Essay

When your game breaks all the time, will you give up or will you play along? We go looking for guts and glitches in the Wild West.

Yeah, we did!

A conceptual game about “real interaction” has players burning, electrocuting, and whipping each other. When they are finished, they may find Painstation was not the game they signed off on.

Some fear heights; others, going outside. Jason Johnson is afraid of fish, which makes even the most innocent and childproof videogames horrible things.

If the cinema has insight to offer games, perhaps it lies not in storytelling, but in the act of watching. Lyndsey Edelman wonders why her transition from passive to active viewer is so underappreciated and terrifying.