Video game histories tend to follow an achingly familiar structure. They start with Pong and the Atari years; they do the console wars between Nintendo and Sega; they cover the success of the PlayStation and the dawn of 3D visuals. All the technological waypoints are slavishly ticked off, but rarely Continue Reading
Game culture
Fun guy: is that Toad from Mario’s head or is he wearing a hat? | Games
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all Over the course of almost three decades playing video games and 15 years writing about them, I have seen a few Continue Reading
Video gaming can benefit mental health, find Oxford academics | Games
Playing video games can be good for your mental health, a study from Oxford University has suggested, following a breakthrough collaboration in which academics at the university worked with actual gameplay data for the first time. The study, which focused on players of Nintendo’s springtime craze Animal Crossing, as well Continue Reading
Battle for control: why the age-old console wars show no sign of stopping | Games
It is an exciting time in video game world: two new consoles, the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, are arriving this month. With a long, lonely Covid winter ahead, it is tempting to splash out. New machines bring with them the promise of new worlds, as leaps in technology Continue Reading
It’s time for fantasy fiction and role-playing games to shed their racist history | Games
When Black Lives Matter protests were raging following the death of George Floyd, the publishers of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, pledged to take concrete steps to make their games more diverse. Wizards of the Coast promised to “share what we’ve been doing, and what we plan to Continue Reading
Why are 400,000 people watching AOC play the game Among Us on Twitch? | Culture
Hi Patrick, I keep seeing lots of screenshots of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing some game involving little Telly Tubby-type creatures. What’s all that about? Hey Josh. So basically AOC (and Ilhan Omar, for a bit) is playing a video game called Among Us with some internet-famous people, and she’s broadcasting the Continue Reading
Coronavirus drives surge in support for unionisation, say games industry activists | Games
Worker strikes, let alone successful ones, are vanishingly rare in the video games industry. But in August, writers at Lovestruck, a mobile app that publishes visual romance novels, went on a 21-day strike, accusing the company of unfair pay, and won a rates increase after owner Voltage initially dismissed their Continue Reading
Sid Meier’s Memoir review – Civilization creator is all about fun | Books
One billion hours, veteran game designer Sid Meier notes in this light and enjoyable memoir, is an unfathomable length of time. And yet it took just six years for players to spend a billion cumulative hours on the fifth iteration of Meier’s engrossing Civilization series, a nation-building game that has Continue Reading
Fights, camera, action: the beginner’s guide to streaming video games | Games- Tempemail
Being a “gamer” used to mean actually playing video games, but now watching other people play is almost as important. Last year, more than 740m of us watched gaming streams on Twitch, YouTube and other platforms, with superstar streamers such as Ninja, Tfue and Pokimane attracting many millions of adoring Continue Reading
Xbox One X games showcase: Microsoft reveals Halo: Infinite and more – live | Games
5.10pm BST 17:10 A forcefield shield and a grapple give the combat some extra variety here, as Chief breaks out the plasma weapons and goes after an anti-aircraft gun. I know this is a demo, but there’s a lot of blasting here and not so much of the clever enemy Continue Reading