If you think girl games matter, help us champion them in our magazine by backing our Kickstarter. /// For generations of women, Judy Blume’s novels are a potent symbol. To the women that read her books in the ‘70s and ‘80s they were symbols of rebellion, offering knowledge that was forbidden by adul
After the release of Star Wars in May of 1977, the Kenner toy company could not make enough action figures to meet the demands of an eager consumer base. Even into the Christmas season, the company still had inadequate stock, so Kenner instead sold people an “Early Bird Certificate Package”—an empty
If you want more in depth interviews like these, support us on Kickstarter! // Few games have captured the public imagination like No Man’s Sky. Due out in June 2016, the game promises an entire universe to explore: some 18 quintillion planets, which would take some 600 billion hours for players to
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. // The Mad Max franchise is unique. Not only does it depict a very different apocalypse than the zombie-ridden radioactive tragedies we’re used to, but it also stands as a distinctly seminal Australian film in an age where America dominates t
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. // This past August, the latest version of Pac-Man reached #1 on the charts in Japan. This may not sound surprising. Until one considers that Pac-Man 256 is a touch-based mobile game made by a small independent studio from Melbourne, Australi
Western depictions of mental illness often tend toward the dramatic. Shows like House often showcase rare disorders or extreme versions of a diagnosis when they mention mental illness at all: the schizophrenic woman who sees fire where there isn’t any, a mute patient who is able to speak after one r
It’s been a rough ride for Pluto ever since it was demoted in 2006 by the no-good scientists who deemed it unworthy of the proper “planet” classification. It lost its confidence, became altogether uninterested in life, and has been revolving in its own sorrow ever since. After the demotion, all of P
Calling the design of the Hunger Games terrible is kind of missing the point, right? There’s no fairness intended, no logic, no rules. The “gamemakers” are industrial-scale butchers, striking a balance between mass execution and mass execution that’s fun to watch. They’re games only in the bread-and
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. A month before the December 18 release of the seventh Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, fans can get their fix of light sabers, starfighters and wookies in a galaxy far, far away inside EA DICE’s online shooter game, Star Wars: Battlefront.
I don’t remember much from Jeen-Shang Lin’s Soil Mechanics class. Beyond a vague inkling of his whiteboard doodles and that time he paused mid-lecture to remark on my unexpected presence, most of it remains a formula-laden blur. Except for the one time he mentioned Pittsburgh’s North Shore Connector
The First World War is often referred to as The Great War, due to its immense scope, as it incited all the world’s national powers and resulted in a devastating death toll. Set within this war is the tabletop game The Grizzled, which makes no attempt to capture such scale, and instead hones in on a
Support print media in the modern world by backing us on Kickstarter If you want a sense of the difference between the worlds of paper media and videogames, color is the best place to start. In print, as we learn in kindergarten, there are three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—and you get all t
If you liked what you read, why not back us on Kickstarter? Early last Friday, just before the opening remarks of “Tribeca Games Presents: The Craft and Creative of League of Legends,” I sat next to a young man named Will, who told me he had come all the way from Daytona Beach, Florida. I asked him
Going fast is easy—the challenge is in reacting to the unwritten near-future while maintaining environmental awareness to avoid running into shit. For all the risks to life and limb, the human brain and body craves the thrill of speed. As such, even relatively primitive virtualized acceleration titi
I remember reading once that a good fiction writer will paint images in your mind. This is vital to the craft; not just stating “a tree” so readers imagine a tree, but describing it so that this is uniquely a tree of your creation, one that will be remembered with intense detail if, say, referenced
Videogames don’t like people. Of that, the overwhelming amount of fantasy, war and sci-fi games, the ones set around goblins, androids and super-soldiers—the ones patently uninterested in real human beings—are proof enough. But even when games profess an interest in personhood and human experience t
A computer doesn’t forget, it deletes. Its memories do not drop off the candle’s wick. Everything discarded is done so by some purpose, the will of the user or an overloaded failure of the hardware. People’s sense of memory can be more convenient; we can amplify the emotions of one moment to captiva
Downwell might be a perfect game title. Not only is it short and pithy, but it serves as a perfect summation for what developer Ojiro Fumoto has created. It’s a game in which a young boy is continuously falling down a well, avoiding enemies and purchasing upgrades along the way. But it’s not a hopel
In the battle of Bieber and One Direction, everyone wins. Clayton Purdom (CP): David, defend One Direction. David Rudin (DR): I’ll get to One Direction, I promise, but first I want to discuss Backstreet Boys and Take That, because no boy band really exists in a vacuum. We like to imagine them as suc
For more in-depth game writing, back our Kickstarter! Here comes the trashman! He’s strutting down the highway in his scrap metal suit, tin cans rattling up and down its legs, soda bottles and glue dispensers falling out the cracks between its plates, cereal boxes bobbling on the tips of his metal f
“The sequel no one asked for,” begins one user review of Uriel’s Chasm 2: את on Steam. It’s a solid thumbs-down verdict and it sums up the general sentiment surrounding the sequel to one of Steam’s most hated games. Uriel’s Chasm has around 2,500 user reviews and not even a fifth of them are positiv
The common conceit associated with virtual reality filmmaking is that the technology gives you a profound insight into the lives of others. More spatial depth, the theory goes, is correlated with more emotional depth. Welcome to the magical empathy machine! This sort of technological determinism is
It’s a gorgeous evening in Void & Meddler’s synth-wave nightscape. The downtempo music is pulsing, rain is falling, and I’m guiding my protagonist Fyn through a market of vibrant neofuturistic goods. I click on some fish, stacked near a bobbing robot merchant. “No, just no,” Fyn tells me. I click on
