2793

Seems like Mashable and PCMag have vaulted to first place on ZD’s “which one gets shut down next” list.

2794

That’s exactly what I was thinking. Good luck to them.

2795

[some sort of joke about replacing them with robots]

2796

Jeeze what are these ungrateful swine going to ask for next? HEALTHCARE?? Give them an inch…

Seriously, good luck to them. Although I feel the macro factors around games mags as a business overall. are insurmountable so its probably not going to have a happy ending with or without unions.

2797

Well, I think if the Union goes through, I start putting Mashable into my rotation of website to check out.

2798

Good idea. i might do the same. I have very few sites I check out for the industry but no reason I can’t check out the content at a company that supports their staff, even if it’s because they have no choice.

2799

The New Yorker cruises in near the end of the year! A “Best of” list should be pretty uncontroversial, right? (Barring the obvious “that list doesn’t have X” comments.) Check out that opening!

In recent years, members of the alt-right have, in blog posts and in YouTube videos, courted young men who share an interest in video games. (The wooers include Steve Bannon, when he was the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and the former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who churned out posts with titles such as “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.”) This scheme has proved effective. Last month, a YouTube user uploaded a clip from the recent blockbuster video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a cowboy playpen set in the late-nineteenth-century American Southwest. In it, the player guides his character toward a computer-controlled suffragette who is campaigning for her right to vote, and punches her unconscious. The video, titled “Beating Up Annoying Feminist,” has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, with a chorus of support in the comments below.

This kind of trolling can easily escalate. Earlier this month, NPR broadcast a story in which a father recounted his dismay at finding a neo-Nazi pamphlet that his fifteen-year-old son had printed out after being encouraged by fellow-gamers. “I was crying,” the man said. “I felt like a failure that a child that I had raised would be remotely interested in that sort of stuff.”

The cultural problems around video games, of course, inhere not just in their young players but in their creators. There remains a woeful lack of diversity among those who design video games, and, in the industry at large, among those who decide what kinds of games are made in the first place. But the tectonic plates still shift, slowly, and, at the edges, work of intelligence and interest is produced. While 2018 was hardly a vintage year for video games, there were releases that nevertheless excited, stimulated, and challenged their audiences to think for themselves. Here are nine.

2800

That’ll fill up the average baizuo-buzzword-bingo card.

2801

That is a good list of games

2802

A.V. Club has a good list this year too:

2803

I was looking at that list a little while ago. It’s an interesting read, but I noticed I’ve only played two games from their list and only heard of maybe half of them.

2805

I didn’t notice that was missing; you’re right, that’s unhelpful.

2806

AV Club platform - 70" HDR/4K TV and a 11.2 Surround sound system surely?

2807

QT3 needs to beat this lead-in now.

“Donald Trump is an underrated president. Here are 11 underrated games.”

2808

Gotta mention Fortnite in your headline to get the clicks.

But, this is a wonderful deep-dive on one of the best games of one of the best years in gaming (1998)

Doing a quick search of the article, the game “Fortnite” is mentioned twice in a 5,000 word article.

Gotta get that SEO AMIRITE?

2809

Thanks for the link, Jon. The Ringer’s 1998 retrospective series is terrific. I never played much of the original Tribes back in the day (or any multiplayer-centric game besides UT 1999), but I remember enjoying Irrational’s strange sequel in the mid-2000s. The idea of an FPS with jetpacks, vehicles, and massive levels would’ve been pretty novel back in the day.

2810

I didn’t play it back in the days either, but they had a van at our college, invited people into the van to try it out, and it was kind of a cool experience actually, not sure if it was that Tribes… could have been a later one.

2811

That made me think of the uber gaudy, $3 million Firefall bus! :)

2812

That bus was made by a serious dickhead

2813

Wow, that’s an “interesting” take on a gaming bus.