Final Fantasy draws a line between games and high fashion

Fashion is basically LARPing at scale. You decide on an identity to take on for the next few hours—a functional person, a grown up, someone loveable, Matt Bomer’s character on White Collar—and then you give it the old college try. Results may vary. The connection between LARPing and fashion is appar

The Dualism and Morality of “Golden Sun”

My father always says there are two sides to every story. There’s one party’s side, the opposing party’s side, and then the truth tends to fall somewhere in the middle. Most videogames, however, exist in a vacuum of storytelling, where the player takes control of a set of heroes out to destroy a set

Drum machine manufacturer offers a more sensible take on Guitar Hero

TR-REC is basically Guitar Hero by another name, and it seems unlikely that any of the parties involved could object too strenuously to this characterization. The game is an exercise in conflating genres and media forms. The self-described “pattern sequencing game” is made by Roland, a company more

A model for referencing videogames in literature

Generally when literature alludes to other media—Facebook, texting, film, the song “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train—my first reaction is to cringe. At its worst these mentions feel unnatural, lazy—the author’s gawky attempt to connect to the modern world or to an artistic tradition by simply referencing

Turning Fallout 4’s world into 1950s-style animations

If you’ve played last year’s Fallout 4, you’ve doubtless seen the series of animated shorts that play upon starting the game up. Black-and-white and with scratchy audio, these videos turned the post-apocalyptic Boston wasteland of Fallout 4 into a comedic, 1950s-style cartoon. (If you haven’t seen t