Brittany Vincent

Why won't my father game with me? It's a question I am sure is echoed within the gaming community in varying forms: why won't my mother play with me, why won't my parents game with me? Variations on the same heartrending sentiment that to some like myself serve as an overwhelming source of sadness as adulthood continues to creep in.

Babysitting is a hard job because babies are irresponsible. They'll drink whatever's under the sink and stick forks in power outlets. It's not that they don't want to live, they just don't understand how life works, and that's part of why taking care of a newborn is so hard. A new game developed by Joe Williams called Who's Your Daddy turns this struggle into a hilarious multiplayer match.

I’ve grown up — rather fondly, I might add — with Pokémon. Over the years the several different hundreds of pocket monsters have become my dear friends. Simply settling into a new game (like I’ve recently done with Black) is a comfort to me. In a tumultuous, changing world, I find solace in the fact that while the games have metamorphosed over the years, whittling down a health bar or throwing a Poké Ball haven’t changed.

“If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh.” This curious sentiment was delivered by a powerful demon king some 20 years ago. It was a jarring statement, then and now: if death is inevitable, what can you do but accept it with a smile on your face? But we’ve experienced deaths a lot of deaths since then in Japanese RPGs and greeted few of them with smiles. We cling to memories like Yuffie clinging to stolen materia, tightly, but without a smile to be found.

If you're a woman in the game industry, you've totally been there.

Game developers are aware that some people just aren’t very good at video games, and they love to play off of it, humiliating those who can't complete specific levels or treating players who take the easy way out like wimps. These 11 games weren't content with simple, mocking "Game Over" screens upon the inevitable failures—they decided to embarrass gamers for their bad performances.

For most professional players, fine-tuning their League of Legends skills means living and breathing the Fields of Justice as well as the various Champions and their intricacies. This means viewing matches and obsessively reviewing plays in order to better themselves.

It might not look like it, but the girl with the paintbrush you see in the picture above is making a video game. When we think of game development, we usually think of people in offices working late hours in front of a computer, and while After School certainly required some of that, it's the kind of craft you see in the image above that makes it special.

Where a good portion of science fiction publications are based on existing licenses or striking out in the brave new world of narrative design, the Terran Trade Authority book series was content to create a guide to an alternate universe. The future seen in the Terran Trade Authority universe was a striking, at some times bizarre glimpse into an alternate human timeline.

In 1996, when the rivalries between video game console companies were at their fiercest, Crash Bandicoot served the same role for newcomer Sony's PlayStation as Sonic and Mario did for industry powerhouses Sega and Nintendo. It's been 20 years since fledgling developer Naughty Dog, then helmed by Jason Rubin and and Andy Gavin, set out to make "the next Mario."

You’re trapped in a holding cell at the institution that employs you. Your partner is to your left, an uninterested guard to your right. There’s no way out—or is there? You place a tiny square of acid on your tongue and watch as the world crumbles around you. The walls tear themselves apart and reform into a pathway where masked beings conduct a ceremony with a majestic buffalo.

Is Super Mario Run sexist? Absolutely not. In fact, it's home to some surprisingly progressive female roles that many players may have completely missed out on.