“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.

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.