What Makes Us Want To Be Gamers

This has been gone over in many other articles, but the short version is that what the player sees in VR is strong enough to trigger an instinctual expectation of motion that, when the body doesn't feel it, causes a nausea reaction. You're seeing something that the brain knows is wrong based on physical feedback; the most likely cause based on data from the last several million years of evolution is some kind of ingested toxin, so systems get purged to remove the poisons from the body as fast as possible. Personally I just get a nasty headach and woozy feeling, but other people need an emergency bucket available. The cost/benefit ratio to FPS VR is completely off, no matter how cool it seems before the reaction kicks in. At this point I've learned the best thing to do with a VR FPS is to poke in for no more than two to three minutes to get a sense of the environment, and then switch back to the monitor and never use the headset for it again.


The lore behind these creatures is unknown but likely unpleasant. It seems as if these warriors met their demise in the frozen parts of the world and returned due to dark powers. Who knows how many Strays are buried in the frozen ice and snow, just waiting for the player to come al

LaurenArtist was inspired by the stories of Dracula with this beautiful castle. Here, the choice of location is important too and just adds to the effect of it being a solitary gothic castle in the middle of nowhere. Perfect for players who love to be fancy and a bit drama


The trend of building homes that don't look like homes is one of the best ones in Minecraft . It lets players innovate and think outside of the box. A home is wherever the minecraft Strategy bed is, and that could even be a massive battleship docked in the middle of an ocean bi

So what convinces us to play games in the first place? To answer that, you’d need to look at every game ever made, because that’s the solution. Because of everything games can, have, and will ever do.

A lot of us remember our very first video game rather fondly. While I’m not going to explain my own life story, I will say that I was first hooked on video games through my older cousins’ Sega Genesis systems, specifically the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Much of my interest in gaming as a whole came from the Yuji Naka-created mascot. It wasn’t the only set of games on the Genesis available to me at the time, but it was without question the series that hooked me. It began my own journey humbly, but in retrospect, it’s actually quite difficult to articulate why it was so interesting to me. This is a situation that many of us recall, but rarely ever examine deeply. Think about your first video game, the one that convinced you to pick up a controller and keep playing till the end credits, the one that convinced you to try another game afterward. What exactly was it about that first game that hooked you and urged you to keep playing from then till today? In essence, what appealed to you about that game that made you "a gamer"?


Rather than going for an evil wizard's castle, however, why not instead create a lava blade house, which looks like a sword stuck into the ground? That's the path AtrixStd went for in their build, which also has a tutorial available on their YouTube chan

The result is, usually, pure unadulterated madness. Whereas this same set up can be annoying in games like Battletoads, here the die and die again as a result of your friends method is embraced with a level of carefree joy that matches the game's initially confounding visual design. Cloudberry Kingdom's multiplayer sessions are some of the best bonding experiences out there, despite the fact you'll spend most the time with them resenting everyone around you.

The only rules here are the game can't be a shooter (obviously) and have to be on a current gen system, or be a PC game released roughly between 2006 and 2013. That type of timeframe means a lot of great had to be cut and, to help make those decisions, I really tried to focus on games that provided a multiplayer experience you couldn't get prior to this generation. However, some exceptions do apply.

The collective groans of the Assassin's Creed faithful heard upon the announcement the game was getting a multiplayer mode were not only noted, but honestly were not without merit when considering gaming's long history of tacking on multiplayer modes to games best left as single player experiences. While that could have easily been the case here, thankfully the boys and girls at Ubisoft recognized the inherit potential of a multiplayer mode within this world, and executed it.

What do I mean by that? In game development terms, a "vertical slice," is a gameplay segment of finished or near-finished quality that showcases all the planned features of a game to potential investors. At the start of a project, these are a massive sink for time and effort, since they essentially involve doing all the hard parts of finishing a game to complete one 10-minute section. Generally, they’re seen as a bad practice. However, toward the end of development, it’s a lot easier to pull assets together for a vertical slice. Of course, if you’re shopping your game around to publishers at that stage, you’re probably in a lot of trouble, but a standalone "vertical slice" can also serve as a strong alternative to a traditional demo.