"Punk, originality, and videogames": a conversation with Friendzone
Bringing videogames and anime to hip-hop.
Do not stop and do not think while playing Strawberry Cubes
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. STRAWBERRY CUBES (PC) BY LOREN SCHMIDT Strawberry Cubes is a platformer that gives you a toolset instead of a jump button. You already know too much. For this is a game that works by keeping
Shut up, Her Story
Her Story might be a good videogame, but it’s the worst kind of crime fiction.
Soundself returns from the wilds, trippy as ever
Soundself returns from the wilds, trippy as ever
Enough with the post-apocalypse. What about the pre-apocalypse?
A lot of games are about saving the world, but Eco might actually do it.
Oh right, so that’s what you do in No Man’s Sky
“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
Magic Mike XXL and the human side of ogling meaty man bits
Magic Mike, John Marston, and butts butts butts.
Finally, a typeface for all the words governments never say about surveillance
Surveillance has proven to be good fodder for games. In Touch Tone, a fictional yet fathomable government has deputized its citizenry to spy on their peers by solving puzzles and decoding encryption keys and codes to access private data. Nothing to Hide applies the logic to your every movement. It i
The new Terminator movie is what happens when old people get scared of technology
Baby boomers versus wearables. With explosions.
When a ten-second journey through the apocalypse feels like a lifetime
If you’ve ever fallen before, you know firsthand that time is relative. You could be looking at your watch one minute—the second hand ticking onward in steady calculation—and then, in the next, you could be bending time and space as your limbs fly through the air. When you lose control of your body,
Swipe right for Pin-Pon, the game that turns Tinder into a psychedelic gymnasium
The bizarre merger of dating and technology.
Going to Hell: DOOM II and the Descent Into Chaos
DOOM II didn’t iterate on DOOM—it opposed it
Let The Endless Cylinder roll over you with its gorgeously surreal alienscape
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
The economics of Bloodborne; or, why you keep clocking into Destiny
The Bloodborne economy values its workers.
Kill Screen is hiring a sales associate
Love games? Able to spot opportunities for fun out in the world? Want to work at a cool media company full of smart, excited people? Well, you’re in luck: Kill Screen is looking to hire a sales associate. We’re looking for someone young, passionate about games as culture, and looking to help grow a
A videogame that captures a son’s final moments with his dying father
Stephen Clark on making a game about his father’s final months battling ALS.
What is #DeepDream and why is everyone getting so weird with it?
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
The frenetic past and bright future of the bullet hell shooter
Danmaku games have proven uniquely resilient.
How a smartphone game is helping to fight against malaria in Kenya
There are games that purport to have life-and-death stakes, and then there are games that are actual lifesavers. Mosquito Hood falls into the latter category. The game, which was first released by Kenya’s Momentum Core in 2013, challenged players to swat pesky mosquitos in progressively more difficu
There is one problem with every wrestling game ever made
Wrestling is fake. Its games aren’t fake enough.
Come duel your friends to Bach’s concertos this Wednesday
Johann Sebastian Joust, Petanque, and drinks in the financial district.
Unexpected videogame adverts celebrate women, fashion, and dance
A more fiercely feminine type of game marketing.
Chilling art installation turns drone strike fatalities into a shopping bill
This is artist Jonathan Fletcher Moore’s Artificial Killing Machine. Unlike other artificial killing machines—machine guns, shotguns, rifles, swords, switchblades, kitchen knives, tanks, battlefield range ballistic missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, medium-range ballistic missiles, intermedia
eSports are gaining in popularity, but do the games support it?
Imperfect games and perfected strategies may create an esports bubble.
Campo Santo demonstrates how NOT to end an E3 trailer
Did you catch Firewatch‘s E3 trailer? Well, after some serene shots of the Wyoming national park—which will be the exploration game’s main setting—the trailer ends on a rather tense note. Some suspicious activity has spooked the park rangers, protagonist Henry and his walkie-talkie companion Delilah