Kate Cox

What Video Games Teach Us About Marriage

Roughly two million couples in the United States get married each year, give or take a hundred thousand. Every pair does it for their own reasons, from the idea of a fairy tale happily-ever-after to the decidedly more prosaic need to share health insurance costs. It’s a big decision, coming with a number of legally…

Where Video Games And Real Military Training Meet

Analyst PW Singer, of the Brookings Institution, has written several books examining how warfare and the military operate in the 21st century. He’s previously written on the intersection of combat and entertainment. In this video for Big Think, Singer discusses the intersection between the real-life military and the generation of soldiers who grew up on…

This Alternate Reality Game Lets Players Control Real People

There are plenty of games out there that posit alternate realities. Upcoming MMO The Secret World bases its whole plot around the idea, while piles of other games have at some point integrated themselves into the real world, often for marketing purposes. But one ARG is taking the premise of games like Missing: Since January…

Mass Effect 3‘s Multiplayer Got Me To Trade My Cynicism for Addiction

I spend a lot of time with the quarian lately; she’s become my favorite. Though if I’m being strictly honest, she’s actually the third quarian. The first two long since reached the limits of their potential with me, and are now off fighting some other battles elsewhere in the galaxy. It’s the Mass Effect 3…

MTV Social Game Makes Election Season a Competition For Players, Not Just Candidates

MTV has been active in encouraging younger voters to get to the polls for well over 20 years. In 1992 they brought the “Choose or Lose” campaign to the airwaves, and in the decades since they have frequently partnered with nonprofit Rock the Vote to air initiatives encouraging 18-24 year-old voters to get to the…

Even The Library of Congress Has a Hard Time Preserving Old Games

Game designers and enthusiasts have, for many years, faced the challenges of preserving history in a digital medium. Source code and original designs for a project get lost over time, or data storage methods change and degrade. Gamers, though, aren’t the only ones facing those challenges. Professional preservationists have their hands full trying to maintain…

MIT Students Turn Campus Building Into Playable Tetris Game

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a long (long) history of student “hacks,” harmless but clever pranks. Several tend to show up in any given year. Previous reasonably recent favorites (of mine) include turning a building into The One Ring, flying Nyan Cat through a lobby, and an upside-down lounge The students’ newest adventure brought…

Nearly 40% Of The US Population Enjoys Free-To-Play Games, And Bunches Of Them Pay

Free-to-play games are all the rage here in 2012. With MMOs, social games, and mobile games leading the way, some analysts see the model as the inevitable wave of the future across genres. And given how very well freemium games seem to be doing, they might just be right. The NPD analyst group’s newest report…

Four-Year-Old Boy Kills His Father After Not Getting a PlayStation

A preschool-aged boy in Saudi Arabia reportedly fatally shot his father this weekend because of a PlayStation. The AFP reports that according to Arabic-language press, the boy, about four-and-a-half years old, had asked his father to buy him a PlayStation of some variety. When his father returned without a Sony device in hand, the child…

This Video Game Actually Treats Teenagers’ Depression

Usually when “video games” and “depression” show up in a sentence together, there’s a research team trying to prove that playing video games causes or at least correlates with depression, especially in kids and teens. This time, however, the news is much more positive: at least one video game out there, it seems, can actually…

EA Declares Every Game They Make Will Have a Multiplatform “Online Universe” Of Its Own

Do you want to be able to connect to your Battlefield, Need For Speed, and Sims, games at all times? Do you want to be leveling up skills in FIFA from work, or contemplating Medal of Honor weapons on your commute? EA certainly wants you to, and plans to make it happen. Eurogamer reports that…

Gabe Newell Says Valve-Apple Meeting Didn’t Happen

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Valve head Gabe Newell did not actually meet last week as rumored, according to a new podcast interview with Newell. He squashed the week-old rumor in an interview with the fine folks at Seven Day Cooldown, who were kind enough to let us in on some early excerpts from the…

Gamers Spend Over $1 Billion Per Year On Power When Not Even Using Their Consoles

Staying current on gaming isn’t cheap. The consoles themselves cost about $300, and new retail games launch at $60. Even for a player who avoids DLC and only buys year-old or used games, the costs add up. But what’s really costing gamers? The electric bills. Games consoles are known power hogs, but a recently published…

DiRT, Bodycount Developer Codemasters Shifts Exclusively to Racing Games

The last few years have been rough for British game developer and publisher Codemasters. Despite a lengthy and varied history going back to the 1980s, their more recent games have seen mixed success. Last year, after their first-person shooter Bodycount launched to decidedly mixed reviews, and admist accusations of unlawful working conditions, Codemasters shut down…

From Lineage to Journey, White House Games Guru Wants to Know What Makes Players Tick

We know video games are big in pop culture: millions of us, of all ages, play them every day. We know they’re big in business: the video game industry in the United States alone is worth over $25 billion annually, to say nothing of the rest of the world. And it seems that the United…

Why I Hope Dragon Age 3 Is A Lot Like Dragon Age 2

BioWare’s Dragon Age franchise, like its science fiction spiritual sibling Mass Effect, creates a great deal of passion among its fans. And also like its sci-fi sib, the Dragon Age games attract an enormous amount of controversy and dissent among those same fans. Dragon Age: Origins and its DLC, including the Awakening expansion, were a…

You Can Make Anything You Can Imagine With LEGO. Even a PC.

One case modder out there in the world has finally found a use, a true purpose, for the featureless square “houses” and “castles” young me inevitably built (and tore down) from my LEGO collection. This particular PC is, indeed, made of LEGO bricks. Sure, the motherboard and processor and fans and the rest aren’t made…

Lego PC Gallery

Why This Studio Will Never Work With Nintendo Again

Microsoft has Xbox Live; Sony has the PlayStation Network. Nintendo technically has WiiWare, but their download service hasn’t enjoyed the same breadth of offerings or popularity as other digital download services. And yet, the country is full of homes where Wii hardware can be found. So what gives? WiiWare distribution, it seems, just isn’t worth…

My Draw Something Disaster, Averted by a Clever Stranger

He was a stranger. I knew his first name, and he mine, but that was the extent of our acquaintance. And yet, he and I were perfectly in sync. I knew his every move. He knew mine. And neither of us ever, ever doubted the other, or had to work to understand each other. We…