Four Badminton teams, two from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia were disqualified from the Olympic badminton event because—according to sections 4.5 and 4.6 of the Badminton World Federation’s (BWF) Player Code of Conduct—the players “did not use the best efforts to win,” the New Yo
Perhaps foregoing the necessity of getting a native English speaker to translate the copy selling your cartoonish, human-scale mech toy, Suidobashi Heavy Industry has revealed to the world their diesel-powered, piloted robot via a public showing at Japan’s 2012 Wonder Festival and several self-parod
As part of the upcoming Babycastles Summit, Keita Takahashi—the endearingly sardonic director of the Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy—has teamed up with the avant-slacker game producers/party throwers Babycastles to carry out Takahashi’s real-world dreams of classic videogames, i.e. Dunk Hunt and P
Drones court comparisons to videogames via the remote-controlled dissociation of violence and physical feeling between interface and human. It’s the idea that operating drones is so like a wartime flight simulator or shooter that soldiers are never convinced that they’re actually killing people. But
Sight—a new short film making its rounds on the internet—is a grim tale of a seduction-turned-cock-block app that in reality seems to be about soft-tech’s colonization of human compassion via apps and gamification. It’s set at the endpoint of augmentation, at least for this very rich white guy. Appa
The third in what looks to be a series (following a “Brief History of Videogames” and “Game Deaths“) of videogame montages that run from the first pixel to the latest BMP masterpiece, “The Evolution of PC Games,” dishes out references to the new canon of virtual desktop games. Of course, the result
Puma’s interactive ad game, Run Puma Run, drops the languid austerity of their typical design for the sexy memory of the screen-lit suburban basement or the dingy arcade. Perhaps London 2012 could have predicted the pixelated fever dream of this year’s favorite screen fashion, but then again that wo
“Most people have no idea of any game designer. They might be able to name one, maybe.” —Rod Humble, executive on The Sims, Second Life, Everquest, The Marriage, etc. Perhaps it’s time we stop and let the developers, artists, designers, and directors do the talking. In preparation of an upcoming doc
Because no human would ever stoop so low as to write voiceless, rote information and expect to get paid for it, Wikipedia has largely relied on bots since its launch. The BBC reports that the bots have only increased in number and gotten better, becoming better aggregators than even your most humble
Superhuman, a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, catalogues the history of synthetic human empowerment. From ivory dildos to telekinetic microchips, the show seems to jostle between historic sex show and cybernetic world’s fair. One piece in particular, the embedded chip of Kevin W
To cope with long-distance relationships, partners often train memory like a muscle, flexing in times of desire a truly sensational remembrance of compassion, in order to rejoin lost love with the present. But if you would rather let this extraordinary part of the brain atrophy in lieu of a cheap te
When the Brooklyn tech agency called Breakfast signed on to help TNT advertise another detective show, called Perception, they built the billboard of the interactive future. Made out 44,000 black and white electromagnetic discs, the billboard displays letters until someone or something walks into it
In a recent article on Tech Crunch, Nir Eyal—a founder of two startups and a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business—admits that he wants you to be addicted to his products. Despite the abounding rhetorical drug associations, he believes that a certain reinterpretation of a
Babel Rising lets you play as God, but you can hardly call it a God game. Remolding Him into an angry tower defender, Babel Rising becomes a ruthless joke on general faith and a victory dance for the anti-theist audience.
Kickstarter rarely delivers a viable market product, so what makes a Kickstarter project make money? Professor and creator Ian Bogost at Fast Company sees the most attractive projects like compulsory TV. The instant jackpots, like the OUYA, are not the ones that are in high enough demand to float th
When Microsoft developed the Kinect—a TV mounted gesture recognition device used for at-home bowling and dance games, they also accidentally created a way for artists to engage the technology as a medium in and of itself. After the Kinect hit the market, a hacker developed an open source driver for
If games are meant to encourage trust and maintenance in systems in general, then we might think of art in games as doubt and subversion of these systems. But does this mutual exclusivity reflect why we struggle so openly about wanting more of the latter in our games? Writing for IGN, Keza MacDonald
Making cigarettes cute and interactive might not be the best way to stop kids from starting, but the Ukrainian artist’s series “No Games For Smokers” does cleverly simplify smoking’s generally accepted dangers. Whether or not game imagery make cigarettes more attractive than repellent is ambiguous,
“All story is manipulation.” — Ken Burns In the video above, the acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns goes ahead and admits that even his documentaries manipulate the audience in order for them to be moving. Only this is his advice to all storytellers. So perhaps we should consider that the thing that
Because augmented reality glasses should probably be for those who actually need them, researches continue developing more economical solutions for suffers of debilitating strokes and spinal-cord injuries, Engadget reports. These glasses track eye movement with $35 worth of parts. The tracker works
As early as 1992, games were mapping human faces onto screens. Mortal Kombat was one of these games, and its first actor was Daniel Pesina. Verge has the story of how one game design student ran into Pesina accidentally as he was teaching martial arts. The gracious game actor agreed whole-heartedly
A feature in yesterday’s NY Times charts the tale of an amateur baller who found his way to Brooklyn from Florida via Portland, seeking “the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball.” Intent on discovering the “city’s truths” in basketball, Isaac Eger found out how to take a hit, dance around
In his review of the pseudo-subversive Spec Ops: The Line for Grantland, famed game writer Tom Bissell lists 13 potential reasons why we play a genre of games whose volume of violence surpasses that of most mediums up to this point. From passages to personal stories to jotted notes, the review is as
Beyond videogames, simulacrum, shady politics, and even the best watch-dog journalism, independent filmmaker Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) wants us to realize drones as the synecdoche of present civilization. In a recent interview with the senior editor of New Inquiry, Rivera waxes polemic about how th
