The Game Design of Severance
Ben Stiller's Severance uses game design principles to explore information, identity, and workplace control through the lens of split personalities and corporate mystery.
The Game Design of Everyday Things
Is Gerrymandering Cheating or Just A Good Strat?
American democracy operates like a complex board game where the rules keep changing, cheating is normalized, and spoilsports threaten the entire system.
How Stephen Curry is changing the game design of basketball
How do you solve a problem like basketball pro Stephen Curry—the guy breaking records for consistently scoring three-pointers? Note that the question here is not how to defend Curry. That’s a problem for other people, and we wish them the best of luck with that! But how do you write about a player w
The game design of the Hunger Games
Calling the design of the Hunger Games terrible is kind of missing the point, right? There’s no fairness intended, no logic, no rules. The “gamemakers” are industrial-scale butchers, striking a balance between mass execution and mass execution that’s fun to watch. They’re games only in the bread-and
Studio Ghibli’s Spaces of Escape and Longing
The spaces we never occupy haunt us the most
With eXistenZ, Cronenberg created the only videogame movie we’ll ever need
Game on, and in, eXistenZ.
Exploring the cramped, beautiful cinematography of survival horror
The hidden pleasures of “bad movies.”
The Tracking Shot and Action Games
Daredevil, True Detective, and the videogame-tension of the long-shot.
Big Hero 6, the Companion Cube, and the pathos of the posthuman sidekick
The escort mission comes to Hollywood
An Ode to an Empty Game Gear
A look back at games in film, from Surf Ninjas to Boyhood
The game-like films of David Lynch
To engage with David Lynch films is to undertake a puzzle.
The game design of monarchies
Gating and the eighteenth century court.
The Game Design of Everyday Things: To Shape the Future
Our design columnist Tom Armitage on why landscape gardening is a better analogy than architecture for videogames—a discipline about guiding the player without access to a rulebook.
The Game Design of Everyday Things: Everyday Gaming
The little things that make up our daily routine became so because of good design. And we love them because they’re simple, inobstrusive and convenient. Likewise, the rise of social and mobile gaming have made videogames more accessible, despite the design drawbacks which still plague the genres. To
The Game Design of Everyday Things: Buttons
What’s on a button? In this new column, Tom Armitage takes a look at the things we press—whether on a city bus, a podium, or a Nintendo controller.