Rounding up all the news for you
In March 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to tell gamers what he owed them. He wasn’t a big gamer, he admitted. Google, though, was indebted to games. Games were the entry point for countless Googlers into computer science. Games like chess and Go helped…
If you ask Empress what got her started breaking DRM, she says it was a dream she had one night in 2014. Chains made up of numbers wrapped around the video game Dark Souls 2. It was anti-piracy software, she realized. As she focused, she began to see “what every number meant ‘universally,’’’ she says.…
When you buy a new PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/Series S console, you get an excellent game controller with it. They’re designed to perfectly complement their respective consoles, but both the PS5 DualSense Controller and the Xbox Wireless Controller can have a life beyond them. If you want a controller to play games on your…
Video games should be playable by people of all experience levels and skill sets. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement. Yet, it often is. For years, gamer culture—the toxic parts of it, at least—insisted on gatekeeping, on maintaining that games be difficult and complex to restrict “filthy casuals” from entering the fray. But as casual…
I teach a journalism class at NYU to high school students via Zoom.When I first set up my course, I planned on offering short lectures and discussions on various editorial elements (the structure of an article, using credible resources, interviewing techniques), similar to the way I teach my in-person and remote classes for adults at NYU’s…
An isolated, wintertime quarantine is no joke. Luckily, there are no shortage of ways to spend the cold winter months inside, whether you’re sipping hot cocoa, cuddling in front of a fire, or burning your eyeballs out by playing hours of video games a day (guilty). If you’re restlessly scrolling, looking for entertainment, we have…
The online brokerage Robinhood launched in 2013 with an egalitarian pitch worthy of its namesake: commission-free trading on a platform that has the common investor’s interests at heart. That veneer has shown cracks over the years, but perhaps none so visible as this morning, when Robinhood users found themselves unable to purchase the so-called meme…
At the beginning of the pandemic, depressed from losing steady freelance work and my social life in the city, I promised my wife: no postapocalyptic video games, no Armageddon hand-wringing. We’d just moved 45 minutes from Manhattan to a 100-year-old fixer-upper, because we both felt that living in a 450-square-foot apartment wasn’t sustainable forever and we…
Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. Photograph: Douglas Sacha/Getty ImagesJon Peterson is the author of Playing at the World, widely seen as the definitive history of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as coauthor of the visual history Dungeons & Dragons: Art and Arcana and the D&D cookbook Heroes’ Feast. In his new book,…
It’s good to take a break from screens every now and then. The great outdoors has plenty to offer, but there are times when you’re stuck inside for one reason or another (like a surging pandemic). Board games are a fun way to gather everyone around the table to engage in some group escapism. My…
