The Last of Us Part II is an incredible journey that provides not only one of the most mesmerizing spectacles that we’ve seen from big budget video games, but one that manages to ask difficult questions along the way. It’s clearly coming from an emotionally authentic and self-examining place. The trouble with it, and the reason that Ellie’s journey ultimately feels nonsensical, is that it begins from a place that accepts “intense hate that is universal” as a fact of life, rather than examining where and why this behavior is learned.

Critically, by not asking these questions, and by masking its point of view as being evenhanded, it perpetuates the very cycles of violence it’s supposedly so troubled by.

There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases. Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.

Un documentaire de 2h sur la conception de Half-Life 2, publié par Valve à l'occasion des 20 ans du jeu.

Dans une récente mise à jour de ses conditions d’utilisation, Steam précise que les « gamers achètent une licence et non le jeu lui-même. » La manœuvre est destinée à se mettre en conformité avec les dispositions d’une nouvelle loi californienne contre la publicité mensongère. Le tableau ravive le débat sur la notion de propriété numérique à l’ère des abonnements qui tuent les copies physiques.

Fascinante exploration de la façon dont certaines communautés de joueur parviennent à exploiter des bugs incroyablement subtils pour répondre à leurs propres défis.

If you fall off a ledge in Dark Souls, it activates a camera as you drop, showing your character from the top down. It assumes you're as good as dead at that point. Your character dies shortly after. Anticipating that, the game stops loading new objects as soon as the death camera is triggered. If you're far enough away from Sen's Gate when the death camera turns on, the game will just decide not to ever load the gate or its collision. If you're too far though, the floor leading to the fortress won't be loaded either. Capitaine needed to find a place he could trick the game into not quite killing him just close enough to the fortress.

Violent video games are much more likely to be trotted out as an excuse, however, in certain situations. For a forthcoming study, Dr. Ivory and his colleagues studied 6,814 news accounts of mass shootings. They found that in coverage of mass school shootings specifically, video games were more than eight times as likely to be brought up when the shooter is white than when the shooter is black.

“We should think about when we are more comfortable looking for something else to blame,” he said, adding, “I haven’t heard any senators talk about video games when an immigrant commits a crime.”

Dark Souls bosses are a beautiful marriage of fiction and encounter design. By the time you find Knight Artorias in Dark Souls’ expansion his background has already been well established in item descriptions and scraps of conversation. You know he’s one of Lord Gwyn’s four most trusted knights. He’s an unparalleled master of the greatsword. He is known as the “Abysswalker”. Gradually you piece together the story of a loyal warrior doomed by his own unwavering determination and sense of duty. It’s also a sad story about a man and his dog.