Category: Read

If you’re a strokey-beardy-booky wanker like myself, you may be familiar with the concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Popularized by Proto-Sadboy Friedrich Nietzsche, it imagines the backbone of creative endeavors as a balancing act between order and chaos. Rationality and playfulness, clay and blood, foundational blueprints and architectural flourishes. Arguably, it’s not a…

Thanks to Andrew Borman – the Digital Games Curator at the NY Museum of Play – you can now play Caper in the Castro, the world’s first LGBTQ game. Caper in the Castro is a 1989 adventure game by artist and designer C.M Ralph. You play as private detective Tracker McDyke, on the trail of kidnapped…

A Museum of Dubious Splendors is a visual mythology of department store goods. A joyous paean to the mundane. An invitation to become intimately acquainted with giant toothpaste tubes, dress shoes, and cooling fans. As you explore this space, a story is gradually revealed, as if gentle winds were slowly whisking away sand from an engraved stone…

Here’s some delightful facts about capitalism:  It allows you to buy projectors in the shape of adorable trash-can, R2-D2  It regularly dropkicks you in the soul, then feeds off your pain  Like, fifteen different kinds of Mayo  It laughs in the face of malnutrition, smothering itself with exploitation avocados and gargling sriracha  I mean, Drogon is…

Ready, Player One? Dig up your artifacts, still warm from hype and channel static. Excavate your chipped neo-antiques; line the walls of your museum with references gouged from their frames. Haunt every shot with the specters of gutted franchises. Fan fiction is never enough. Consumer fiction is that new hotness. Shut up and take my…

Welp. The Monster Hunter: World beta has been and gone, and now we’re all left waiting patiently until January of next year to slice off the tails of ridiculously big reptiles with ridiculously bigger-er axes. The beta showcased some hallmarks of the series  – like lengthy, epic battles and insanely convoluted menu interfaces -but brought…

For years, there has been a stigma attached to mental illness and those who suffer from it. Recently, content creators have been using their platforms to combat this stigma. In the UK, more than two-thirds of the population have some kind of mental health condition. This can range from a persistent, lower severity anxiety, to…

Making a good game is hard; this is just a fact. It is a Herculean task. One which takes an incredible amount of time and a panoply of skills across many fields to complete. Making financially successful games, especially AAA titles, isn’t just difficult though. Often it can be damaging and exploitative to the programmers,…

Log onto any gaming news site or type in a specific hashtag on Twitter, and you’ll get the impression that these are the end days for gaming. While some players frequently cry wolf about the medium’s death, it would be remiss to discount the level of discussion and spite being thrown in the direction of…

Here’s a quote I quite like from thinky French man, Jean Baudrillard: “If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.” Here is a slight re-arrangement of that quote, by me, who once read a couple books by thinky…

In a world of giant flying eye monsters and mountable unicorns players are free to do and be almost anything. Yet in all the fantastical make-believe somebody at Terraria developer Re-Logic felt the need to spice things up with a dig at those crazy females. The snide little social commentary had gone mostly unnoticed or…

The Game Awards, eh? What a show! I’m actually still dizzy from all the reveals. There was that new FromSoftware game we know nothing about! That new Hideo Kojima game we know nothing about! That new Campo Santo game we know nothing about! What a time to be alive… Amidst all the glitz, sponsorship, and…

Impressionist composer Claude Debussy once famously remarked that “Music is the space between the notes.” The beauty of a song lies not the systems – in what can be defined, cataloged or scored and shared – but in the unique idiosyncrasies that the individual musician provides. It could almost be a mantra for Media Molecule,…

With all the recent furor around Star Wars: Battlefront 2, it’s easy to forget how many other Star Wars games we’ve had over the years. Some of them were great. Some were terrible. All of them, without fail, would have benefited immensely from the inclusion of Porgs. All the Porgs. All the time. Porgs. Shadows…

Connection Lost is a collection of pieces that uses games to examine attitudes towards death in the non-gaming world. In this edition we will look at games that use time-bending mechanics to bring about feelings of connection and loss. This emotional bridge is so often the difference between an average game and a great one.…

Hating specific developers and publishers seems to be a bit of an obsession for gamers. People hated Sean Murray for being dishonest regarding No Man’s Sky, Warner for not having its priorities right, and EA for being a greedy cash grab. The latter has had a particularly hard time. This is mostly due to their high…