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I'll be honest: I made fun of clicker games online for years. A game where you tap and a number goes up? That's not a game, I said, that's a spreadsheet with a pulse. Then one slow Sunday I decided to try one "...

The first time my cousin Chloe asked me to find her some "games for girls," I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly pulled something. Games are games, I told her, and handed her my favorite shooter. She yawned. Then ...

My entire childhood fighting-game career can be summarized as: insert coin, pick the guy with the coolest hat, mash every button in a panic, and lose spectacularly within ninety seconds. I never learned a singl...

When I was a kid, I drew maps of fictional islands on graph paper and kept them in a ring binder labeled, with impressive seriousness, "EXPEDITIONS." Twenty years later, very little has changed — except the b...

My best friend moved three hundred miles away last year, and our weekly "game night" survived anyway. Not because we invested in expensive consoles and cross-play accounts — we played browser games online, th...

I once played a stacking game in a grocery store line for so long that the cashier finished scanning my stuff, processed the two people behind me, and then asked — genuinely concerned — whether I was okay. ...

I spent most of my twenties trying to organize five-a-side football that never actually happened. Three mates would drop out by Wednesday. The goalkeeper would text "bit emotional today" at noon. The pitch we b...

Three seconds. That's how long it takes between clicking a game and being in a fight. No cutscene, no tutorial that explains what a jump is, no prologue where I have to rescue a village to learn the controls. I...

I'd like to formally apologize to every virtual soldier I've ever led into a wall while trying to find the fire button. My aim has always been a work in progress, my reaction time is "optimistic," and my proude...

My first racing game was a plastic steering wheel that clicked when you turned it, connected to a console my parents insisted would "rot my brain." Thirty years later I have a grown-up job, a real car, and abso...

Somewhere in my childhood there's a living room where the TV was permanently tuned to a bubble popping show, and my mom could clear a level I'd been stuck on for a week without even looking up from her tea. She...

I can still smell my hometown arcade hall: ozone, popcorn and the nervous sweat of somebody one life away from beating the high score. I spent half my childhood feeding quarters into the same few cabinets, tapp...