Being wonderfully weird, capricious and regal, cats are easy to adore (even if it's just the brain parasites). Inexplicably compelling, they're also often ideal subjects for games.

Sometimes, your workday just needs the kind of pastoral background music that makes you feel like you live in a village full of animals, right? Nintendo's popular Animal Crossing lets… Read the rest of the article: Want to listen to Animal Crossing music all day?

Game development is on the rise in Africa. Just for example, the first-ever West African Gaming Expo was hosted in Lagos last fall, and an eagerly-anticipated roleplaying game made in… Read the rest of the article: Learn about game development in Africa

How an 'anti-nurturing sim' helps reveal the importance of mortality in games

Do you want to have a homoerotic experience with your manual transmission? Yeah, of course you do. Come on, you saucy saucepot, don't tell me you never found it a… Read the rest of the article: Play it now: Stick Shift

Games aren't just playful — they let players inhabit characters, visit unfamiliar places or practice problem-solving within complicated systems.

Freshman Year is the latest personal game from designer Nina Freeman. It's brief, and it tells an upsetting story — a teen in college goes to the local bar to… Read the rest of the article: Experience a difficult night in the life of a teenage girl

Which lulls you into complacency: Leg warmers, or the font Helvetica? What's better proof of the way absolute power corrupts: The great Pacific garbage patch, or Labradoodles? Is brunch fraying… Read the rest of the article: Debate your friends on culture with this new card game

My generation of girls grew up sneaking around online, pretending to be older, pretending to be supernatural, in order to meet strangers — more important than the fleeting strangers, though,… Read the rest of the article: Most users of online worlds do sex stuff

Games can be conversations, and a new anthology curated by Merritt Kopas called Videogames For Humans aims to explore those connections. She's gathered Twine game creators and critics to annotate… Read the rest of the article: Videogames for humans, a special book

Lots of young people are growing up watching strangers play video games. But while "Let's Play" videos are fairly common in the West (I even do a niche series of… Read the rest of the article: Watch: The rare Japanese Let's Play-ers

Aunt Flora's Mansion is a simple little block puzzle game from prolific designer and author Anna Anthropy. You might have played games like it before — push a block thoughtfully… Read the rest of the article: Shuffle around the family baggage in Aunt Flora's Mansion

San Francisco-based Campo Santo is an indie studio currently at work on Firewatch, a visually-evocative game about being a volunteer fire lookout in the wilderness of Wyoming, with a handheld… Read the rest of the article: How a small art team created Firewatch's beautiful environment

Plenty of people play games to escape their real lives, and the character creators some games offer let us imagine ourselves in whatever image we'd like: realistic or idealized, some… Read the rest of the article: What happens when you don't let players pick their race?

It's fun to feel you're a video games pioneer. The world sprawls out in front of you, in chunks of textured map-land, and you have to make often risky decisions… Read the rest of the article: Let's go pioneering

Tetrageddon Games is a multifaceted and delightful project from Nathalie Lawhead, one of the participants in my feature about digital mysticism yesterday.

Liz Ryerson is one of my favorite game critics — she has a great eye for the alien and oddly-beautiful design harmonies of game landscapes, and she specializes in the… Read the rest of the article: Watch: DOOM MIXTAPE

You, the mustachioed Wild West villain, have just tied your nemesis to the train tracks. Can you recite your entire evil monologue before the locomotive comes barreling down? You really… Read the rest of the article: Play it now: Monologue

Fortune-telling games help us fumble toward deeper truths, at the junction of technology and mysticism

New text-based browser games by Caelyn Sandel and Lydia Neon ask searching questions we may prefer not to answer. I have a hard time being honest with these bots, even… Read the rest of the article: Tell these games what's wrong