This is a post about our being in possession of a new cache of images of policemen behaving badly. Plus ça change, eh? OK, maybe some context is needed here: The images in question are new screens from This Is The Police, which completed a successful Kickstarter campaign this February and is slated
Melancholia is meant to be seen on the largest screen possible. Reruns of Law and Order SVU are meant to be seen on your laptop. Puppy gifs are meant to be seen on your phone. (OK, that’s a lie. Puppy gifs are meant to be seen anywhere and everywhere.) From each according to its content, to each acc
Pavilion doesn’t explain itself. The kind souls at Visiontrick Media have left that to scribes and, as was announced today, owners of PC, Mac, and Linux computers by the end of the year. Let’s give it a try, shall we? (The new trailer below should help.) Pavilion is a puzzle. What isn’t? As was prev
The narrative arc of history bends towards our being able to reach through a screen and actually touch Lumino City. Everything between now and then is just a stopgap measure. Meet the latest stopgap, Lumino City for iPad and iPhone: You may have noticed that it looks just like Lumino City, as well
What’s the difference between art and architecture? Here’s Archdaily’s Vanessa Quirk with a run of the mill definition: Art is a form of self-expression with absolutely no responsibility to anyone or anything. Architecture can be a piece of art, but it must be responsible to people and its context.
The Walls Have Ears is security theatre, but what isn’t? Body scanners at airports, metal detectors at sports stadia, fancy uniforms that imply nonexistent authority—it’s all a big show. The Walls Have Ears is about that show, but you’re a performer. More accurately, you’re a desk jockey at an unnam
Kadeisha Buchanan, the best young player at this summer’s Women’s World Cup, is a fantastic talent, the kind of player you can only dream of being. That’s why the news that a select few female soccer players would be included in the latest edition of FIFA was so exciting. That’s also why the news th
In city builder games, the player is god. No capitalization is called for here: She is looking on from on high, but she is not omnipotent; she must watch human forces desecrate her creations from the heavens above. Most games grant their players agency they would otherwise lack, but the risk of POV-
I first covered Riot — Civil Unrest in the midst of the protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray. It’s always the midst of something. The news cycle leaves injustices behind with alarming regularity, but it never lacks for new sadness to glom on to. There’s no comfort in such predictabil
The Contender is a tabletop game that combines the rhetoric of political campaigns and the mechanics of Cards Against Humanity, all of which raises a thorny interpretive question: Would tonight’s second Republican presidential debate be improved if it were replaced by a televised game of The Contend
We expect our surgeons to have steady hands. Some of the time, our lives depend on it. But what happens when that steadiness deserts a surgeon? Like a golfer with the yips, one crisis leads to the next, spreading outwards to affect the surgeon’s professional life and his emotional state. Suddenly, t
For a character who has already died, Dracula sure is a chill dude. In Hotel Transylvania, the 2012 children’s movie that has a sequel coming out this month, Dracula is clumsily adjusting to domesticity. In Mel Brooks’ 1995 parody of traditional vampire stories, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Dracula
“Japan just created a Google Street View for cats,” reports Vox’s Margarita Noriega, which sounds like a pretty good deal. A series of maps and visualizations created by Hiroshima prefecture’s tourism board, show a number of popular routes from the just-above-ground POV of a feline. As you stroll th
The Candidate, director Michael Ritchie’s 1972 political satire, depicted an exaggerated political milieu in which even the most earnest of candidates is shallow and ultimately believes in nothing more than getting elected. Ritchie’s exaggerated world, in other words, is the world we now live in. Th
Every new film that is at least tangentially about digital technology should open with a title card proclaiming: “At least it’s not yet another Steve Jobs movie.” So, here is the trailer for The Gamechangers, BBC Two’s film about the development of Grand Theft Auto and its accompanying moral panic.
Sharing is largely incidental to what has come to be known as the “sharing economy.” It is simply a solution to the larger problem of allocating resources. Let’s say you have a possession—it doesn’t have to be a car or a domicile. Let’s call it a widget. You use it some, but definitely not all of th
Where, if anywhere, is the line between casually offensive videogames and transparently hateful videogames situated? How many white, male playable characters and tokenized female or minority NPCs does a game need before we declare that the whole enterprise is rotten? These questions come up with ala
To be, or not to be—that is a rhetorical question, and it gets at the challenges facing anyone who wishes to convert Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a videogame. Games are about the ways user choices can shape a narrative and Hamlet—well, let’s just say he prefers to keep his own counsel. Every level mus
For a brief, glorious period in the mid-20th century, Jack Webb was the voice of every detective in America. Most famously, he was the voice—and, later, corporeal manifestation—of Sergeant Joe Friday on the ür-procedural Dragnet. Webb also provided the voice for the titular, simile-dropping lead in
You wake up to a series of missed messages on your phone. Shit, today’s going to be horrible. Today is taking place in Open the Door and Smile, an entry in the 33rd Ludum Dare game jam, and it does indeed look like it’s shaping up to be horrible. There are messages on the phone from your partner, s
Instagram announced on Thursday that its signature 1:1 aspect ratio was no more. An update for Android and iOS clients will allow users to upload full-sized portrait and landscape photos. The square will remain Instagram’s fundamental unit, but its value as a cultural currency has been devaluated. W
Welcome to the future! Truth be told, it’s pretty grimy. At various moments in time, this assessment could have been applied to both Mars and the VHS tape, which is convenient because Printed Mars is about both of those things. In Vladstorm’s game for Mac, PC, and Linux, your pixelated character wak
Scale is a puzzle game with a straightforward elevator pitch: “You wield a device that can make any item any size.” This is a popular pitch. It earned the game $108,020 in funding from over 5,000 backers during its Kickstarter campaign. Steve Swink, Scale’s creator, subsequently created an alpha ver
