Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming normal. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Sure, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum. You may …
Nothing moves quickly in Wanderstop. To make a single cup of tea in the new video game is a meditative ritual of deliberate steps. The recovering hero, Alta, has to forage for tea leaves, dry out those leaves, plant seeds for fruit to flavor the tea, water those seeds, watch …
Within a modern but nondescript building a few hundred feet from Stockholm’s pretty Riddarfjarden Bay, a frosted glass wall in Josef Fares’s office displays etched characters from It Takes Two, his video game studio’s “Toy Story”-esque cooperative adventure about an adult couple’s broken relationship. Near his desk, in a lighted …
In 2010, a woman in Sakura, Japan, posted photos of her well-manicured Shiba Inu to her digital journal. The dog, Kabosu, shot her owner a wide-eyed glance, a comic image that quickly jumped from Tumblr to Twitter to Facebook and to the rest of the internet. A meme legend was …
You awaken on a hexagonal tile. It is the year 4,000 B.C. You can see just a few tiles beyond yours: to the north a desert; to the south a shoreline; to the east, alarmingly, an angry-looking volcano. The tiles beyond are shrouded in shadow. Over the next 6,000 years …
Will Wright kindly requests that admirers stop describing him as a god. “I don’t think God would concern himself with taking out the trash and cleaning the toilet,” he quipped while chain-smoking cigarettes. Besides, he’s an atheist. But what is better shorthand to describe the man who created The Sims? …
On its face, the claim feels improbable: In addition to being the world’s richest man, the chief executive of multiple companies and a key adviser to President Trump, Elon Musk says he is also a world-class video game player. It is a claim that Mr. Musk has repeated through the …
Jon Ingold finds most video game writing empty at best, turgid at worst. Ingold, an author of celebrated narrative-driven games including 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, acknowledged that his writing tastes were “fussy” and was reluctant to single out studios. But he was comfortable calling the text-heavy Disco Elysium, one …