The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. This is my first blog post on Gamasutra. Everything I post here will be on my own blog, too:…

John Gruber had strong words about Apple news site iMore : 1 I love iMore. I think they’re the best staff covering Apple today, and their content is great. But count me in with Nick Heer — their website is shit-ass. Rene Ritchie’s response acknowledges the problem, but a web page like that — Rene’s…

It brought him some extra spending money and a surprising amount of notoriety, but Hockey Night in Canada ‘s chief play-by-play man Jim Hughson doesn’t miss his side gig. Calling sports video games, like EA Sports’ fantastically successful and increasingly realistic NHL series, can make a man famous…

I'm going to make some predictions about the future of the media in this piece, and they come with the disclaimer that predictions always come with: They could be entirely wrong. The media is moving fast, and what looks like an unstoppable trend today might seem like a hilarious detour a year from…

ISTANBUL — Turkish fighter jets, which on Friday attacked Islamic State targets in Syria , have launched a wave of airstrikes in northern Iraq , targeting camps of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party for the first time in four years, the prime minister’s office said Saturday. The Iraq raids, which…

The tech entrepreneur Allison McGuire’s app SketchFactor was criticized for stoking racial prejudice. She’s now launching a new project, Walc, and hoping to move on. Illustration by Jon Han. On August 7th of last year, Crain _’ s ran an article about SketchFactor, an app that was set to launch the…

I hate browsing the web on my phone. I do it all the time, of course — we all do. Just looking at the stats for The Verge , our mobile traffic is up 70 percent from last year, while desktop traffic is up only 11 percent. That trend isn't going back; phones are just too convenient, beckoning us to…

My first trip to Vernon, the city that inspired True Detective S eason 2’s fictionalized “Vinci,” was on a whim. At dinner, I told a friend about my intention to drive to the nearby city, which is just five miles south of downtown Los Angeles. “Why would you want to go there?” he said with genuine…

ARUNAS KLUPSAS/Getty Images For just a dollar, you can send your first message to Valerie, a 22-year-old college student living in southern Georgia. If she responds, you can spend more money to keep chatting. Maybe you'll discuss literature, her tattoos—or whatever is on your mind. Eventually, you…

You've heard of actors getting typecast. But there is no group more slighted, more narrowly cast, than the Muslim-American actors who earn virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels. Jon Ronson embarks on a soul-searching odyssey with the bad guys of Homeland ,…

Havana: On a small cut of land at the corner of 23rd Avenue and F Street in the Vedado section of this city stands a monument to two heroes of the Cuban people. But the faces carved into the imposing marble-and-granite structure are not those of Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, icons of the…

Wolf, sheep, or sheepdog? Photo by Keith Bernstein © 2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment This past weekend, American Sniper sold millions of tickets , and introduced millions of Americans to a novel turn of phrase. In an early scene set at the dinner table, Chris Kyle’s father tells him that there are…

Paolo Contri /IAEA/Flickr Barack Obama and John Kerry are playing with fire. They presumably want Congress and the American public to accept the nuclear agreement they and four other governments struck with Iran, but they work against their own objective by accepting the false premise of their…

ISTANBUL -- The current situation in Turkey is nothing short of apocalyptic. Radical Islamists who have turned the country into a "jihadi highway" to Syria -- while Ankara has looked the other way -- are now carrying out attacks within Turkey itself. Following last week's ISIS-linked bombing in the…

Mike Coppola/Getty Images Over the last five years, Kanye West has morphed into one of the greatest live performers of our generation. His concert tours are routinely critically acclaimed, and his headlining show at Coachella in 2011 is in the running for the greatest performance in the festival’s…

“These are not bangers, these are artists!” might as well be the official tagline of F. Gary Gray ’s N.W.A biopic, “ Straight Outta Compton ” (named after the rap super-group’s first album). Instead, the line is tossed off by Paul Giamatti (starring as the group’s manager, Jerry Heller) during an…

Getty Jon Stewart slipped unnoticed into the White House in themidst of the October 2011 budget fight, summoned to an Oval Office coffee with PresidentBarack Obama that he jokingly told his escort felt like being called into theprincipal’s office. In February 2014, Obama again requested Stewart make…

Marilyn Monroe sings “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962. (Bettmann/UPI) It is arguably the world’s most popular song: a tune performed billions of times in dozens of countries over more than a century. It has featured in commercials for Frosted Flakes and…

Share Opinion The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization. Last week, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz caught some heat for saying that Captain Kirk would have been a…

