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I do my clearest thinking while waiting for things — queues, loading screens, coffee to brew. And for the last few years, my waiting-time activity of choice has been quick mental challenges in a browser tab. ...

Let me confess something that will destroy whatever cool points I had left: I still play dress-up games. I've been quietly styling virtual characters since the era when these games were a single flash file on a...

Some people play soccer. The rest of us coach from a keyboard — and honestly, I've made peace with that. My football career peaked in middle school when I was chosen third-to-last for a team, so these days I ...

It's Friday night, the backlog is empty, and I have fourteen browser tabs open — half of them game portals, none of them actually exciting me. Every player knows this specific hunger. It isn't for something g...

My nephew came home with his first Chromebook for school, brimming with excitement, and immediately tried to install a game. The app store said no. He tried a download. The Chromebook said no. He looked at me w...

Say it with me: just one more run. There is a specific hour of the night when endless runner games online stop being a game and become a personality test. My personal record for "just one more run" is, I'm emba...

There is one specific moment in gaming where my brain goes completely quiet, and it's this: the first zombie rounds the corner, I check my ammo, and I realize I have twelve bullets, two hundred meters of hallwa...

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...