The first season of Life Is Strange leaned on melodrama to give some stakes to its story of a time-traveling queer girl and a potentially destructive tornado. This season’s first episode also leans into schlock, but this time, the story is about racism in America. Sometimes, that melodrama made me groan. When it…
The Sims 4’s newest update added ten new, darker skin tones, as well as a new curly hair, to a game that had had not previously reflected the range of skin tones that black people and other people of color have.
Since Riot Games reworked accounts to level infinitely in League of Legends, there has been something of a race as players climb higher and higher. The leader just passed level 300 today. His method? Destroying dozens of bots.
Cuphead is a beautiful looking game with tight controls and grueling combat that culminates in game unlike many others. But as a throwback to the animation of the early 20th century, it finds its muse in a troubling past it never gets around to actually confronting.
For a certain subset of folks, speedrunning—the art of beating a video game as quickly as possible—is their window into competitive gaming. But if speedrunning Super Mario World is a 100-meter sprint, a Tales race is a marathon: superficially similar but wildly different.
In Berserk’s manga, TV series and full-length movies, the sword-wielding heroine Casca has traditionally been depicted with dark skin and short, black hair. Today, in Berserk’s second episode of the anime’s new rendition, she appeared extraordinarily pale. It’s gone over about as well as you’d expect.
Amidst the pushcart vendors selling bacon-wrapped hot-dogs, religious leaders blasting damning sermons over megaphones, and the homeless wandering around the city, there is one San Francisco fixture most people don’t know about—not even the locals. It’s not a bridge or a winding street or anything like that: I’m…
The moment that I knew graphic novel American Born Chinese was something special, and real, was in its second chapter.
Justin Timberlake recently called Madonna a "mother chucking ninja." Some people in the U.S. were upset, saying the word had racist connotations. In Japan, some folks were baffled by this controversy.
Ubisoft's latest open world game, Watch Dogs, lets players assume the role of a hacker named Aiden Pearce. Pearce uses a cellphone app to learn more about the strangers roaming Watch Dogs' version of Chicago—and some players are using this information to kill digital minorities.
Combine race, history, an upcoming PC game and some angry Reddit users and you've got a recipe for disappointment in your fellow man.
Most people seem to really like the indie PC sensation The Stanley Parable, but not everyone enjoys one of the jokes in the game. Specifically, a jokey 50s-style PSA video that shows a black child being given cigarettes and set on fire by a white guy.
At its heart, Animal Crossing is a game that's all about personal flair, customization, and expressing yourself. And now that even franchises like Pokemon allow players to choose their skin color, some are wondering: why doesn't Animal Crossing allow you to do the same thing?
No longer will Command and Conquer's militant "Global Liberation Army" feature generals of obvious Middle Eastern descent, once the game goes free-to-play. Polygon reports that Victory Games made the decision because some folks didn't like the implication that Middle Easterners were a bunch of militant terrorists.
If I learned anything this past week, it's that some people will find any context in which an ethnic slur is not an ethnic slur, or will find some justification for its use, from the name of a video game to that of a football team.
So I finished Guacamelee! and I think I am supposed to feel offended.
This eloquent Kill Screen piece ruminates on why diversity should be important to the future of video games.
This week, Japanese restaurant chain Gusto started running a new series of commercials. It features the above woman, a "handsome foreign man" as the chain's website says, and two comedians. So, what's the problem?
I enjoyed the new trailer for BioShock Infinite. It's the best look we've had in a while at a game that I've been looking forward to since 2010, when the first gameplay footage surfaced.
When Assassin's Creed III made its stunning debut a few months ago, Ubisoft proudly noted that they were using an actor with Native American heritage to bring new lead character Connor Kenway/Ratohnhaké:ton to life. In the game, Connor's parents were of British and Mohawk descent and the casting of a performer who…
