It first hit me during A Quiet Place, as John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s fictional kids quietly played a board game by firelight on a reclaimed wood table, a vertical garden growing out of planters on the wall. I had noticed earlier how nicely Krasinski stayed dressed in the film’s post-apocalypse, in unfussy but…

Earlier this week, Sony held a press conference during the Paris Games Week trade show. If you follow games, you’re intimately familiar with what ensued: a lot of blue lights, a handful of enthusiastically delivered sales notes from a charisma-less executive in an ill-fitting suit, and a series of short trailers and…

Keyboard Geniuses is our weekly glance at a few intriguing, witty, or otherwise notable posts from the Gameological discussion threads. Comments have been excerpted and edited here for grammar, length, and/or clarity. You can follow the links to see the full threads.

A pompous, awkward, acne-spotted 16-year-old, Harold Lauder is one of the few immune to the superflu that wipes out 98 percent of humanity in Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic masterwork. But while others mourn the dead, Harold revels in the demise of his bullies and naysayers. The end of the world means the end of his…

As Matt Gerardi noted in his review this week, the nuke-ravaged world of Fallout 4 places a greater emphasis than ever on community—a point that Matt extends in the first entry below. Fallout 4 is part of a long tradition in games where indefatigable survivors carve out a tiny slice of heaven in a world sent to hell.…

This installment’s question comes from A.V. Club contributor Zack Handlen:

The 2015 Writers Guild of America Awards are being handed out on February 14, and the nominees for the Video Game Writing category have been announced. According to Variety, not one, but two Assassins Creed entries—Freedom Cry and Unity—are up for the honor, competing against Alien: Isolation and The Last Of Us: Left…

In her 1992 book Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film, film academic Carol Clover noted that at the peak of slasher films’ popularity in the late ’70s and early ’80s, they presented an intriguing shift in gender representation on screen. More strong female characters were being pushed to the…

This week’s question, which we’re visiting amid all the talk around the new Silent Hill and its bizarre teaser, comes courtesy of Gameological reader Christopher Arp:

The Last Of Us, Naughty Dog’s post fungal-apocalypse drama, has been showered with just about every possible accolade and award a video game can hope to receive (including the most cherished of all, being named The A.V. Club readers’ favorite game of 2013). And now, to celebrate its towering artistic achievement in…

This week, I’m joined by Gameological contributor Drew Toal, who recently went and joined the hordes of people who own new consoles with nothing to play on them. For his first PlayStation 4 game, Drew grabbed Wolfenstein: The New Order. When he told me he wasn’t digging the game after playing for a bit, I suggested…

Today’s question is something of a follow-up to our last Q&A about in-game pop culture, and it comes from our own John Teti: Most of the time, when a video game is successful—artistically or commercially—we start anticipating the sequel. But once in a while, you play a game that feels truly finished, one that doesn’t…

The Last Of Us, which was The A.V. Club readership’s astute pick for the best game of 2013, is set to become a live-action motion picture. As reported in a report from The Hollywood Reporter reporter Rebecca Ford, the game’s creative director, Neil Druckmann, will write the screenplay for a film adaptation of the…

Yesterday, Sony published a feature-length documentary on YouTube that chronicles the making of The Last Of Us, the post-apocalyptic drama from Naughty Dog (and The A.V. Club readers’ choice for the best game of 2013). The behind-the-scenes look, titled Grounded: The Making Of The Last Of Us, was previously…