The words “video game addiction” elicit reactions ranging from disbelief to outright rage, and especially from gamers who feel their hobby is being unfairly criticized. Yet first-person stories of compulsive gaming exist. In The Atlantic’s new animated documentary I Was A Winner, published today, interviewees “are embodied in animated re-creations of their gaming avatars” as…
Ladykiller in a Bind creator Christine Love gives a talk at GDC about sex as a reward in games. “The problem with ‘the chase’ is that it’s one-sided,” Love explained to a room of Sexy Microtalks attendees. Love instead suggests making sex a crucial and indispensible aspect of gameplay, not just a reward. When sex…
Neo Cab is an upcoming narrative game about the ride-share gig economy in the far future where drivers compete with self-driving cars. The player must regulate protagonist Lena’s mood, displayed on her biofeed bracelet, while also balancing her Neo Cab driver rating—two things that might come in conflict when a passenger’s throwing a fit in…
Upcoming hack-and-slash RPG BloodRoots is all about its verbs: “smash, slice, crush, blast, crack, slam, burst, break, split, slit, gut, tear, gash, gouge, scoop, cut, chop, dice, hash, grind,” it promises. BloodRoots premiered yesterday at Nintendo’s indie games GDC event in San Francisco, where I met Raphael Toulouse, co-founder of developer Paper Cult, who explained…
If you’re looking for something to scratch that Inside-ish puzzle platformer itch, Stela, out later this year for Xbox and PC, just might. We gave the moody indie game a spin today for its debut at GDC and, so far, it seems tricky and beautiful.
The gaming platform Steam has cracked down on over 100 profiles memorializing the suspected shooter behind today’s tragic mosque shooting in New Zealand, which claimed the lives of 49 people. Until shortly before this article’s publication, dozens of users of the PC gaming service were blatantly offering tribute to the alleged writer behind a white…
According to five creators and sellers of aimbots and hacks who spoke with Kotaku, Apex Legends has become big business for cheat-makers. Just a week after Apex Legends’ explosive release, a cascade of cheating allegations flooded player forums and every corner of the internet where the survival shooter’s players lurk. On esports newswires, articles over…
Long-established is the purpose of friends. When you feel like you can’t do anything right, they remind you of the times you did. When you feel like the world’s against you, they loyally stand by. And when you triumph, they celebrate your successes alongside you. All of this, it turns out, it crumpled up and…
It was right about when I scrolled past the virus festeringchunk2 (1) in my Download Manager and again heard the desktop assistant Professor Helper’s appeal to guide me to a free cruise and credit report site that I realized my computer was trashed and the game Hypnospace Outlaw is a work of genius. Hypnospace Outlaw,…
The creators of Hyper Light Drifter just announced their upcoming game Solar Ash Kingdom, which appears to be a follow-up game.
Indie publisher Raw Fury just revealed a hilarious and creepy trailer for their upcoming game Atomicrops. It’s a roguelite farming simulator where players raise “ultra-GMO” crops and “defend the last farm in the post-apocolypse wasteland.” Cute!
While the majority of people who tune into Super Smash Bros. tournaments are in it for the nasty spikes and pop-offs, this fighting game’s grassroots community also has some comedy chops to offer. The best surprise from last weekend’s Smash Ultimate Summit tournament was a hilarious, Interstellar-inspired skit from some beloved pros about the difficulty…
Pokémon Go developer Niantic and WB Games just gave us our first in-depth look at the gameplay for their next augmented reality game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, slated for release sometime this year. From the screenshots and videos Niantic dropped today, it’s immediately apparent that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’s beta looks a lot better than its…
Gail Gygax and I were sitting in the living room of a lace-trimmed, flower-filled bed and breakfast in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin when she told me about the time she discovered what she believed was a plot to kill her. It was a fall day in 2013, and it had been five years since her husband…
Online, we can be whoever we want—a bulked-up soldier, a freakish banana, Sonic the Hedgehog—only until we start speaking. Over any online game’s built-in chat or Discord, our voices have the power to immediately reveal information about our geographic region, our gender, even our ethnicity. Now, a company that makes “voice skins” is trying to…
At 4 a.m. last Sunday morning, Fresno County, California resident Eric Gan heard a loud banging noise in his house. He lay awake in panic for an hour before falling back asleep, figuring he’d observe the damage in the morning. He didn’t expect to find five bullet holes in his home hours later. What he…
The only thing less fun than losing in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is getting buried. Nine of the 76 fighters in Smash Ultimate fighters have the ability to rudely push you halfway into the ground. When you’re in that state, you’re vulnerable to everything. If they’re nice, your opponent might throw out a mean-spirited taunt.…
Last night, I finally encountered what top Apex Legends players are describing as a “neat trick” or an “OP strat” but for me just resulted in a newfound hatred for doors. I hopped onto Apex Legends for a few rounds of shooty-shooty funtimes with some buddies. We’d done all right, for the most part, often…
The Super Smash Bros. Melee community is reeling after organizers for the world’s biggest fighting game tournament, EVO, announced tonight that the game would not feature at EVO 2019. The 17-year-old game has been a mainstay at fighting game tournaments for over a decade, pulling in hundreds of thousands of live viewers in its prime.…
When Georgia police arrested Thomas Cheung, a well-known Twitch streamer and World of Warcraft community figure, as part of a child sex sting two weeks ago, a common reaction among his friends, fans, and business associates was shock. If you were intimately involved in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game’s community, there’s a good chance…
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