Essay
Dealing With Urban Decay
The raw materials of New Marais, the setting of Infamous 2 based on New Orleans, tell a story both longer and more pressing than their digital textures suggest. Nora Khan climbs through its multilayered history.
Essay
Essay
Black Undead Damnation
Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption is the latest videogame to host an urban legend. A house on a hill is said to be haunted—in reality—so we went ghost hunting.
Essay
Track Shots
Our favorite Trials Evolution user-created levels have some unexpected themes in common.
Essay
Grounds for Play
Why are playgrounds still so important in the digital age? We talk with some of New York’s leading playground architects and designers about their work and the past and future impact of public play on urban space.
Essay
Altered Appreciation
Land art is an appreciation of earthy materials churned into something new. Videogames—mechanical, artificial and synthetic—can gain something from the principles behind this form of art. Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP leads the way—but there are some foothills along the trek.
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Plants vs. Plants
In PopCap’s tower defense game, lively plants defeat a zombie horde. We asked a horticulture expert how real plants grapple with nature in uncannily similar ways.
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Too Little, Too Late
Environmental simulation Fate of the World lets you advance the world, only to end up destroying it. Filipe Salgado wonders why futility leads to such persistence.
Essay
Infected Zones
The little-known Russian videogame Pathologic offers a harrowing apology for environmental abuse, and asks some difficult questions about how we relate to the world.
Essay
Behind Every Great Pixel
Every hero needs a helping hand. Is it strange that in videogames, that hand is usually female and invisible?
Essay
Do It Differently
Darshana Jayemanne on why it’s time to stop criticizing—and celebrating—videogames for being nonlinear. It turns out the medium’s blessing and its curse is neither unique nor especially new.
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Loot and Libraries
What games and players can learn from System Shock 2, and why the most effective videogame story may be an incomplete one.
Essay
Classic Calvino
When in doubt, look to Italo Calvino’s systematic writings about literature and the imagination. We use one of his essays to speculate on the creation of a gaming canon.