This is going to be a short article because there aren’t two sides to tell. In Nintendo’s upcoming Fire Emblem Fates, it will be possible for your avatar to bond with an NPC of the same gender during a war and eventually get married. Polygon reports that relationships between men will require the pu
There are sad nights on Twitter, nights where one scene of senseless repression bleeds into the next. There have been plenty of these nights in recent years: Tahrir Square, London, Bahrain, Ferguson. Last night, it was Baltimore. Soon it will be somewhere else. For brief moments, the phenomenon of w
Pollution is all around us, swirling invisibly and sometimes not-so-invisibly through the air in wisps of gasses and dust particles. This is a fairly disgusting consequence of post-industrial living. But Digioxide, an art project by vtol, makes environmental contamination all glitchy and pretty. Th
The digital art archivists at Rhizome have excavated and extracted files from the computer that contains Cory Arcangel’s 2005 Bomb Iraq, so now you can experience a piece of art from the creator of Super Mario Clouds in your browser. A sort of modern-day Duchamp’s Fountain, Bomb Iraq is a post-conc
Say what you will about President Obama, he is currently the world’s most prominent ambassador for the cultural legitimacy of videogames. That’s because on his recent visit to Poland, motherland of Witcher dev house CD Projekt RED, he gave a tip of the hat to everyone’s favorite action-heavy, decisi
For a brief period after the onset of the Syrian Civil War, journalist Mitch Swenson was there, hitching rides with Syrian rebels and rubbing elbows with smugglers. Then, he came home to the US to write a free-to-play adventure game about it. (Full disclosure: he has written exactly 2 articles for u
Someone needs to find Drakengard 3 director Toro Yoko and give him a hug. The fine people over at Gamechurch have transcribed a very somber and reflective interview on his views about those violent competitive kill-fests we call games, and it’s a compelling read. He finds it saddening that there ar
Finally, something liberals and conservatives can agree on! As you can see in this chart released by the Washington Post, Republicans and Democrats spend equal amounts of time playing videogames while online. This makes me kind of proud of the medium, as the only other Internet activity donkeys and
It seems Russia is not the only regime making moralistic demands on videogames that seem outrageous to our modern Western lifestyles. According to the gaijin-centric Rocket News 24, China too is getting in on the censorship train, issuing statements to Japanese developers saying that characters wear
Writing a book on the infinitely fascinating virtual world of EVE Online sounds slightly less daunting than writing a book on the history of human civilization or something. Still, one journalist is undertaking that difficult task and documenting the long history, backhanded politics, void nullsecs,
As part of his visit to Japan, the President recently kicked around the soccer ball with Honda’s Asimo robot at a science museum in Tokyo. Let me tell you, there are few things stranger than seeing a very athletic Commander in Chief being subjected to the superior ball-handling skills of a humanoid
When we heard that China was loosening its reigns and allowing gaming consoles in the country, we figured there would be some stipulations, with everything we know about the extreme censorship behind the so-called Great Firewall. Well, we were right. The Shanghai government has released some guidel
