The stunningly enduring iPhone sensation Plague Inc. may be the video game with the highest body count in the long history of the medium. I’m trying to think of another game that made me feel inadequate for laying waste to a mere 1.75 billion people. We like to pretend that Grand Theft Auto invented the…
Although the trauma of congressional hearings in the 1990s and early 2000s over video games published by studios as diverse as Nintendo and Rockstar remains fresh to many game designers, the perception of games and their players is slowly changing in the nation’s capital. On the most recent episode of my podcast, Shall We Play…
Ten years ago, I wrote one of the most wrongheaded articles of my career. In a review of 2005’s Blitz: The League for Slate, I predicted that Madden NFL’s then-new monopoly on the National Football League’s license for video game football would restore variety to the virtual gridiron. Surely the single-minded pursuit of NFL realism…
On the new episode of my podcast, Shall We Play a Game?, my co-host JJ Sutherland narrates a partial playthrough of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, the new game in a series of turn-based, cyberpunk-and-magic tactical RPGs from Harebrained Schemes. An audio Let’s Play? Of a game without spoken dialogue? It’s an experiment! What’s the point of…
It is one of the oft-old tales in the three-decade (!) history of Madden NFL: When Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, approached John Madden, the Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster, about collaborating on a new version of video game football, Madden stipulated that any game with his name on it would include…
Here’s something I wish more game designers understood: If you put an interaction in your game, I am going to interact with it. Anytime a game responds to its players, the rats—or at least this rat—are going to press the lever for more cocaine pellets. Jenova Chen, during a talk about the design of Journey…
I just played the first 30 minutes or so of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and I’m hooked. I’m also slightly—emphasis on slightly—less confused than I otherwise would have been, because I asked Jason Schreier of Kotaku and Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? to talk about why they like the Metal…
A little more than 10 years ago, not long after I quit my job to become a freelance writer, a colleague warned me that sometimes the work could be grueling and unrewarding. “I want to talk to you when you’re writing a story only for money,” he said. It took a decade, but I finally…
Sometimes I think a golden age of DLC was kicked off by The Ballad of Gay Tony for Grand Theft Auto IV. Minerva’s Den for BioShock 2, Freedom Cry for Assassin’s Creed IV, Left Behind for The Last of Us, and maybe even Burial at Sea for BioShock Infinite were all expansions that matched, or…
Are video games bad for you? Could they even kill you? That’s the kind of rhetoric we’re accustomed to hearing from cable television, not from one of the best journalists and critics who writes about games. Simon Parkin’s terrific new book, Death by Video Game, ends on just that note, however. “No, video games won’t…
Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell’s charming 2010 platformer about the inner lives of hopping geometric shapes, was an experiment in the power of storytelling to triumph over abstraction. Volume, Bithell’s new game, is also a successful experiment in abstraction, although the narrative is realistic, or realistic science fiction. This time, it’s the interactions that are…
A solitary, silent majority of teenage girls plays video games: often alone, rarely online. When teenage girls do venture online to play games—and a fair chunk of them do, quite regularly—they usually don’t speak. That’s how you go from a world where 59 percent of all girls between 13 and 17 play video games to…
As a good American I was filled with a jingoistic fervor after the triumph of the Evil Geniuses at The International, the world championship for Dota 2, this past weekend. I like video games. I like sports. But I’ve never watched esports, not a single match of Starcraft 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, Heroes…
The insult of “walking simulator,” lobbed at video games whose strongest elements are exploration, discovery, and story, misses its intended target. It conjures something more like Bennett Foddy’s QWOP. Then again, we all know what the term means by now: something like Gone Home that removes the elements of puzzling and physical challenge from an…
I own a lot of books about video games. I paid almost $125 for a used copy of Invasion of the Space Invaders, Martin Amis’s out-of-print confessional/tips-and-tricks book about the arcade age. I recently bought another out-of-print book from the 1980s, David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld, which is a fascinating account of a pianist’s…
Tom Bissell is the author of my favorite book on video games, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, which I called “the finest account yet of what it feels like to be a video game player” when I reviewed it in The New York Times. These days, he is a writer for video games like…
The rewarding but occasionally unpleasant video game Beyond Eyes has one exceptional idea: You’re blind. Or you’re Rae, rather, and Rae is blind. Because she can’t see, you can’t see. Instead, this young blind girl pieces together a visual picture of the world around her by using her other senses—mostly sound, but also smell and…
“It was the first time I had ever controlled anything on a video screen,” Ernest Cline, the author of Ready Player One—and a new book, Armada—says of playing Space Invaders as a child in 1977. “I was suddenly drunk with power.” Cline talked to former NPR producer and correspondent JJ Sutherland for Shall We Play…
I took our 5-year-old daughter to see Pixar’s Inside Out a week ago. I wish we had been able to play the new King’s Quest together instead. Like Inside Out, the new King’s Quest is close to a perfect piece of family entertainment. Unlike Inside Out, it would be far less likely to turn a…
As you have likely heard, Pixels is a bad movie, almost pleasingly stupid. After watching it last night, I had more fun retelling the plot to my wife, who had never heard of the movie, than I did sitting through Pixels. I am now going to spoil it, all of it, so that you don’t…
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