Gaming

If you like playing video games but have a hard time fitting them into your schedule, you’re not alone.

Four players take on waves of zombies in a post-apocalyptic landscape: it doesn’t sound like the most innovative proposition, but Valve infused this enthralling co-op blaster with brilliant technical flourishes.

SHANGHAI, Aug 30 (Reuters) - China has forbidden under-18s from playing video games for more than three hours a week, a stringent social intervention that it said was needed to pull the plug on a growing addiction to what it once described as "spiritual opium".

Of the many fantasies humanity has entertained, conquering time has been paramount, whether through time machines, freezing, or reversing. If time is the great consumer, then those that control time control the universe.

Game engines: everything runs on them, barely anyone outside of developers really know what they're all about.

Being a parent can feel, at times, like leading an authoritarian nation of one.

The ultimate point of playing video games has always been to have fun. Whether it’s Space Invaders or Sonic or Red Dead Redemption, you hit the start button and do your thing until game over – and then you probably wipe the sweat off your hands and do it again.

In 2013, I was just starting to really get paid to write about video games. Video game magazines were drying up, but I wanted to know about the history of my field and get a sense of where the “old game journalism” had gone right and wrong before the print magazines started to go belly up.

The Ryan Reynolds action comedy topped the box office this weekend, but as the first non-IP Disney release in years, that wasn’t a sure thing. The minds behind the movie talk about how the film came together and how it evolved in the years since its conception.

For many players these days, the video game industry’s increasing reliance on online connections is an afterthought. But for the significant portion of the world without a quality Internet connection, it can sometimes feel like the game industry at large is leaving them behind.

China has barred online gamers under the age of 18 from playing on weekdays and limited their play to just three hours most weeks, marking a significant escalation of restrictions on the country's massive gaming industry.

Breaking out a new cooperative board game is always a cooperative experience. Everyone works together to find the best strategies to navigate an unknown landscape and achieve victory. But some games keep that co-op spirit alive after that first playthrough.

Not quite, but I like what I see.

In May, as part of an otherwise unremarkable corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida made an interesting announcement.

We’re seeing a ton of new games, and many of them blur the lines between video games and other types of activities. This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.