Critically Speaking

Maturity and violence have long gone hand in hand in the gaming industry. But do they have to? If the only axis on which we judge our games' maturity is ...

Controversy. How does an industry with games that feature so many guns and so many deaths not have controversy? According to this week's feature article, there are no controversial games. ...

Theme is more than a simple bullet point to be added amongst the various graphical effects, multiplayer modes, and stat systems. When big name titles aim for thematic resonance, is ...

When does marketing become sheer deception? It's one thing to manipulate the audience in benign ways, getting them excited for a product that the creators are equally or more so ...

What qualifies someone who is passionate about a topic? Be it art, film, or gaming, there is a tendency to designate between those who feel strongly about a medium—and demonstrate ...

If purchasing decisions tie less and less to the opinion of a published review, what place do reviews have in the gaming industry? This week Scott and Nate discuss the ...

Every genre has a defining title that sets the stage for a new, more polished generation. But at some point, the product reaches a quality that requires more effort to ...

Games have always striven toward the goal of creating believable virtual worlds, but with the recent advancements from Oculus and Sony's Project Morpheus, VR is closer to becoming a reality ...

Sometimes the best topics come straight from the news. This week's episode does just that. CryEngine on SteamOS, a crisis for the console market, and a handful of PC and ...

Time will outlast us all, if it even exists, but in gaming, time is often a tool or a feature or altogether absent. What happens if games focus on time ...

In life everyone has their pet peeves, and the same is true with videogames. Whether it's piles of junk everywhere or slow travel from place to place or stilted dialogue, ...

Sometimes our characters talk, and other times we make them talk. What happens when our choices mean as little in the first case as they do in the second? Can ...

Nothing is a pure original, but if that is true, then what does it mean when videogame protagonists are so homogenized that they can be boiled down to a series ...

Without action there can be no stealth. Or is it, without stealth there can be no action? Either way, sneaking, hiding, and gathering information in order to get the upper ...

Restrictions may breed creativity, but what happens when the restrictions become the starting point? Game genres help marketers, publishers, and press decide how to discuss a given title, and help ...

Special guest Ryan Payton of Camouflaj joins Nate and Scott to discuss his studio's new game, Republique Episode 1: Exordium and the Kickstarter process that led to the game's publication.

Does gameplay, real gameplay, emerge? Or, does a designer have the final decision? Whether a guiding hand or a free-for-all, the discussion around the best way to design games continues ...

When all the gaming outlets are discussing Game of the Year, does it make more sense to consider Game Played this Year? Scott and Nate take a look back at ...

Avatars represent more than just our preferences in character design. Statistically, players choose characters that resemble themselves, and often characters that represent idealized versions of themselves. What goes into the ...

No matter the topic, occupation, or activity, rarely do people want to feel like outsiders. With the games industry expanding in content and subject matter, the old identifiers (namely "gamer") ...