Q: I had a professor in school who went on and on about how well the AK-47 was designed. He stressed that as designers we should be able to appreciate an object’s design on a purely aesthetic level. Do you agree? A: Fuck no. Fuck him. Fuck the AK-47. Fuck all guns and the people who design them, but…

I n 2008, Tom Cruise needed to find a way to make people laugh. Hard. Probably at him. After two decades as a bona fide Hollywood sensation, the actor found himself in the midst of a crisis that seemed unimaginable. Over the past four years, he’d fired his publicist, who had told him to curb the…

Spencer Platt Raising the minimum wage is supported by the majority of Americans , but it seems that $15 is just too much for some to handle. That’s the hourly rate fast food workers in New York secured last week for all jobs in their industry. The new minimum, which is set to go into effect…

More than 50,000 people have signed a petition to stop hip-hop superstar Kanye West from performing at the Pan Am Games closing ceremony in Toronto on Sunday. They say organizers should have chosen a Canadian act and shouldn't be supporting such an arrogant and talent-less performer. And this isn't…

Larry Busacca Taylor Swift looked down from her partially-elevated stage. Moments before, her planned stunt — to have a portion of the catwalk rise up into the air of Washington, D.C.'s Nationals Park in what she called her “helicopter thingy” — had fallen short. She was already shaken up. During a…

The hobby of collecting classic videogames has gained quite a lot of popularity in recent years, with more and more people (your author included) spending their free time hunting down game cartridges of yesteryear. Of the classic game machines of old, the original Nintendo Entertainment System has…

The devil in this particular equation? “Legitimacy.” Today news broke that the UFC parted ways with one of their most recognizable figures . Not a fighter, not a commentator, not even a referee—but rather, a cutman by the name of Jacob “Stitch” Duran. Cutmen play a massively important role in the…

Composed almost entirely of sampled content lifted from vinyl records, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing is something of a crate digger’s bible. Eliot Wilder reflects on the landmark hip-hop album, nearly two decades on from its original release . Words: Eliot Wilder When it was released in 1996,…

I like to buy games on day one. I’m not a fan of pre-owned, because I’d rather see my money go to the people who made a video game than the retailer that’s selling it, and also when I’ve been looking forward to a game for months or years I quite often don’t want to wait any longer because I have…

T he boarding procedure has barely started at Chicago O’Hare, and Ben Schlappig has already taken over the first-class cabin. Inside Cathay Pacific Flight 807 bound for Hong Kong, he’s passing out a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of designer chocolates to a small swarm of giggling flight…

President Obama during the singing of Amazing Grace on Friday in Charleston I think Barack Obama’s eulogy yesterday for parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was his most fully successful performance as an orator. It was also one that could have come only at…

I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold. Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio…

I’m a fan of Glenn Thrush. For me, he is in Politico but not of it . But I think he gets this take on Obama , coming off his fractious and steely Iran deal press conference, simply wrong. The image is of a president frantically trying to cram as much legacy as he can into the final quarter of his…

Kent Hernandez/FUSION Of all the ups and downs that I've had in my dating life, the most humiliating moment was having to explain to Siri that I got dumped. "Siri, John isn't my boyfriend anymore," I confided to my iPhone, between sobs. “Do you want me to remember that John is not your boyfriend…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it? By Hossein Derakhshan Illustrations by Tim McDonagh S even months ago , I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building…

Arturo Hernández/Demotix/Corbis The end of the nearly one-mile tunnel through which drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera escaped, Almoloya de Juárez, Mexico, July 12, 2015 Within a few hours of his relaxed escape from Mexico’s highest security prison early Saturday evening, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better…

The Fight Over Plastic Bags Is About a Lot More Than How to Get Groceries Home Photographs by Bobby Doherty Lauren Kuby had a simple ambition: She wanted to get something done. Kuby works by day at a sustainability institute that’s part of Arizona State University in Tempe, but last year she decided…

On a green hill overlooking the tree-lined perimeter of Daejeon, a city in central South Korea, a machine gun turret idly scans the horizon. It’s about the size of a large dog; plump, white and wipe-clean. A belt of bullets – .50 calibre, the sort that can stop a truck in its tracks – is draped over…

by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite In the fall of 1949, the editors of Esquire magazine published Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, billed as the “all-time, all-knowing, all-inclusive, all-man reference book on ‘Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.’” The Handbook included recipes, drink ideas, games, decorating tips,…