Not every fictional genre is suited to video games, and that’s ok. We don’t read poetry for car chases, we don’t go to concerts for psychological realism, we don’t play The Sims: Hot Date expecting an erotic thriller. But the neo-noir crime drama? That should be a slam dunk. There’s…

Excavate the crawl space behind the second floor landing of my childhood home on Long Island and you may yet find a musty copy of the official Journal of Myst. Treat it gingerly, for it is a totem of my youth — a portal to a bygone era. In that…

Narrative doesn’t describe the structure of a good ad. So what does? — In advertising, everybody wants to be a storyteller. Maybe that’s because the word evokes a familiar mystique — a nostalgia for the time when ads were so novel and slick that people accused them of hidden agendas and subliminal hijinks. Maybe it’s because the “storytelling” conceit dresses up awkward truths…

Whether games can tackle one of history’s most sober subjects — Before there were trigger warnings and safe spaces, before there was even the notion that ideas could be so toxic as to prove dangerous, there was Mrs. Vetrone’s 7th grade English class, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. Over a span of months that also featured the announcement of grownup hairs, the…

Ten years ago I secured lucrative bragging rights by actually doing what other white fuckboys merely gestured at — teaching English to primary school students in Kham, the historical Tibet. Over eight weeks I got fat on butter tea, introduced frisbee to my charges, and immersed myself in a culture…

Should we be impressed or horrified? — Pity the gamers who grew up in MMORPGs, the medium’s crassest bastard, an unholy amalgamation of our creepiest traits. World of Warcraft debuted in November of 2004, a few weeks after I entered boarding school as a sophomore. It tore through victims at an alarming rate. Who could care about…

As will forever be the norm, my first brush with sexuality involved a computer screen and naughty intent. But the encounter, when it finally arrived, was fully censored, and moments later my avatar — sweet, fumbling Larry — had died of an STD. I was eleven. Anyone who remembers the…