A Game About Conservatory is somewhere between being a game and guided meditation. It is also, I guess, music criticism, though not of the Pitchfork variety. The game does what it says on the tin. You are in a music conservatory, discussing scores, recordings, and practice with your fellow students.
The Internet is, by and large, an ugly place. This is a reality partially informed by the choices we each make (some more than others, granted) but largely attributable to choices made upstream, before websites arrive on our screens. To beautify the Internet, then, is to wrest control away from the
There is officially nowhere you can go to hide from the interminable agony that is this election, especially online. To wit: Cory Doctorow, by way of Motherboard, reports that tensions between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump loyalists have boiled over on Second Life (2003). More to the point, Trump
On May 22, 2014, after months of anti-government protests, the Royal Thai Armed Forces overthrew the country’s government, repealed its constitution, and established rule by military junta. It was a momentous event that flew under Western radars by dint of being the country’s 12th coup since 1932. T
Molleindustria’s Nova Alea is a parable in search of a game. It is the story of real estate speculation, housing bubbles, and capitalism run amok. The story takes place on a chessboard—that or a graveyard for skyscrapers. Maybe both. “For its masters,” the gentle-voiced narrator intones, “the city w
There are many reasons a writer might resort to fabulism. None of them are sufficient justifications, but some are more understandable than others. Chief among these reasons, one imagines, is the undeniable fact that transcription is miserable, tedious work. Steno Hero, with apologies to Donald Trum
Liyla and the Shadows of War is a game about a young girl living in Gaza during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more than that because Apple has declared it too political to count as a game in its App Store. On Tuesday afternoon, developer Rasheed Abueideh said Li
Liam Wong, Ubisoft’s graphic design director, takes dope photographs. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The obvious temptation with Wong’s photography, which is posted on Instagram and sold on Society 6, is to liken it to his work in videogames. Insofar as games are our main point of refere
Hugo Arcier’s FPS is about last year’s attacks in Paris, though it is not immediately clear in precisely what way. We know this because the artist says as much on his website: “FPS is a post November 2015 Paris attacks art piece. The artist deals with blindness hijacking video game codes, in particu
The idea of innovation is often much cooler than innovation itself. Jetpacks, for instance, still capture the imagination in ways that a Boeing 737 does not. The former still looks like the future, even if that is a qualification it only holds because such a future has always failed to materialize.
The mindfulness group meets every Wednesday in a room with obscenely grimy chairs and an even more obscenely good view. This week’s subject was emotions. There they were, laid out in a circle: six basic emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—each sprouting a few sub-emotions
Playing videogames is overrated. This is, I’ll grant you, not a position that videogame writers tend to take. In varying measures, we are known to value continued employment, professional relevance, and the grudging tolerance of our readers. There are, however, pleasures to be gleaned from videogame
All space travel is fiction. Alright, it’s not fake in the “we didn’t go to the moon” sense of the term, but it necessarily involves the creation of tales to justify what remains a riotously expensive undertaking. “Major achievements in space contribute to the national prestige,” American Secretary
If an object does not exist on a map, does it exist at all? Do you? You can see it with your own two eyes, and yet it is exists outside your world. In the early days of mapping, when much of the world was unknown, such discoveries simply expanded the known universe. There was a world beyond maps. Bu
Who among us hasn’t looked at a car and thought, “What if this complicated mechanical device operated a little bit more like the bestselling game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014)?” A version of this thought may have passed through the minds of Elon Musk and the people of Tesla, who announced on Thu
You shake some cereal into a bowl and pick up a box of milk. As you’re about to pour, you see a sign on its side: Have you seen this building? Well, not exactly. Some mischief has been done here. At least it’s mischief of the architectural instead of criminal variety. (Granted, this line is occasion
We are all just collections of limbs and appendages, naked before the Internet. Some of us—or some of our devices—just may not know this yet. Curiously, it’s our devices that lag that lag behind in this regard. The Internet, as was correctly noted in Avenue Q, may be for porn, but identifying nudity
Fashion, like everything else in the age of technology, is about fear—fear of what is coming next; fear of looking silly in the long run; fear of trying something new. How else to explain the often-underwhelming interpretations of “Manus x Machina: Fashion In An Age Of Technology” theme for last nig
Don Draper, John Hamm’s suave protagonist in the dearly departed series Mad Men (2007-2015), didn’t so much as work in advertising as embody the field. At an instinctive level, he understood that aspirations wrapped up in objects need to be made tangible, and that advertising is a means to that end.
The refugees in London design collective Embassy for the Displaced’s video “Where the Land Meets Sea” are not moving; they have already moved. That is why they are on the island of Lesvos in Greece. They might want to keep moving, but they are stuck on Lesvos. That’s the problem. “Where the Land Mee
Content warning: This article discusses suicide and depression. /// Most days can be good days, even when you’re diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Or at least they can be made to look as such. You learn to put on a good face, to make it through the day. All of this means that when you spiral—an
True to form, Sam Hinkie was not wrong when he wrote “the NBA can be a league of desperation” in a letter to the Philadelphia 76ers’ equity partners last week. Hinkie, having quit his position with that letter, is now the former president and general manager of the 76ers. And more importantly, he ma
Assuming you are not already a vegetarian, what would it take for you to renounce meat? What previously unseen sight would turn you to swear off steak? What heretofore unheard fact would get you to give up fried chicken? Perhaps it would it help if the point were made in brand spankin’ new virtual r
Let’s say you’ve just come into some money. Maybe you earned it through your labors. Maybe you didn’t—no need to get bogged down in the details. Anyhow, you have this money. Now what? A series of choices present themselves, which is to say that this situation has the makings of a game. Well, at leas
The architect Zaha Hadid, who died in Miami last Thursday at the age of 65, was one of design’s great optimists. Only an optimist could dream up the billowing curves of Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev Center, which sprout from the ground, rise like sine curves, and blend into one another without ever mee
