Jacob Simon

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 to build a global game empire from cotton balls and watermelon seeds.

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

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