Forty years ago, a trio of student teachers created the most popular educational game of all-time.

Tom Bissell was an acclaimed young writer when he started playing Grand Theft Auto. For the last three years he has been sleep deprived, cocaine fueled, and barely able to write a word—and he has no regrets.

How the 130-year-old game company bounced back with the Switch.

How a teenage gamer in the hottest new esport, Overwatch, became a reluctant icon for South Korea’s feminist movement.

The story behind an online gamer’s suicide.

Details from a Lord of the Rings fantasy game interrupt details of a tragic, complicated personal life.

"Right about now, I assume you’ve gotten a bit bored. Dead babies! Let me tell you, dying babies bore the shit out of pretty much everyone, I’ve learned. So, let me take a moment to tell you a humorous LOTRO anecdote (that is, Lord of the Rings Online) about my level 25 minstrel character, Sinuviel. You see, LOTRO is free up to a point, and great fun if you have access to a computer that is badass enough to run it. Just before my fiancé, James, died, I bought a refurbished ASUS laptop for dirt cheap, and it was the best thing in the world for distracting me from how boring my dying child was to everyone I’d ever known."

How Gary Gygax, a semi-employed shoe repairman, built and lost the Dungeons & Dragons empire.

From pinball prohibition in 1940s NYC to Dave & Buster’s, the rise and fall of the American arcade.

A “crude table-tennis arcade game” called Pong and the birth of the video game industry.

The surprising anti-monopolist origins of the world’s most popular board game.

Jonathan Blow is both the video game industry’s most cynical critic and its most ambitious game developer. As he finishes his indescribable game-opus, a trip inside the head of a videogame auteur.

In which the author’s wife attempts to break the world record in Tetris.

Inside the most ubiquitous distraction of its era.