Yo-Kai Watch 2 taught me that emotions are a lie, but ghosts are real

I’ve been playing Yo-Kai Watch 2: Bony Spirits every night since I got it. Why Bony Spirits and not Fleshy Souls (the alternative version of the same game)? Because skeletons are cooler, I guess. At least, that’s my reasoning. Yo-Kai Watch 2 comes only a year after the series’s first localization re

Ian Bogost’s Play Anything and the sublimity of boredom

In the strata of books about videogames, I offer the following overly simplistic codification: 1. Books about a specific game or game developer 2. Books about a specific period of time in the history of games 3. Books about how videogames are art, dammit And then there’s Ian Bogost’s new book Play A

IMPRESSIONISTa lets you wander around one of Monet’s paintings

Plenty of games have toyed with the convention of going inside paintings—Oblivion (2006), Super Mario 64 (1996), and Dark Souls (2011) to name a few. But only a handful of games have been made with the sole purpose of perusing artwork from the inside out. IMPRESSIONISTa, a new exploration game from

Gears of War 4 has lost some weight

A number of things define Gears of War. There’s the chainsaw-equipped assault rifle used to saw murderous reptile men in half, the constant rhythmic challenge of timing a supercharged gun reload, and, of course, the brick shithouse soldiers that players control throughout. These are all constants in

American politics and the importance of participation

Heat waves rose from the concrete streets of central Philly as I left my office at 1pm to join a protest in the streets. I melted as I walked the two miles down Broad Street from City Hall towards Temple University. The in-between space transitioned to ghetto territory—an uncharted war zone where pe