Over the past few months we’ve written about the rise of so-called “esports”, from the “athletes”, to the regulators, to the technology that has allowed a boom in remote viewership. It’s a nascent culture, to be sure, with its own tropes and mores and beliefs, and as such it seems ripe for a well-ob
We – and many other outlets – just named an indie game as our finest of 2012. If anything, it looks like this year may bring an even richer crop of games made by small and independent studios. From the Braid followup The Witness to the years-in-the-anticipating group heist coop game Monaco, to the r
Last fall we interviewed Miriam Bellard, one half of the duo behind Seduce Me, the indie converse-and-get-perverse game that Steam yanked from Greenlight for indecency. Speaking to Bellard, I realized that the game wasn’t a cash grab or a stunt; she legitimately wants to address what they perceive a
Rami Ismail, of Super Crate Box developer Vlambeer, forecasted the impact of the Ouya to the Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera.
These graphs, from a larger paper done by Mike Zuurman of Xentax, show a dramatic decrease in the number of games released since 2009. As the author notes, this may be due to decreased reporting by gamers (entries at MG are user-generated), because it doesn’t seem to square that the real number of g
As you have no doubt been told by now, there are AT LEAST two different kinds of gamers: core (slobbering, mouth-breathing tweens, teens) and casual (moms, people who put games in the same category as toasters). Well, it has started to strike some folks that this binary is not particularly subtle, n
Though created for different mediums and concerning totally different worlds, Half-Life and Jurassic Park share an overarching theme, one at least as old as Mary Shelley: experimental science, taken too far, can have enormous destructive power. Now, they share something else: an engine. The fan-made
If you are a videogame nerd you will love Well Played. And When I say nerd, I don’t mean everybody who plays videogame players, but those who enjoy exploring the esoteric realm of videogame study (ludologists and narratologists, you know who you are). A description of the journal from their website