Video Games

They look like slot machines. They sound like slot machines.

But they aren’t in casinos — which is the only place you are supposed to be able to find slot machines in Missouri. 

Thousands of new gaming devices have been popping up at gas stations, veterans homes, union halls and fraternal lodges across the state. Their growing presence has raised the hackles of state regulators and the traditional gambling industry, which says the machines are draining business from them. 

Updated 10:45 a.m., May 21, to reflect new witness statements — The first time Tamsen Reed heard the rumors was over a text message from a soon-to-be roommate. Almost immediately, she began to feel trapped.

The rumors kept piling on. She’d hear them in her university classrooms. Once, a stranger shared them with one of Reed’s housemates, not realizing they lived together. Another time, a date brought them up to Reed.

In a dark classroom at Francis Howell Central High School, students are gathered around a glowing projector screen displaying a video game. On it, avatars shoot machine guns, blasters and orbs at each other.

The students are watching a video of a match they played against students from another high school earlier in the week — “reviewing tape,” like high school football players do after a game.

It’s an all-too-familiar battle for some parents — getting their kids to stop playing video games and do their homework.

But in one classroom at St. Louis University, video games are just another learning tool, like textbooks or worksheets. The course, Intensive Italian for Gamers, is a hybrid of traditional instruction and in-class video gaming. The preliminary results are promising, with students in the class scoring higher on their finals than those in traditional Italian classes at SLU.

Could a St. Louis game producer be responsible for the next Cards Against Humanity or Minecraft? On Monday’s St. Louis on the Air, host Don Marsh discussed what turns out to be a bustling independent game production community in St. Louis.

There are several dozen tabletop game developers and hundreds of professional (and hobbyist!) digital game developers located in the St. Louis region. At the last St. Louis Game Jam, a weekend-long meetup where people develop a game, over 300 people attended, making it the second biggest jam in the country.

In late 2015, St. Louis filmmakers James Reichmuth and Alessio Summerfield were looking for subjects to include in a documentary film about locally produced video games. They found an ideal source in Butterscotch Shennanigans, a game development studio, that “was putting out a huge game at the time” and “going through some personal turmoil.”

Pokémon Go has become an unequivocal sensation in the past couple of weeks across the world and right here in St. Louis. On the negative side, it has been associated with some crime.

Sam Coster had an unusual inspiration for his hit computer game – his fight against cancer.

“The game is designed specifically to deliver a feeling of awe and wonder and immersion so it’s literally designed to be the place that I wanted and needed to go during cancer treatment,” Sam said.

There is a new way to look at video games coming out of St. Louis. The Pixel Press Floors app, which was released Wednesday for iPad, allows people to draw their own video game levels on graph paper.  The app then allows users to take a picture of their drawing and turn that picture into a “run-and-jump Mario-esque style” video game.