It took 15 years for the Pokémon series to start looking inwardly at itself and question its own ethics. By then, it comprised videogames, anime, trading cards, toys, a whole damn franchise that might—it just might—have advocated slavery and/or animal blood sports. This isn’t meant to be one of thos
Jack Torrance. Loving father. Adoring husband. Friendly handyman. Driven absolutely psychotic by either a supreme and enduring boredom or the whispers of murderous ghosts (you decide!). What happened Jack? At the start of The Shining he’s all smiles and strolls as he accepts the position of janitor
The world is an infinite musical instrument. This is the prevailing idea across the interactive documentary Soundhunters. And it doesn’t mean in the way as I understood it in my college days, drumming out beats onto desk corners with my fingers; it’s less deliberate than that. The idea is to listen
“So what do you actually do?” It’s worrying that this has been the biggest question surrounding No Man’s Sky for the duration of its public existence. At the same time, that mystery is what has probably kept us engaged for the past two years. Every time one of its features is outlined it’s like a ma
Until now, Carlos Bordeu has only been known as the ‘C’ in ACE Team. He’s about to become much more. No longer will he be the letter squished between his brothers Andres and Edmundo in the title of the Chilean videogame studio they founded together. Carlos has revealed that he’s working on a persona
To answer your question, Mr. Dick, yes, androids do dream of electric sheep. Or, at least, artificial intelligence does. And it’s less sheep and more like an insectoid nightmare of sheep as seen through a faint kaleidoscopic filter. We are fascinated and disturbed, Mr. Dick, but the future isn’t qui
How do you build a church for an atheist? Who or what, exactly, would an atheist be looking to worship at a church made for them? These are null questions as, by definition, an atheist has no need for a church, at least not for prayer and sermons. It’s a shame, really, as while the routine of Sunday
If you’re watching this year’s Wimbledon (you know, the tennis) how can you be sure that you’re feeling the right emotions at the right time? It’s alright, don’t panic, apparently this is a common problem that the event’s car sponsor Jaguar has tackled with a website that will tell you exactly how t
Mark Johns is chasing a ghost. This is what he tells me. It’s not quite the truth. The spectral quality of this “ghost” isn’t immateriality; interfacing with it isn’t a problem, Johns has done that thousands of times. The hard bit, and the bit he’s after, is understanding it. The ghost is actually S
Grand Theft Auto V is an ugly mirror held up to modern-day America, and it’s plenty dark as it is, thanks. But Danish photographer Morten Rockford Ravn has taken to capturing the game’s inherent “existential despair” in striking black-and-white snapshots with the in-game camera phone. It’s an ongoin
Harmonix reckons it’s time for the music visualizer to go about a big change. That’s probably about right. For an electronic art that’s almost as old as videogames it’s a wonder how it’s managed to remain so close to its roots in abstract shape-making. Did you know that the first commercial electron
“When there’s an arch you want to go under it, right? That’s the kind of game I wanted to make.” When Shigeru Miyamoto delivers lines like that no one knows what he means. Not at first. He may be the famed designer of many of Nintendo’s most successful videogames from the past 35 years but Miyamoto
Eitr‘s red-headed Shield Maiden is justifiably pissed off after having her destiny figuratively scribbled over in crayon by the mischievous god Loki. He’s a trickster god, a god of infant-worthy trouble, and Loki is the easiest of the Norse gods to hate. He gives birth to eight-legged horses and fat
If you’re not busy snapping chest bones in Doom 4 once it’s out you can snap together your own maps and game modes. And let’s be clear: “snap” is apparently the keyword here. It alludes to the apparent accessibility of the game’s SnapMap feature. The boast from Doom 4‘s executive producer Marty Stra
If you have a child, do not take them on vacation to the cold Cornwall coasts. It is a place of terror. Dark rugged waves that foam at the mouth aggressively pound steep rocks to a deafening chorus. On the wet sand lies the receding tide’s victims: purple blobs of dead jellyfish, scattered like alie
The best poetry alludes to a kind of magic. After all, as one classic tweet had us recall, the act of reading is to “stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.” It seems a bizarre activity when worded as such, but it’s the truth, as the power of finely tuned stanzas is e
What will you do when the robots take your job? It’s only a matter of time until we’re all melted down and shoveled into vats as our flesh becomes a more valuable resource than our labor. So it’s about time you start planning ahead for your (f)unemployment. Your options are severely limited to 1) le
