When I was growing up, games were demonized as the harbingers of bad grades. But games such as SimCityEDU, recently released at schools, are now seen by grownups as compelling ways to teach middle-schoolers complex systems. SimCityEDU is a mod of SimCity, the re-imagining of Will Wright’s world-fam
Gabe Newell, the C.E.O. of Valve, plays by his own rules. You can see this with Steam, the on-line service that finally got right digital distribution for games. You can see it with the Steam Boxes, the set-top machines that bring Steam into the console arena. And you can see it with the Steam Box g
Palmer Luckey, the outspoken, young entrepreneur behind the Oculus Rift, says the reason we won’t see his revolutionary virtual reality headset on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is because consoles can’t keep up with the pace of technology. “Consoles are too limited for what we want to do. We’re tr
Hacking into an innocent bystander’s cell phone and stealing their currency is a criminal activity. It could land you in jail. We are not advocating that. We are, however, in full support of PKPKT, the mobile “in real life” game about standing on a street corner and fishing for “suckers” with open b
Words such as “tuberculosis,” “meth lab,” “illegal immigrant,” “radioactive,” “Hezbollah,” “southwest,” and “China” and 359 more are among the buzz words that the Department of Homeland Security actively monitors in email, according to a document made public a few years ago thanks to the Freedom of
Held this past weekend in Anaheim, BlizzCon is a World of Warcraft players’ pilgrimage into the real-world, or something akin to the real-world, anyway. BlizzCon is part Renaissance fair, part esports competition, and everything Blizzard. As thus, there were plenty of game announcements related to B
Ladies and gentlemen, StarCraft 2 has a new world champ. Over the weekend at BlizzCon, Kim “sOs” Yoo Jin completely frustrated Jae Dong, the overwhelming favorite, by the score of 4-1, making him a hundred thousand dollars richer. Here’s the winning match. StarCraft 2, the ever-popular esport about
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that multiplayer gaming makes us brighter, better-adjusted human beings, but now we have empirical evidence. A New York University study shows that playing educational games boosts morale for learning in middle-schoolers. Playing seems fosters the optimal envi
Before Cactus was propelled into the spotlight with Hotline Miami, he made a ton of small, irreverent games—sketches of games, really. They lacked polish. They were kind of tacky (Hotline Miami is no beauty queen). Their playability was suspect. And that’s what made them awesome. Last week, Cactus
An epoch is coming to a close. A meteor the size of Pangaea, the great uni-continent, gleams in the atmosphere. A mysterious melody of bleeps and bloops wails from somewhere you know not. And a stampede of triceratopses, raptors, brontosauruses, and pterodactyls instinctively run to the right, the m
Not a lot of writing, apparently. It’s no secret that the author Neil Gaiman has been on board for a new game with indie developers The Odd Gentlemen, best known for the Chaplinesque The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (and for drawing us an awesome t-shirt design of an octopus smoking a calabash
For as long as I can remember, which albeit isn’t that long, we’ve played our videogame role playing games on a monitor and our tabletop role playing games at the kitchen table. As thus, sitting in front of a screen lacked the face-time of a good boardgame, and boardgames lacked the fluidity of stab
Esports are huge. This year’s League of Legends World Championship was held at a sold-out Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers. With spectacular events like this, it’s easy to forget that there is a huge barrier to esports that doesn’t exist with other sports. Namely, a large portion of th
The internet is a great place to be if you demand an endless stream of pictures of cute cats and ugly babies. But it’s not so great if you are announcing features for a new game console that fans are not especially stoked about, (or are a professional bodybuilder trying to pass on your knowledge to
In the dominion of analog synths, the Korg MS is iconic as they come—a black and white keyboard with an upright console of knobs towering above. The Korg M1, not so much. But looks can be deceiving. While the M1 was a standard keyboard, it sonically outperformed its accordion-shaped older brother.
With the coming of age of wearable computer technology like Google Glass (and not like this), the use of augmented reality is posed to accelerate by a lot in the coming years. A new report predicts a “paradigm shift” where AR use will expand by 333 percent by the year 2018, increasing from 60 milli
Synesthesia, or the mental state that blurs the boundaries between sight and sound, is a rare neurological condition. That is unless you’re playing Fract, where it happens all the time. “The audio is so intrinsically connected to the mechanics of the puzzles. Because many systems are plugged into w
Forza Motorsport 5 is launching with the Xbox One, which means we will all soon be racing shiny expensive roadsters against a sentient supercomputer A.I. that’s based in the cloud, eyeing our every move. “First we have to see what it’s going to continue learning, once there’s a million people train
Leave it to the bassist from Lightning Bolt to make the demonic/cyberpunk, rhythm/racing game of your dreams. If you haven’t heard of the band, imagine a relentless, noisy shredding of vainglorious metal riffs. If you haven’t heard of the genre, well, neither have we! Thumper is the game in question
A duo of interactive media artists have pitted two Macbook Pros against one another in a never-ending game of rock-paper-scissors. There is an algorithm that picks between paper, scissors, or rock running on both computers, which are connected by an ethernet cable. The winner gets a point. Going by
Markus Persson, or Notch, is known across the Internet for throwing lavish parties and wearing a trilby. Oh yeah, you might’ve also heard of a little indie game he made. It’s called Minecraft. It’s only sold something like 30 million copies, which raises the question of why doesn’t Notch own a more
Jonathan Blow, the creator of the allegorical Braid, a game-changing platformer about rewinding time, thinks that some games are evoking the cookie-cutter mentality of terrible television of yesteryear. In a talk titled “The medium is the message,” given at Creative Mornings, Blow summoned the spiri
We all agree that the days are numbered for the helpless, hyper-sexualized, damsels in distress in videogames. But will an outdated archetype simply be replaced by new ones? At a talk given yesterday in Los Angeles, Jill Murray contended that a slew of more suitable roles for women characters were
