“Protagonists have had their way for too long,” declared Meg Jayanth, the writer behind 2014’s 80 Days and a contributor to last year’s Sunless Sea. At her GDC talk on Monday, Jayanth took the stage to instruct a room full of game designers to transgress one of the most fundamental conceits of their
One of the best sessions I attended at GDC this year was on the AI pathfinding of Ellie, everyone’s favorite surrogate daughter from The Last of Us. Admittedly, “AI pathfinding” sounds sedative, but actually proves to be enlightening. It turns out the way Ellie’s movements, shooting abilities, and b
The female population in World of Warcraft is a lot smaller than you think, as the game is populated with guys moonlighting as girl characters. This is the takeaway from a new study on the realm of ogres and magic pandas, which found that while 26 percent of male players chose the opposite gender fo
You might want to think twice before repeatedly running over the driver of that car you just carjacked in Grand Theft Auto Online, because the game will let other players know that you are a psycho. After installing the new High Life update, released today by Rockstar, your behaviors are officially
Take a moment and watch this micro-documentary on a 64-year-old Japanese woman who is sewing elaborate dolls, leaving them in the place of departed neighbors from her dying village in the valley of Shikoku. For the past decade, Ayano Tsukimi has been repopulating the remote village of Nagoro with ar
Claptrap was a pretty outstanding non-playable character. In the first two Borderlands, he was sort of a curt, demented WALL-E. He made you laugh. He made you cry. OK, really he just made you laugh, and doled out some side-missions. But in the new Borderlands game announced today, we get to see what
