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Foundd, a new Berlin-based media recommendation service, just launched this week. Rather than focusing solely on mathematical predictions, unlike Netflix’s recommendations, Foundd looks at the bigger picture and makes broad strokes with its suggestions, including content from multiple content provid
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This new game console was announced only a week ago and already seems to have the gaming community rallying behind it—or at least hyping it. Led by former IGN executive Julie Uhrman, designed by Yves Behar, and advised by Ed Fries (who wrote for us in Issue 2), Ouya is being touted as the console t
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We don’t always play horror games. But when we do, we usually piss ourselves. Slender is simple and scream-inducing. Pick your poison: Mac or PC.
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Wired recently did a profile on a company called California Skateparks—comprised of architects, designers, and skateboarders alike—explaining the balance of play, difficulty, and art that a good skatepark requires. Every park that California Skateparks builds has certain fundamental features, like
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Artist Ruganzu Tusingwire is creating a movable playground for Ugandan children entirely out of recycled water bottles. An artist and community organizer, Tusingwire has a…more imaginative idea for how to engage and empower the children of his home country: Play. Tusingwire became the first City 2.0
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The CEO of Wargaming.net, developers of the free-to-play, tank-based MMO World of Tanks, recently discussed the history of the company and its unlikely path to success, as well as its plans for the future. Kislyi has come a long way since first designing physical games directly on the bare floor of
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Chris Baraniuk, over at The Machine Starts (an allusion to the excellent short story by E. M. Forster), eloquently explains the “fifth wall” of games that some players always feel the need to transgress. Like many other games of the era, Super Mario 64 set each level on a kind of pixelated island s
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An interactive exhibit designed by Usman Haque and showcased at Specialmoves aims to “empower people to reconfigure their city.” Using an array of projectors, phones, and laptops, DIY City 0.01a is an “experiment between two independent interactive specialists who are keen to push the boundaries of
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Rob Fahey has just posted a sobering piece about maturity in videogames that’s as critical as it is optimistic. Video games are a creative medium, and as such they intersect with many different fields of human experience – but they’re also still exploring the bounds and possibilities of technology
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According to an article at the BBC, children may be teaching themselves to read in the near future with the help of technology. MagicTown is a “world that unites books and gameplay,” designed for children on the web and the iPad, that is trying to preserve the tradition of storytelling for a future
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Kes Sampanthar recently discussed the effects of stimulus-reward conditioning (i.e. Pavlovian conditioning) from a neuroscientific standpoint. It turns out that your brain gets a dopamine burst whenever you receive the signal for a reward, not the reward itself. This presentation was not for the sci
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It doesn’t hurt to take a step back and re-evaluate our assumptions every once in a while. In his article today at the Verge, Paul Miller ponders the eternal mystery, “What is the Internet?” Since I don’t “use the internet,” according to my dial-up definition, I’m frequently longing for my friends t