“We’re in a culture that doesn’t like to talk about hard things,” Green says, explaining why he’d make his son’s struggles with cancer into a game. “We don’t like to remember those things that have shaped our lives, even though they’ve been the most pivotal points in our histories. “I think [the game] is important because I think my son is important. Joel may not change the world, but he changed my world. When people deal with hard things, it changes their world. If we share those things, then we can overcome struggles.” Read the whole story, only on Polygon.
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“We’re in a culture that doesn’t like to talk about hard things,” Green says, explaining why he’d make his son’s struggles with cancer into a game. “We don’t like to remember those things that have shaped our lives, even though they’ve been the most pivotal points in our histories.

“I think [the game] is important because I think my son is important. Joel may not change the world, but he changed my world. When people deal with hard things, it changes their world. If we share those things, then we can overcome struggles.”

Read the whole story, only on Polygon.

Human Angle: Anatomy of a Cosplayer

Ger Tysk makes woodworking look effortless. As wood chips and splinters fly, sticking to her shirt and rebounding off her plastic safety goggles, her face remains as still and calm as water. Her arms move back and forth, the wooden block in her hands an extension of her limbs, pushing it through the saw and flipping it over to push again in one fluid motion.

Tysk is in her garage in the middle of Arlington, Mass., where she has banished her car in favor of a workshop. Floor to ceiling, the walls are covered with shelves and hooks sporting saws, wrenches and blades of all sizes. A pile of wood blocks and dowels sits in one corner, a dedicated station for spray-painting in the other. A bandsaw, router, lathe and two tables with half-finished projects clutter the room.

The spread on the tables is impressive: a Keyblade from Kingdom Hearts, what looks like an unfinished sword hilt, the beginning of what will become an 8-foot collapsible spear. The latter is what Tysk is working on now, recreating a weapon originally rendered in polygons with wood, plastic and paint.

“The props are the best part,” Tysk says with a grin as she flicks a switch and the saw roars back to life.

Read her whole story, only on Polygon.

Once upon a time, Ciji Thornton was a rock star. 

Kind of. During the height of the Guitar Hero boom, Thornton made a name for herself as one of the hardest rockers of the plastic guitar. 

“I was up on stage with thousands of people watching me,” Thornton muses about her performance at the World Cyber Games Pan-America 2009 tournament in Mexico. “How many people spend thousands of hours, days, years learning to play real guitar? And I come out with my plastic guitar and play on stage in front of thousands of people in another country.” 

Though Thornton has been competing in one form or another since 1998, she didn’t go pro until 2006 at the Midnight Gaming Championship in Texas. Her first sponsor was a gaming apparel company, she recalls, who offered to customize her personal Guitar Hero instrument in exchange for her wearing their clothing. But the rock star treatment didn’t last. As Guitar Hero and Rock Band products began to saturate the market, every other game with a new plastic peripheral, the public’s interest began to fade — and with it, the money.

Read her whole story, only on Polygon.

Even if you’ve tried to maintain a total media blackout on BioShock Infinite, it would have been difficult to remain ignorant of the extended, torturous development cycle it’s been through, or the number of major creative personnel who have come and gone during that time. You’d almost think it was hard to follow up the original game, which has been lauded and held up as one of the few conscious, authorial pieces of mainstream art that the video game industry has produced this millennium. Read the whole review, only on Polygon.
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Even if you’ve tried to maintain a total media blackout on BioShock Infinite, it would have been difficult to remain ignorant of the extended, torturous development cycle it’s been through, or the number of major creative personnel who have come and gone during that time. You’d almost think it was hard to follow up the original game, which has been lauded and held up as one of the few conscious, authorial pieces of mainstream art that the video game industry has produced this millennium.

Read the whole review, only on Polygon.

“If addiction is a freight train, then SimCity is the roaring locomotive pulling you into the night. You may play a hundred hours of this game without noticing, but behind the curtain, SimCity is working furiously to hook you — and keep you hooked. And in my case, it was enormously successful at both. It started with the best of intentions. I’m old enough to have played and remember all of the various iterations of this franchise. I’ve built (and destroyed) countless sim cities. I’ve perfectly zoned my little towns, entered cheat codes, then left them to bake over night and returned, triumphant, to a pile of “simoleons,” ready to reap the whirlwind. I’ve been there, is my point.” Read the whole review, only on Polygon.
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“If addiction is a freight train, then SimCity is the roaring locomotive pulling you into the night.

You may play a hundred hours of this game without noticing, but behind the curtain, SimCity is working furiously to hook you — and keep you hooked. And in my case, it was enormously successful at both.

It started with the best of intentions. I’m old enough to have played and remember all of the various iterations of this franchise. I’ve built (and destroyed) countless sim cities. I’ve perfectly zoned my little towns, entered cheat codes, then left them to bake over night and returned, triumphant, to a pile of “simoleons,” ready to reap the whirlwind.

I’ve been there, is my point.”

Read the whole review, only on Polygon.