Previously on Alan Wake… In 2010, bestselling author Alan Wake took his wife Alice on vacation to Washington State. There—after enduring years of writer’s block—he was finally motivated to embark on a manuscript for a new novel, Departure. But when the events described in that work-in-progress started coming true in real life, Alan realized he needed to hurry up and write an ending...
It was already after 11pm. My husband found me in our bathroom, where I was working to pull my hair up into a lazy French twist. I clipped the knot into place with a barrette. “Are you getting dressed for Pokémon?” my husband asked me, bewildered. I didn’t answer. Instead, I put on a necklace. My husband smirked at me. Then he looked at himself in the mirror. “I already look like a...
Editor’s note: There are a number of articles between 2015 and 2016 I have no recollection of writing but, as Paste Games’s then-assistant editor, I was supposed to be contributing regularly. (I preferred to hide out and edit others.) At this point, I’d been a GamerGate target for 32 months. This text is frantic—the kind of disorganized thinking that reads like hastily...
Any end-of-year ranking is not going to be easy work—but ranking mobile games is perhaps toughest of all. It’s very much comparing apples to Mack trucks: One app might be something of a simple toy, while the next may be a full-fledged RPG, for instance. Still, it’s a task we here at Paste Games are willing to undertake. We’ve whittled this list down to just ten of 2015’s best. (Eleven, really...
On Friday, Rhizome published a restoration of three CD-ROM games from the 1990s by Theresa Duncan, which you can play here. Duncan’s work has been largely and unjustly forgotten since the 1990s, and this restoration project was inspired, in no small part, by a 2012 article on Duncan’s work by Jenn Frank. To mark the restoration of the games, Jenn Frank spoke at a panel...
Entry 8: Gamergate is the most expansive real-world ARG in video game history. Editor’s note: Being asked to contribute to a end-of-year letters series at Slate was a dream come true—but trying to evaluate GamerGate and put it in its “historical context” when you’re still very much experiencing it, is assuming a pose of objectivity that must surely be deleterious to...
Frankly, it’s about time we heard what Jenn’s favorite games of 2014 were. In 2005 Jenn started writing 90- and 120-word game reviews for Electronic Gaming Monthly; from 2006 to 2008 she was dreadful as 1UP.com’s CM. Fortunately, she is better remembered for her irregular appearances on Retronauts, a podcast about being an old person. Since 2008 she has written for Kill...
I tented my fingers, bending them into a writerly stretch. Then I poised my hands over my new laptop’s keyboard, a musician ready to compose on her instrument. I froze, waiting for inspiration to strike me down. It wasn’t right, I wasn’t ready. Something was missing. I’d already installed Scrivener, for writing; Notepad++, for blogging and code; LibreOffice, for editing...
The original Game Boy is always called the original Game Boy. In the videogames industry, where everything is in flux and obsolescence is planned, this naming convention—”original Game Boy”—is anomalous. For instance: We often refer to the first PlayStation, retroactively, as the “PS1.” Even original-formula Coca-Cola is called “Coke Classic,” while old-school Mountain Dew is...
“We should hire based on merit rather than gender.” It’s a great idea in theory, but can it work in practice? Editor’s note: One of my strengths, debatably, is patiently explaining certain concepts to my two core demographics—straight guys with good intentions, and my readers’ own Baby Boomer moms. A lot of these Explainers are mortifying for me to revisit...