Having recently earned front page status on Reddit, I Have No Idea What I’m Doing: The Game is a virtual reality mosh pit simulator gone wrong, or so its creator Sos Sosowski claims. In it, hordes of creepy, slightly gelatinous men with no respect for personal space try to swarm you, leaving you awk
It must be difficult for a game made on 89-year-old hardware to stand out anywhere, let alone at a conference brimming with excitement over upcoming virtual reality headsets like PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive—it wouldn’t help that this game assigns the player with a menial day job that’s now handl
The history of videogames maps directly onto the history of computation. At least, that’s how speakers cast it at GDC this year. Chelsea Howe, Chris Crawford, Dave Jones, Graeme Devine, Ken Lobb, Lori Cole, Luke Muscat, Palmer Luckey, Phil Harrison, Raph Koster, Seth Killian, and Tim Schafer (phew)
By far the most innocent game with the smuttiest implications at GDC this year was the alternative controller entry entitled Planet Licker. In the game’s fiction, you are a monster who eats planets made of popsicles. As the player IRL, you are also a popsicle-licking monster of sorts, only instead o
The term “rhythm game” might call to mind images of a virtual band either slaying or bombing in front of a crowd. Usually, you’re cast as a musician strumming a fake guitar or a fake drum kit to the demands of a note highway, songs turned into timely button presses. Thumper throws all that shit out
There’s something intoxicating about long-distance train journeys. I think it has to do with the fact that, these days, it’s non-standard. It feels detached from the cattle-like experience of air travel: passengers enjoy a luxurious amount of legroom, there are private rooms with bunk beds, closing
“Protagonists have had their way for too long,” declared Meg Jayanth, the writer behind 2014’s 80 Days and a contributor to last year’s Sunless Sea. At her GDC talk on Monday, Jayanth took the stage to instruct a room full of game designers to transgress one of the most fundamental conceits of their
Yu Suzuki is scheduled to give a postmortem of Shenmue at the next Game Developers Conference in March. PlayStation 4 mastermind Mark Cerny will be translating for Suzuki. These postmortems are normally fascinating: developers cut like a flaming hot sword through the typical piles of marketing bulls
The NASA session at G.D.C., We Are The Space Invaders, came at the end of a long day. Everyone looked exhausted, the woman sitting next to me had her shoes off, and more than a few chairs were free. You could almost here a collective sigh as the two presenters, Victor Luo and Jeff Norris of the NASA
Far Cry 3, with its torture scenes and male-and-male rape and its leading millennial star named Jason Brody, is positioned as a work of cultural critique, a meta-commentary on the addictive gameplay systems and unsightly tropes found in popular shooter videogames. We’ve written about that before. Bu
