Author: Maddi Chilton

Maddi is a history student in constant transition between Washington, DC and St. Louis, MO. She enjoys bad movies, irrelevant soccer teams and Fallout: New Vegas.
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Oh look, Slither.io had a baby with your biology textbook

Smash-hit mitochondria simulator Agar.io (2015) and its recent knockoff Slither.io took certain corners of the internet by storm a while back. If you’re confused to why this is, here’s a hint: they’re super addictive. They’re easy to grasp, have a manageable skill curve, and ring that bell in your brain that says “One more try!” It’s a simple but foolproof formula—the same reason you kept coming back to Facebook games in 2011, and the same reason you haven’t deleted Stack from your phone even though you swear you’ll never touch that thing again. You can’t stop swiping. It sure resembles old entomology illustrations But…
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An unfinished demo provides a surreal meditation on grief

Outside, the waves crash against the shore rhythmically. Inside, a broken robot suit lies sprawled on a bed, one arm yanked off and left dramatically on the floor. It’s accompanied by a keyboard that, upon further inspection, is literally made of gold. You can pick up the broken arm, or attempt to play the stubbornly immovable keyboard, but your cautious avatar doesn’t want to go near the robot. That’s understandable, as she just came to this beach, this cabin, to mourn. This is, more or less, the unfinished demo recently released by Arielle Grimes called Simulus, subtitled Cabin in the…
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Japan can’t stop depicting war as the cutest thing on the planet

What do the creators of games like I Am Setsuna, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001), Demon’s Souls (2009), and SoulCalibur V (2012) have in common? They’re very familiar with Japanese videogame culture and what kinds of games thrive over there. They’ve got their names on some of the most esteemed games of the generation. They’re “grizzled.” And they’re all raring to make a strategy game! Tiny Metal, the culmination of their efforts under the studio name Area 34, is a turn-based game that’ll focus on intense tactical combat, backed up by a strong story. It wants to merge the grand tradition of military…
White Lie
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Upcoming game about a stuffed rabbit goes to a surprisingly dark place

If you ever had a favorite stuffed animal as a kid, you had one or two close calls where it was left somewhere a little too long and forgotten. Most of the time, an eagle-eyed parent would spot it and rescue it from the corner of the laundromat, or the rental car. Other times, it wasn’t so lucky, and sleepless nights would be spent until it was retrieved from its hiding place or a suitable replacement was found. Now take that childhood dependency and switch it around. Emma’s disappearance weighs on him White Lie, the debut project from Ambize Studio,…
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What the hell is a sexual consent app anyway?

The recent publicity of prominent sexual assault cases has everyone on edge. It’s a hard thing to read about in the first place, let alone be inundated with day after day on social media or in real life. For assault survivors, it’s a million times worse than that. It’s understandable that the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue is, “How do we fix this?” Many people are talking to their children more seriously about the issue now. Colleges are embracing Title IX, with varying levels of success. And a couple people, in order to fix this pesky, irritatingly nuanced…
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Conduct a starlit conversation in a new videogame vignette

New game Friary Road takes place after everyone else has left the barbecue, when the coals are still warm and the stars are getting bright and you’ve had just enough beer to start thinking about how far away they are. It was made (in a day, though the jam deadline was a week) for the recent Fermi Paradox Jam, which asked game makers to consider this contradiction: if aliens are out there, and statistics say they are, why haven’t they contacted us? Many of the games take you on adventures in spaceships and have you confront the aliens about their absence…
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I fell in love with a Soviet robot and all I got was hacked

You get a message from an unknown number that doesn’t say much more than “hello,” and after a brief response, those dreaded words: “your device has been compromised.” You splutter and demand answers. The person on the other line is unhelpful; weaves some grand tale of identity theft and infinitely valuable lost codes lingering in hyperspace—then, without further ado, he connects you to another system. The music becomes more ominous; the faux-iPhone messenger turns into a green retro display, and the mysterious and threatening K.O.M.R.A.D. greets you. But you’d be kinda shaken up too if you’d been left alone to…
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The Crusader Kings II mod capble of generating huge, alternate histories

Like the procedural culture experiments currently going on in Ultima Ratio Regum, a recent mod for the grand strategy game Crusader Kings II (2012) is trying its hand at procedurally generating a whole world. The mod, created by user Yemmlie, manufactures history “from its first exodus from Africa” onward, creating religion, language, legal systems, and more, all from scratch. Nothing from the base game remains except for the map, which can be randomized if desired, while new factions and cultures struggle for control of land and resources. entire dynasties are developed Even though the simulation isn’t as detailed as the vanilla game,…
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Quote, an upcoming literary RPG about destroying knowledge

Ignorance is bliss, or so the clichés say. It’s true that there’s a certain appeal to that innocence, but we as a society have decided that proverb is mostly bullshit, right? Knowledge, for lack of a better motivational poster, is power, and those who champion the cause of the opposite are generally suspected to have ulterior motives in mind. That’s what makes Fahrenheit 451 (1953) such an enduringly captivating dystopia; that’s why shelves are built down into the ground in the streets of Berlin on the sites of book-burnings; that’s why modern-day arguments of censorship carry so much weight. We like knowing…