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Since last year, educators have made efforts to co-opt Minecraft as the champion of videogames as learning tools. But it’s become like trying to get vice to sublimate into utility—to build utopia out of dystopia. This newest article for Slate and Future Tense by Lisa Guernsey, mother of Minecraft-ob
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The Disney execs behind the forthcoming Wreck-It Ralph must have been asking: How do you get more aging gamers to see your videogame movie for kids? The answer: Aggregate cameos from nearly every recognizable videogame character ever. Maybe even make a game out of seeing how many you can spot while
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Plunging us deeper into the abyss of bloodless simulacrum, this sketch-up designed submarine offers its crew all the thrilling, claustrophobic anxiety of submarine warfare, except everything that’s not fun about submarine warfare. Metaphorical blip on radar: they’ve volunteered to become the target
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Nolan Bushnell, often called the father of videogames, doesn’t see a future there for him. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, following his key-note address at the Games for Change Festival in New York in June, Bushnell manages to steer the conversation away from videogames nearly to a point of d
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EA’s recent suit against Zynga for copying The Sims Social in The Ville has the potential to be a precendent-setting case for defining copyright infringement in videogames, perhaps to the aid of indie developers. For Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander spoke with Rutgers law professor Greg Lastowka, who beli
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The shovel, the pale, and the subsequent sandcastle seem to fade into antiquity in light of this world-building robot, running on nothing but the humble sun—and a laptop. The Stone Spray Project, in its early stages, mixes a liquid binding compound and sand to sculp arches or stools over scaffolding
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We are not, as Richard Brautigan once (ironically) hoped, all watched over by machines of loving grace. Last Thursday, newly installed trading software at Knight Capital, which is designed to anticipate swift changes in the market, ungracefully glitched out, taking an estimated $440 million with it,
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Further proof of the quantified nostalgia we extract from the hardware that projects an original story: According to Examiner, an original prototype of The Legend of Zelda will find a new, undisclosed home after selling for a record-breaking $55,000 on eBay. The price is the highest-ever for a Ninte
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When the Brooklyn-based, band-of-electro-brothers Yeasayer received word that their album was on “the verge of…being leaked through the cracks of the digital universe,” they spread their own tendrils into that digital universe to co-opt illegal trafficking by—for lack of a better word—gamifying the
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If thousands of armed, unmanned, and GPS-reliant drones buzzing over our borders ever seemed way too precarious to believe they were making us safer, here’s why: Researchers at the University of Texas’ Radionavigation Laboratory led by Professor Todd Humphrey took command of a UT-owned UAV, because
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Marching one step closer to a future of feeding-tube monitors or subwoofer footbaths, the Black Element Cyclone Edition is a mouse that wields a 6000rpm fan aimed to send cool, dry air through the slimy crevasse between your palm on the plastic. According to Engadget, the creators TT eSports, the ga
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Foursquare’s society turf-war was a scary investment for many who feared constant oversight of their daily activities. Now those anxieties might relax in light of a new iOS app that overlays a pixelated, Wes Anderson storybook over Foursquare’s interface. Turf Geography Club takes its cues from Mono