By Chloe Cramutola, Investigative Editor
• February 20, 2025
The gaming industry has been blown to pixelated bits.
It’s not because of its games. It’s not the expensive, downloadable content or DEI controversies.
It’s how the industry is treating its workers — the very talents who make the games we know and love.
Enthusiasts should certainly share their critiques, but when leaks are framed as gaming “news,” fans often blame the company instead of those spreading classified information.
In past articles for my column, I have touched briefly on derivative work and modding in the gaming sphere, but never was it the focus of my article. My commentary from October 2021 on drama in the Super...
The Japanese video game The Touhou Project may be described as peripherally well known due to its cult status, but its rich fan contributions are anything but.
If we don’t oppose a loose interpretation of the language of activism for freelancers commentators for Nintendo, the subversive power of the idea of a strike will be lost further.
Instead of pinning the blame entirely on developers, we should instead focus our attention on the ways they are incentivized to limit the release of their work.
Esports and video games are a great thing, and their communities have the potential to reflect that even more. However, they demonstrate with particular clarity the systemic factors that facilitate an epidemic of sexual assault. They are the same factors that plague our world outside of gaming, including our own lives as Boston University students.
For the foreseeable future, this great cycle of nostalgia will continue. Even the painful or annoying periods of life may transform into fond memories, but remembering good times is bittersweet. As always, all we can do is enjoy the present — the only time we ever actually live in.
If Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ reputation for posterity is going to be “the pandemic game” — which seems to be the case, if 2020 year-in-review articles are any indication — I hope people remember more than just its obvious utility as an escapist fantasy.
The 8-Bit Big Band understands the nostalgic soundtrack behind every popular video game, performing their jazz take on the themes at the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday.
