Feature

Screenage life: What looking at screens all day is doing to your eyes

This article is part of Vision Week, our exploration of eyeballs and videogames celebrating our collaboration with Warby Parker. Grab a pair of limited edition Kill Screen glasses here: warbyparker.com/kill-screen /// The eyes are among the most sophisticated organs in your body, comprising an automatic focusing and light sensitivity system far better than the best cameras and film designed to date. Four separate surfaces bend light as it enters the eye, and ciliary muscles flex in order to make these lenses change shape, flattening and thickening to account for distance and light. In other words, there’s a lot of work…

Feature

Overwatch and the pleasure of transmedia narratives

Before Winston, a glasses-clad gorilla scientist, was leaping across maps to crush his enemies in the chaotic multiplayer battles of Overwatch, he was merely a young ape with big aspirations and an affinity for peanut butter. But you wouldn’t know that from merely playing the game. You’ll find no calculated, story-driven campaign in Blizzard’s competitive team-based multiplayer shooter. Overwatch’s character-driven narrative is instead trickled elsewhere: in genuinely endearing animated shorts, character-focused one-off webcomics, and short website-bound character biographies. The latter-most isn’t uncommon within videogames, the second less so, and the first is the most uncommon of them all, the three…

News

Oxenfree’s supernatural teenage drama will also become a movie

Have you played Oxenfree yet? Probably not, given that it comes out today. Do you think you’ll play it, or just wait for the movie? Oh! I forgot to tell you—turns out there might be a movie in the works. This seems fitting given that Sean Krankel and Adam Hines, the two founders of Night School Studio and the creators of Oxenfree, put together a team comprising Telltale and Disney alumni to produce the game. The talent behind this videogame learned from movies and animation and now the result of their work will be fed back into the machine that enabled it. And,…