In 1942, two years after the Battle of Britain, the question of how to deter or fend off future German attacks on the British Isles remained urgent. How else to account for the Maunsell Forts, a series of structures in the Thames and Mersey estuaries that sat atop pylons and served as platforms for
Don’t look now but Ted Cruz won the Republican vote in the Iowa caucus. (At the time of writing, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were on track to split Iowa’s Democratic delegates.) Or maybe you want to look. I don’t know you or your political views. At the very least it seems safe to bet that at
I solved the Israeli-Palestinian situation over the weekend, and the experience didn’t fill me with hope for the future. Let’s backtrack a little: Benjamin Netanyahu is still Israel’s prime minister, Palestinian statehood is still far from a reality, and international pressure or support for any jus
They say we eat first with our eyes, so it was only a matter of time until a restaurant told its patrons to strap on virtual reality headsets and enjoy some retinal feasting. That scenario is not a joke—well, at least not entirely. “Sublimotion, along with award-winning chef Paco Roncero, recently h
Imagine a purgatory for the beleaguered office worker. It is probably a world of endless (or, to misuse the term to constructive ends, more endless) meetings and water cooler chat. Fair enough: That is what office culture and the cultural portrayals thereof have conditioned us to expect. But what if
In the face of professional pressures, the profit motive, and a basic desire to survive, what can average citizens expect of the poor souls who inspect public infrastructure? This unfortunately timely question is at the heart of Loiste Interactive’s INFRA, which is out now for Windows. You play as a
If Churchill Solitaire existed in smell-o-vision, it would reek of cigar smoke. Seeing as the game only exists on iOS, however, identifying the precise stench it gives off is something of a challenge. The game, which was developed by WSC Software and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is b
The weight of artistic expectations, particularly in the era of peak content and endless aggregation, can be crushing. A story about the next big thing and why you should care (what to expect when expecting an album?) lurks around every corner. While some reactions to this scenario are better than o
Like most arts graduates in their twenties, I have two voices: the one I use for day-to-day interactions and the one I’ve cultivated working in service positions. The former is more sarcastic and the voice I’m likelier to employ without thinking, but the latter is genuine. When I say “have a nice da
Games that seek to represent significant historical phenomena are, by their very nature, reductive. Real-time gameplay is, Timebound’s multi-year push notifications notwithstanding, not on the table. Beyond the time imperative, creative works must also make narrative and dramatic choices. These cons
Pity the poor jetpack, forever stuck at the dweeby-but-not-practical stage of technological development. Sure, the jetpack looked neat when Buck Rogers used one to zoom through the sky in a 1928 edition of the comic series Amazing Stories, but it’s basically all been downhill since then. In order to
There is no logic to it, but it happens with enough regularity to be memorable: A tragedy occurs, and days later, journalists report that if it wasn’t for a quirk of fate it might have taken another victim. To wit, Dutch cyclist Maarten de Jong switched flights from Malaysian Airlines flights MH370
As an architect, Alejandro Aravena traffics in a sort of obviousness that only becomes apparent in hindsight. The Chilean’s best works gradually reveal themselves to be fundamentally explainable. This, one might argue, is a more compelling magic trick than the eternal mystery of how some of his coll
It’s a chicken and egg problem, and one with deep roots in videogaming history. And we’ll get to that, I promise. But first: some words about Line/Dash. Created by Davide A. Fiandra, Line/Dash is a minimally modernized arcade game. Blocks float across the screen rom right-to-left. Your job is to int
The enemy here is capitalism. Isn’t it always? Suits: A Business RPG is an expedition into the morass that is modern capitalism. Note that it is not a journey through this world. That would presuppose the existence of an escape, and Suits is not that sort of game. The action takes place in a black-a
On the occasion of CES, the annual “consumer” electronics extravaganza in Las Vegas, murmurs started to be heard about whether virtual reality headsets were all that useful, particularly at the prices at which they are being sold. Better late than never. CNN, however, is here to distract from the do
North Korea dropped a bomb. “It was confirmed that the H-bomb test, conducted in a safe and perfect manner, had no adverse impact on the ecological environment,” Pyongyang announced, by way of the Korean Central News Agency. “The initial analysis is not consistent with the claim the regime has made
Fashion is basically LARPing at scale. You decide on an identity to take on for the next few hours—a functional person, a grown up, someone loveable, Matt Bomer’s character on White Collar—and then you give it the old college try. Results may vary. The connection between LARPing and fashion is appar
TR-REC is basically Guitar Hero by another name, and it seems unlikely that any of the parties involved could object too strenuously to this characterization. The game is an exercise in conflating genres and media forms. The self-described “pattern sequencing game” is made by Roland, a company more
Libraries, huh, yeah. What are they good for? With apologies to Edwin Starr and Betteridge’s Law, the answer to that question is probably not “absolutely nothing, uh-huh uh-huh.” That’s a start, but it still leaves the not insignificant question of what, exactly, a library is good for in this day an
City building games are rarely exercises in democracy. The player’s agency stems from her role as a central planner; she designs cities that hopefully please their residents, but this is not a consultative, bottom-up process. Considerate urban planning in the city-building game is an act of benevole
‘Tis the season for Christmas music to blare from every direction. They come from speakers, carolers, and buskers. They are played in stores and putative public spaces. As a side effect of this sonorous onslaught, ostensibly cheerful songs become backing tracks to breakups and calls announcing the s
There’s nothing to be worried about, it’s just a quiet walk through the woods. The sun is shining through the leaves. Strings swell in the background as you amble about. Everything is okay. Only it isn’t. Sure, Alessandro Salvati’s Anxiety Attacks starts out pleasantly enough. You are in the woods a
There’s experimental housing, and then there’s housing created in a test tube. Rosa de Jong creates the latter. To use Zoolander terminology, these are homes for ants. There are no ants here, but the scale is appropriate for the little critters. Instead, what you have is a series of cylindrical dior
It’s about the language. It’s always about the language. Kommissar is a text adventure masquerading as a thriller—and that’s a good thing. You play as an officer in the Ministry of Truth. This is a plum job seeing as it went to you, a child of the elite, and not some pleb. Suffice it to say this is
