Lost for words: new relationships and Journey

I’m in a bar with the girl I like. I want her to like me back. I’ve decided the best way to do this is by talking about video games. I’m talking about Journey and struggling to find the words:

On Entitlement: Are We Whiners, Or Just Passionate?

Image by Daniel Horacio Agostini, licensed under Creative Commons Just when you thought the word ‘fanboy’ had gone away and gamers could have conversations without throwing trite slurs at each other, there’s a new villain in town: ‘entitled’. It crops

Reality Check: Murder We Wrote

I am a murderer. Well, maybe I’m more co-conspirator or an accessory, but the details don’t matter as much as the crime: killing games journalism. Whether you’re reading this on Split Screen or Nightmare Mode, no one asked for your

Awesomenauts: all for 'naut

Astronauts explore space. Scribblenauts vivify scribbles. Awesomenauts create awesome. In an age where games are given pretentious titles like Wars of Death II: Bludgeoning, it’s nice to encounter something more succinct. When you first play Awesomenauts you may think it’s

Reality Check: Only Entertainment

Objectivity is pretty fucking boring. I recently wrote a feature entitled “In Defence of Subjectivity”. Some people liked it, while others suggested I had drifted into madness. In hindsight, maybe it was a little hyperbolic: of course there’s a place

Afterlife: Beyond Mere Death In Games

People have a hard time dealing with death. We don’t just grieve over lost loved ones: we mourn complete strangers and celebrities we’ve never even met. Death is a subject that is difficult to approach, so it’s unsurprising that game developers have incorporated death in a way that is either crass, facile or both.

Games don’t really have ‘death’ in the sense of finality: it’s just one long stream of life, punctuated by save points to which we can rewind after a mistake. Narratively, the only universe that exists is the one where we played perfectly. What could be more fake, hollow and unrealistic than a perfect life? Games should be able to give us new perspectives on life, rather than conforming to ideal ones.