There are the kind of games like Call of Duty, which do little to spark serious contemplation about morality or violence. This is the norm. Text games, however, may have a little more insight than your standard AAA fare. Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is filled with death, no matter how carefully you plan or hard you try. Sometimes you make mistakes and other times it’s simply out of your control. XCOM‘s Facebook pages immortalizes the fallen. One of the achievements of the game is the pang of guilt when one of your soldiers d
Ever wonder what kind of internal insight your favorite NES games reveal? John Peck at McSweeney’s will tell you: Metroid: You have killed a mosquito with hairspray. Duck Tales: You have spelled out “BOOBS” with Alpha-Bits. Contra: You have wet the bed exactly twice: once as a child, once as an adul
In an interview with Wired, Ken Levine explained the box art of Bioshock Infinite as a means of courting the untapped segments of the market. Specifically: “We went and did a tour… around to a bunch of, like, frathouses and places like that. People who were gamers. Not people who read IGN. And [we]
I am 33.23 seconds into Hexagonest. It’s far and away my best performace in Super Hexagon. I’m spinning in circles and line are flying at me from every direction. I’m tapping furiously and nothing seems like it can contain me. I am playing like an absolute hero. I wish somebody was watching because
Dark Souls 2 has been announced. I thought I would have been giddy with excitement, but I’m not. I love Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. They are some of the best games ever made, but playing one is an ordeal. I would hyperbolically equate it to climbing Mount Everest: worth it in every respect and a p
A lot has been said about games ability to grab our attention. For some they can be a little too effective in this regard (ahem). But if you have a disability, or learning issues, it may be the only medium that you can really plug into, as it were. A step-father made a videogame with some educationa
2012 is almost over and while the “best of” videogame lists are soon to come a reflection on the general trends of the medium are in order. Michael Abbot: The games of 2012 suggest that designers are discovering and exploiting more channels of communication with players. In the past, these efforts h