Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Toxicity Problem in Gaming Communities — Where It Comes From and How to Fix It Gaming communities have a toxicity problem. This is not news. What's less well understood is the specific architectur...
Read article →The Anime That Changed How People Think About Death and Grief Certain stories arrive at the right moment and reshape how a generation thinks about something. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a clust...
Read article →How Gaming Became the Last Third Place for Young Men The third place is a concept from sociology — somewhere that's not home (first place) or work (second place) but a social environment where people...
Read article →Fan Fiction and Emotional Processing — Why So Many People Write It Somewhere in the range of several million people are currently writing stories about characters they don't own. They're extending nar...
Read article →Gaming and Depression — When Games Are the Only Thing That Gets You Out of Bed There's a period of depression that some people describe as the floor period — when getting out of bed feels like climbin...
Read article →The Mental Health Benefits of Narrative Games Nobody Talks About The conversation about games and mental health usually goes one of two directions. Either games are harmful — addictive, violent, antis...
Read article →Gaming Addiction or Gaming Refuge — How to Tell the Difference The word addiction is doing a lot of work in conversations about gaming, and it's doing some of that work badly. When parents describe th...
Read article →Isekai and the Fantasy of Starting Over — What It Says About Modern Life A person dies — hit by a truck, usually, though the method varies — and wakes up in another world. They have special abilities...
Read article →Solo RPG and AI — The Perfect Partnership Tabletop RPGs were designed for groups. The whole machinery — the dungeon master, the party dynamics, the shared table — assumes you have friends who are free...
Read article →Cozy Gaming as Anxiety Treatment — Stardew Valley as Therapy Mental health professionals weren't recommending Stardew Valley. The recommendation emerged from patients themselves, who arrived in therap...
Read article →The Loneliness of High-Ranked Competitive Gaming There's a specific kind of loneliness that comes with getting very good at something. The skills that elevate your rank separate you from the people yo...
Read article →Parasocial Relationships in Gaming — When Streamers Feel Like Friends You watch someone play games for a hundred hours. You know their laugh, their expressions when something goes wrong, their opinion...
Read article →Why We Grieve When an MMO Shuts Down The shutdown announcement comes with a date. Somewhere between thirty and ninety days from now, the servers will go offline and a world you've spent years in will...
Read article →The People Who Were Ready First When researchers and journalists began documenting the rise of human-AI companionship as a mainstream phenomenon, they were often surprised to find that gamers had been...
Read article →VTubers and Parasocial Bonds — The Next Evolution of Connection Something unusual happens when you watch a VTuber for long enough. The avatar — a bouncing anime character controlled by a real person y...
Read article →The Friendship That Shouldn't Work There is a version of this story that almost every gamer who is now past thirty has lived through: the friend you made online, in a game, ten or fifteen years ago —...
Read article →The Group That Was Just a Group The guild started, the way most of them do, as a functional arrangement. A group of players who needed each other to complete content that none of them could manage alo...
Read article →The Education That Was Happening in Plain Sight For roughly three decades, anime has been one of the most emotionally sophisticated popular art forms available to young people — and particularly to yo...
Read article →The App You Almost Deleted Most men who have tried a mental health app describe a version of the same experience: they download it during a difficult period, open it a few times, feel vaguely patroniz...
Read article →The Age at Which Men Stop Making Friends There is a graph that social scientists have drawn repeatedly, across different countries and demographics, that tells a quiet and uncomfortable story. It show...
Read article →The Feeling That Something Is Wrong With You There is a particular kind of discomfort that some men experience when someone does something kind for them. Not discomfort at the kindness exactly, but at...
Read article →The Part You Have to Get Past First If you are encountering waifu culture from the outside, the first impression is probably the obstacle. The artwork. The body proportions that belong to no biologica...
Read article →The Thing That Goes Unsaid There is a conversation that happens between men and the women who love them that almost nobody has. Not the argument about dishes or the negotiation about finances or the d...
Read article →What the Data Actually Shows The popular narrative about men and romantic love goes something like this: men are more guarded, less attached, quicker to move on. Women are the ones who fall hard and s...
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