Popular Mechanics • January 16, 2024

This Is the Perfect Size Table for Your Jigsaw Puzzle, According to Math

• A fun, delightfully short paper shows us the math of how much space a jigsaw puzzle takes up. • The answer relies on how circles “pack” into a space, which is a major topic in physics research. • Representing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle as circles reflects how people lay pieces out and manipulate them. In new research posted last month to the ArXiV preprint server (meaning the work has not yet been peer-reviewed) biophysics researcher Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, Ph.D., and her family explore a

itch.io • February 1, 2023

No Substitutions: A Browser Game About Cooking

This is a word substitution game made for Gaming Like It's 1927. Explore eight real passages from a "domestic science" book, then swap out words found elsewhere in the book.

Unwinnable • November 8, 2022

An Hour Making Games in the Belly of Demonicon

What is an hour, really? The division of time into small pieces of each day is very, very old.

Unwinnable • October 27, 2022

Papers, Apples, Microphones, Chairs: Immortality’s Spatial Miscellany | Unwinnable

My favorite author, China Miéville, calls himself a “weird fiction” writer – a callback to the time before genre labels emerged, when anything “other” was simply weird. In games, there’s something even more satisfying about thinking about the idea of weirdness. Games can induce you to feel weird so viscerally. And this is where Sam Barlow’s game Immortality, which came out August 30 on Steam and Xbox GamePass, enters the discussion. In the game, you scrub forward and backward through footage, r

Unwinnable • October 22, 2022

Sponsored: Mind the Gap

This series of MegaGrant spotlights is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Epic Games.

Unwinnable • October 21, 2022

Impostor: When the Monster Makes You a Monster

The other day, I was discussing “monster theory” with Unwinnable’s editor in chief.

Unwinnable • September 28, 2022

There Swings a Skull Completes the Bigger Picture with Grim Tidings

This column has superficial spoilers for There Swings a Skull: Grim Tidings. The game contains “immolation, smoking, hanging, drowning, spiders, apocalyptic themes, and harsh language.”

Unwinnable • September 21, 2022

Paradise Killer is On a Heavenly Trip

This is the fifth and final installment in my kickoff Paradise Killer series. So far, we’ve explored the game’s design and genre, use of space, nonlinear open world, and passage of time.

Unwinnable • September 8, 2022

Paradise Killer’s Biggest Secrets are Straight Up

Unwinnable • August 26, 2022

Paradise Killer’s 8,227 Years of Solitude

I’ve quickly staked out a territory here of “nothing is demonstrably real,” and the 2020 mystery adventure platformer Paradise Killer may just be my highway to hell.

Unwinnable • August 18, 2022

Roam Paradise Killer If You Want To

Even the hugest games can never be infinite, and everything in them is always constructed. But how do we create something that acts and “feels” as large as possible? On a reasonable budget? And how do we make it feel good? Talking with Oli Clarke Smith about open worlds.

Unwinnable • August 11, 2022

Reaching for Truth in Paradise Killer

In this column, I hope to explore the ways games play with space. Paradise Killer is a murder mystery set in a lore-stuffed open world adventure. To help me pull apart the world of Paradise Killer, I talked with the game’s creative director (and Kaizen Game Works cofounder) Oli Clarke Smith.

Popular Mechanics • August 5, 2022

Find Out How the Changing Hats Code in the Among Us Game Works

In the hit game Among Us, a group of players are dropped into a spaceship and given small tasks to do like maintenance and engine repair. But for one player, the “small task” is to kill all the others. We talked with Shahrin Khan from Innersloth, the makers of Among Us. She shared a piece of code from the game that will help us tell the story.

Uppercut • July 8, 2022

Rogue Legacy 2 and CBT Have More in Common Than You’d Think

While Rogue Legacy 2 is much more difficult than the original, it’s also much more thoughtful and approachable — something I learned firsthand by learning to fly. All it took was a little bit of a running head start, and some realistic goal-setting.

Stacker • June 23, 2022

How educational games have evolved over time

The world of educational video games is a rich industry with decades of history. These games directly tie with analog educational technologies like creative worksheets, classroom role-playing projects, and even educational vinyl albums from previous decades.

itch.io • June 22, 2022

What Will You Have? A Browser Game About Dinner Dates

In this short, completely SFW dating sim, you choose a main ingredient that will "cook" while you go on dates.

Medium • June 16, 2022

Sexy, flexible swashbuckling with Jemma Topaz

"The amazing thing about games is that even choices that are ‘meaningless’ actually aren’t. Even if points A and B are the same, it actually makes a difference if you take 5 minutes or 50 minutes between them, 3 steps or 30, 7 words or 700. Or just choosing the right pronouns; it’s not a ‘game’ decision at all, usually, but it is definitely meaningful."

Medium • June 16, 2022

The charming, lived-in collage of Kate Bagenzo’s tarot game

"I am very bad at drawing, so I settled for a collage-style early on. I use public domain photographs and illustrations and vector art from wherever I can find it. My biggest inspirations are those clipart illustrations you see in social studies or math textbooks. Maybe it’s a form of nostalgia?"

Medium • June 16, 2022

Unified style and place with the Adamant Gambit crew

"Emma came in with a pretty clear idea of wanting to do multiple stories all set on a space station to really explore the sense of place over time, and then in brainstorming, I suggested a generation ship, and Rose suggested a game per generation as framing."

Medium • June 16, 2022

Precise, beautiful PICO-8 games with Brook.p8

"I really love all of these flags because what they represent is beautiful. Flags, be it pride flags or country flags or else, only really have meaning and power based on what they represent. I feel that the design and its meaning are intrinsically linked; and that pride flags are beautiful because queerness is inherently a beautiful thing."