At some point in my childhood, I persuaded my parents to buy me a computer game at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obsessed, like many kids, with ancient Egypt, I'd spent the day marvelling at scarabs, sarcophagi, and ivory game pieces with canine heads. My favorite spot was the Temple of Dendur, where you could actually go inside the narrow chamber etched with hieroglyphs. In the gift shop, I spotted "Nile: An Ancient Egyptian Quest"--a three-disk "edutainment," co-produced by the museum and scored by Brian Eno, which invited me to bring the enchantment home. Soon, in defiance of the twelve-and-up rating, I was wandering the tombs of Giza with a talking jackal, searching for grave goods to nourish the souls of kings.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. Next month, Mortal Kombat turns 30. Look back on that 1992 arcade game now and it almost seems quaint. But what many gamers may not remember--or were simply not yet alive to experience--was that Mortal Kombat was the eye in a violence-in-video-games storm. Its spine-ripping gore was the stuff of congressional hearings and contributed to the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which to this day puts content and age ratings on games.

For four years I've waited for a spiritual successor to Never Alone. Part game, part documentary, E-Line Media and Upper One Games managed to adapt traditional Inupiaq folklore into an accessible platformer while educating players about the culture in question. It was flawed, but beautiful and memorable. Memorable enough, I guess, that the BBC got in touch and asked E-Line to do it again. At Gamescom this week I got to take a look at Beyond Blue, a spiritual successor to Never Alone and a companion piece to the BBC documentary Blue Planet 2. As you might expect from the Blue Planet 2 pairing, Beyond Blue takes you deep under the ocean.

The Iñupiat people, a tribe native to Alaska, did not have a written language for much of their history. Instead, for thousands of years, their culture was passed down orally, often in the form of stories that parents and grandparents would tell and entrust to their children. In recent years, those stories, and the lessons and values and history that they contain, have become harder to preserve, as the young people of the tribe, growing up in the modern world, have drifted further and further from traditional ways. This video, which originally appeared on "The New Yorker Presents" (Amazon Originals) and is based on a story by Simon Parkin, is about a recent experiment in transmitting Iñupiat culture through a new medium: a video game. The tribe worked with a New York-based company called E-Line to create a game based on an old Iñupiat tale called "Kunuuksaayuka," in which an Iñupiat child travels across the wilderness to find the source of the bitter blizzards that have been hitting his village.

With over 2 million apps in Apple's App Store, it can be hard to find the ones that suit you best. We're here to take the tedium out of your search. If you're a politics junkie, you know there are a lot of polls to keep up with in the heat of the presidential campaign. TPM (Talking Points Memo) has released an app that lets you "follow" the races you're interested in and sends a push notification to your device every time a new poll comes out. If you don't want to wait until dinner to learn the latest poll results, this app is for you.