Papers, Please is a sort of half puzzle half simulation game set in the fictional authoritarian country of Arstotzka in which the player takes the role of an immigration officer at a boarder checkpoint. The player can approve or deny entry based on an ever growing list of criteria and…

Spent is a sort of text adventure game but rather than exploring a dungeon or alien planet the player has to navigate through late stage capitalism as a low income worker. The focus of the game is on the difficulties faced by low income and impoverished workers in the US…

Released in 1998, Metal Gear Solid, is a game well ahead of it’s time in terms of implementing value based design mostly unintentionally. One of the major themes is Nuclear Proliferation and antiviolence messaging, and being developed in post WWII Japan these themes were often ubiquitous in Japanese media being…

With my first experience with real time corruptor I had an explicit goal of trying to create a playable glitch, one that didn’t entirely crash the game. After about an hour of constant crashes, chaos, and an unplayable mess I was able to dial in an acceptable intensity and stopped…

When considering glitches we often think of them in the context of video games as an error or breakdown of systems. Games in themselves are a construct that typically creates a veil between the user and the technological systems to engross a player into an aestheticized experience. A glitch is…

In Grand Theft Auto 5 players are treated to a narrative focused on a triumvirate of protagonists, and how their actions affect each other. Little does the game ask how we the player affect the lives of the people who live in this world outside the lens of the narratives…

When presented an opportunity for playing a modded game my mind instantly drifted to Skyrim. With Skyrim comes mods of the absurd and few are more iconic or absurd than the Randy Savage Dragon Mod. The mod is very simple it replaces the models of the dragons in game with…

Like many others this week I spent time with the Maiden demo for Resident Evil 8, released on January 21st. The photorealistic assets, characters, and environments make for a truly terrifying atmosphere, even if the experience is mostly puzzle based and any conflict is scripted. Maiden, like most Capcom outputs…

Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game that deals with our relationship with technology, specifically military technology and the internet. The narrative of the story deals with AI systems and the idea of societal control via information control, not removal of information but through producing a deluge of information via…