Rachel Helps

Why are there no gaming memoirs?

Chris Suellentrop’s review of Papo & Yo wonders why the memoir-as-game is a virtually untouched genre. Papo & Yo is a magical-realist fable about the relationship between its creative director and writer, Vander Caballero, and his alcoholic father. No, the game isn’t an autobiography or a documentar

Evidence of a military-grade Pokémon-inspired seizure gun

In 1998 the US Army was trying to think of non-lethal ways to incapacitate enemy soldiers. One of these ideas was to induce seizures in them. Spencer Ackerman at i09 gets down to the details: The [Army’s analysis] cautioned that the effectiveness of incapacitating a human nervous system with an elec

Have opinions about interactive fiction? Judge these entries.

For the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition, the entries are short and many are playable online. The games range from hyperlinked Twine games to fully parsing text adventures. The game shown below, Guilded Youth, is a fun one for the Halloween season. Anyone can judge the games, though they have to

Sites charging for app reviews outed

For a new mobile app developer, doing PR is kind of hard. And when most app sites reply to your press release asking for money in exchange for an “expedited review,” developers might start wondering if this is just how the system works. Appynation has made a list of sites that charge for reviews.  C