in so doing assert the supremacy of the modern global North.
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Why Play to Regret?
Videogames that demand female protagonists commit—and receive—violence may be captivating, thoughtful, and moral. But they are not fun to play.
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“Echo” and the Problem of Chess Problems
When looking at both art and life, we recognize patterns and then we learn what those patterns signify.
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Public Picks 2020
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
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Public Thinker: Ian Bogost on Games, Doorknobs, and General Readers
Particularly with the advent of the handheld device, digital games now seem a ubiquitous part of our culture … [none-for-homepage]
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Quit Playing Games with My Heart
Robert first catches my eye from across the coffee shop. New to the neighborhood, I’m looking for a friendly face. But Robert—glaring back at me from over his mug …
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Public Thinker: T. L. Taylor on Gamergate, Live-Streaming, and Esports
The qualitative sociologist T. L. Taylor is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and cofounder and director of research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to … [none-for-homepage]
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A Ouija for the Apocalypse
It is no easy feat to establish a cult and herald the apocalypse. I learned this firsthand while playing the card-based videogame Cultist Simulator, set in …
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The End?
The apocalypse—for all the questions of when and where and why and how surrounding it—will actually be a rather straightforward affair. At some point in time, after a particularly grueling winter, Odin, the all-father, will find himself plummeting into the stomach of Fenrir—son of Loki—the wolf whose upper jaw can scrape the sky while his…
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Games for a Fallen World
Last year, Nintendo released its latest gaming console, a nimble and versatile product appropriately named the Switch, which transforms from transportable LCD tablet to a standard controller with a simple click. Released alongside the …
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Ghost in the System
It’s fitting that a videogame about novels and their authorship manages to marry two media long thought to be polar opposites. Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe’s The Ice-Bound Concordance, available for free, for iPad and Windows, on their website, is a story-based game that requires a real printed-and-bound book in order to play. In an age…
