Digital experiences can leave indelible marks on the story of the self — Video games propose a thousand ways to be. We live, we breathe, we dream the experiences they gift to us — either across an eight-hour campaign as the titular hero or through months as an alter ego in massively-multiplayer world. Become what you want, when you want. Become a beefed-up…

Reflections on a time when play experiences were uninterrupted by ubiquitous, invasive connectivity — Video games used to be a meditative experience. It was just you and the box, with controller and cord as the connective tissue. Those thoughts — those pesky mental constructs — vanished to the experience in the moment. It’s why there’s a soothing silence to consoles of yore. It’s you…

NieR: Automata’s opening hours are an eerie parallel to our post-virus world — Everything is changing. The advent of COVID-19 is transforming how we live now — and how we might live for years to come. The world we knew yesterday won’t be the world we know tomorrow. In NieR:Automata, everything has already changed. The sun shines on a desolate land, a place…

Doing Halo better than ever before — Let’s get to it, then: Halo Infinite’s fledgling multiplayer is properly brilliant. It’s all the bang-bang, pew-pew, pop-pop action you’d expect from the daddy of the modern console shooter — one about armoured punks fighting in an arbitrary life-and-death contest with really big guns on some intergalactic real estate.

The famous franchise had its share of growing pains — We used to be the parents. We were their guardian angels, the commander of our own private army of ensemble characters with wild hair and crazy costumes who burped giant boxes of text from their mouths as they talked about giant monsters and time-travelling wizards.

Why world-building and narrative supersede inconsistency in the message — In Mass Effect, the Reapers are absolute killing machines. Waaaaaaah, they cry, telling you just how killy they really are — and presumably that they’re going to be killy at you, too. …

📢 Hello! Please note that SUPERJUMP has moved to a new site. This story is now available — for free — on our new site. We’ll see you there! Metal Gear Solid 2: The Original Next-Generation Video Game Looking back at Kojima’s enigmatic second “Solid” entry So, like, in Metal Gear Solid 2, there’s this guy who attached another guy’s arm to his very much arm-free elbow…

Do you think its possible to make suffering before death a happy thing? Or, at least, a less terrible thing?

The pursuit of power in our gaming lives — Be the better of your world and everything in it — that’s power. The child staying up past bedtime, the worker telling their boss to get lost: people enacting their will and breaking the rules, free from comeuppance and consequence. …