For the once seemingly-infinite British Empire, World War I, in spite of victory, was a low moment for its internal narrative, a blow to its aristocracy’s ability to point to God and crown as a good enough rallying cry for its soldiers. Though Britain had fought plenty of wars before, […] Read More

Though it is often framed in the West as a distant doomsday event, the effects of climate change are not merely some future threat. For many, particularly the most marginalized and vulnerable among us, it has long since arrived and wrought its havoc. The residents of Puerto Rico continue to […] Read More

I’ve been listening to Mortal Podkast, a new podcast by comedy writer, Ben Mekler, where he invites on various writers and comedians (many of whom having only a passing familiarity with the series) and recounts the astoundingly complex and lengthy minutiae of Mortal Kombat lore. Each episode features a new […] Read More

When I was in high school, I assumed I’d be into anime forever. I was the president of our small anime club, I drew anime characters in the margins of notebooks and built GeoCities web pages devoted to my favorite characters. I even planned on and ultimately wound up taking […] Read More

The dog, as loving and adorable as it is born, doesn’t always remain that way. Like humans, dogs can be shaped into awful things, turned into tools of oppression. Like humans, this is largely because they crave leadership, someone to tell them what to do and how to behave. So […] Read More

That those who publish and develop games tend to favor post-apocalyptic settings is well known and well covered. It makes easy sense from a production viewpoint: far fewer bothersome computer people to design, animate and load with semi-realistic voice lines; simpler, less morally compromising enemies to pit the player against […] Read More

Outside of freelance writing, the majority of my time is spent animating graphics for the screen. This line of work includes me in the sweeping job categorization known as the arts. But I never attended art school. Instead, I went to a small liberal arts college in Ohio. My film […] Read More

In addition to a smattering of other activities, I spend a good chunk of my day thinking and writing about videogames. I do so partly because if I wasn’t writing about games, I would definitely still be playing them. This is because, for the most part, I find games to […] Read More

Unlike the book it’s based on, which is a perfectly serviceable airport novel, voiced with the forced gruffness of a recently divorced dad who’s just started going to the gym again, The Snowman is a nearly unwatchable two hours of glum A-listers shuffling around stark, snowy landscapes, delivering their stilted lines with unintentional hilarity. It’s irredeemably bad and the reasons why will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has also played a David Cage game.

While the Overcooked games are brightly lit, Playmobil-shaped experiences that don’t share an obvious connection with We the Animal’sdark interpersonal themes, the demanding cooperative play that it requires can sometimes surface familiar emotional responses in the friends or lovers who find themselves playing the game together.

Once the actual matches begin, and the players are transformed from diminutive nerds to 30-foot-high projections of heroic titans, clashing together over the crowd’s joyful uproar, I feel myself getting swept up with the excitement and momentum of the event. Though the entirety of the action is contained within a singular screen, and though there is a dearth of flesh and blood players sweating it out on the court, these grand finals still manage to feel unmistakably like a legitimate sporting event.

A lot of formative cyberpunk stories, from Gibson’s Neuromancer to Stephenson’s Snow Crash, take place in megacities, in the rain-soaked gutters between glistening high rises. They also tend to feature solitary, nihilistic main characters who, in clear reflection of their authors, are mostly white men.

Despite all of this bombast, the game has plenty of quiet moments too. The places where these moments occur are those where humanity still has enough of a foothold to allow for the normal activities of daily life: the farm and the rebuilt tower. There, as I rustle through my inventory, dismantling weapons and selecting costume shaders, I overhear conversations between regular people about a variety of mundane, if illuminating subjects.

In 1956, Isaac Asimov wrote “The Last Question,” a short story in which humanity develops an increasingly powerful and complex artificial intelligence and uses it to expand throughout the universe. At the outset of each new generation, the AI is asked to help humanity figure out how to outlast the […] Read More

Videogames love a good, cinematic, Normandy beach landing scenario. What could be more swiftly impactful or immediately dramatic than landing on a contested patch of land in the heat of pitched battle, pouring out of your troop transports under heavy fire as some superior barks at you from the rear […] Read More

The first thing I do after downloading the new “Discovery Mode” for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which lets you non-violently explore the culture, people and architecture of Ptolemaic Egypt, is head directly south in search of Nubia. Contemporary Western recollection of Egypt remains myopically centered on its massive pyramids and god-like […] Read More

Whenever I spend time with my mom in Tunisia, where she lives, family gatherings tend to go a certain way. We’ll be drinking tea at a sidewalk cafe, or sitting down at an aunt’s table for dinner, and the family will be chatting away in Arabic, while I sit mutely […] Read More

PaRappa the Rapper came out for the PlayStation when I was thirteen years old. Amidst a field of racing games, Street Fighter iterations and low-poly stealth men came this totally outlandish genre-defining game fronted by a cartoon dog in baggie jeans and hi-tops. The norm in games then, and now, was violence and […] Read More

Playing as the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Origins, Bayek of Siwa, I spend most of the game liberally stabbing bad guys on a quest for vengeance in Ptolemaic Egypt. A few of these killings leave an especially bad taste in my mouth, however, and force me to question who exactly the […] Read More

2017 saw two games released that both share a focus on nature and the environment: Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Videocult’s Rain World. Where Rain World bases its setting in a ruined industrial wasteland, intermittently deluged with catastrophic rainstorms, Breath of the Wild erects an idyllic nature park above long defunct, […] Read More

Pastiche is an aspect of post-modernism that involves borrowing from pre-existing aesthetics, cultures and time-periods when creating new work. It’s “the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language,” as Frederic Jameson writes in his essay, Postmodernism and Consumer Society. A post-modern […] Read More

Cuphead is a 2D platformer with run-and-gun gameplay reminiscent of classic games like Mega Man. What sets Cuphead apart from its predecessors is its unique aesthetic which pays stunning homage to early 20th century American animation. The artists at Studio MDHR, the Canadian company which developed the game, have done an impressive job […] Read More