How to design a beautiful video game

Hey, so you want to know what beauty is? What do you think it is? What is beautiful to you? Now think, what’s beautiful to me? Oh dear. We’ve happened upon a conundrum. How can I know that what’s beautiful to you is the same as what’s beautiful to me? And why would we want […]

Gamers like you and me

This next part is for you, connoisseur and journalist of games who throughout the main show has been bemoaning how none of it is any good. Now it’s time for you, wholesome game fan, to take the mantel of supporting one of the wobbling legs of the table by being enthusiastic about a flash game, a white domesticity simulator and a game where you create some sort of “stone age tribe” that is clearly an amalgam of stereotypes about indigenous peoples.

these are your icons gays – pokemon, sex and twitter

We would like to sell you your sexuality back to you as a racial power fantasy, do you accept?

The Millionth Warning – Everything Everything and Personal Apocalypse Music

It took a while for me to stop thinking of Everything Everything as the band who signal the apocalypse, and back to being just one that signals my own state of mind during what feels like an ending…

What is Battlefield 2042?

Video games are places where we restage wars, either real or imagined. Battlefield 2042 is about an imaginary war in 21 years, one that hasn’t happened yet.

Brute Forcing the Medical, Doc: Cybersleuth Puzzle Design

Where’s Karin? Where is she? She’s supposed to be here, to give me a check-up and fill these tranq darts.

I am hypnogogia

pikuniku sleeper on my beanbag. i play the picnic game on orange bean bag. it’s not that I can’t sleep. I sleep easily. but for minutes at a time. When I don’t want to sleep I fight it, but it’s not even a fight. Sleep takes hold. I don’t want to turn off. I can […]

I’ve Gone to the Lighthouse

A chain of games where loss and the lighthouse connect.

That thing to make the pain go away Didn’t work

Maybe I’ve just been in the wrong mood lately, but the games which have this sweet meanness supposedly at their core just haven’t soothed any of the existential dread that they normally do.

A is for Jump

A platformer tells us what could happen if jumping around like that was our bread and butter, and therefore opens us up to many variations on the idea.