It’s right there in the word itself. But of course they’re more than that, too. There’s the interactivity, of course, and the sound design can really improve or drag down a game…and then there’s reading. Reading?  If we want to pull out the old stereotype, then people play video games instead of reading (which is why video games “are destroying our youth”). But then, that stereotype would also have all gamers as teens or twenty-something dudes living in their parents’ basements and wasting their lives in inept solitude, so we should approach such generalizations with skepticism. In fact, there’s quite a bit of reading that goes on around video games. From the pre-release coverage and hype to reviews, manuals, and fan communities built around strategies, secrets, and simple discussion, avid gamers often do quite a bit of reading to enhance their knowledge about and enjoyment of our favorite games. Much of this...

I’m not the kind of player who longs for “the good old days” when games seemed to hate you and want you to die. My attempt to replay Paperboy and recapture the glory of my NES days was short-lived as I realized how needlessly, unrewarding cruel that game is—I just didn’t know any better as a kid.  But I’m also not the kind of player who wants games to be easy. My first walkthroughs are more often set to Hard than to Normal. My biggest disappointment about the death of my first PS3 Console was that I lost the save data for my finished Hard play through of The Last of Us and so wouldn’t be able to play Survivor mode next. The difference is in what makes the game difficult Difficulty, like everything else in a game, can be designed well or poorly. To see what good difficulty plays like,...

With the PlayStation 5 released in 2020, does it make sense to buy a PlayStation 4 in 2022? The simple answer is yes. You must be shaking your head in disbelief, but here are some incredibly good reasons why the PS4 still makes sense in 2022 and beyond Everyone's heard of scalpers ruining the computer market over the past year. Prices for processors and graphics cards have skyrocketed because of shortages in supply. This has extended to the PlayStation 5 as well. Sony has not been able to meet demand for the console at all over the past year. The PS5 was a hot ticket item during the holiday season last year, with stores often selling out within minutes of putting up stock. The situation has not improved at all this year. Big retailers like Walmart and Best Buy sell out online within minutes. As for in-person, you would have to...

I recently finished a fifty-five-hour playthrough of Grand Theft Auto V. It’s a ridiculously fun game. It’s also can be a very disappointing game.  Unlike Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V is a flawed masterpiece worth playing, thinking, and talking about whose good will never erase its bad and whose bad doesn’t, for me, overwhelm its good—it just cheapens it. About ten hours into my Grand Theft Auto V playthrough My wife said to me, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you giggle as much as since you started playing this game.” And she was right. So many of the things that Grand Theft Auto IV almost got right were beautifully executed in Grand Theft Auto V. Driving (and piloting) was fun in its own right, and the different handling based on vehicle and terrain kept it exciting and strategically interesting. The quantity and quality of random things to...