Jacob Simon

68 posts

One man’s trash is another man’s…playground?

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

How play helps us out of the walled garden.

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

DIY City looks like crowd-sourced graffiti.

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

Games struggle in the light of maturity.

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

Just signaling a reward makes us feel good? Oh no.

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

Um, so what is the Internet anyway?

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

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