Kent Szlauderbach

video Nathan Englander (author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) was terrified of the phrase “Write what you know.” To him though, his fear of writing about his ordinary suburban life was a gross misinterpretation of the phrase. What he knew was

Surely not to debase and trivialize a sacred law by making it an adolescent fantasy, a state-sponsored Iranian studio is developing a game whose objective is to kill a Salman Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children) avatar, because it’s definitely going to educate the youth and no

More and more are coming to believe that education and imagination are not gulags of labor, but places to play. Announced yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, GLASS Lab—a project by Institute of Play in partnership with EA and the Entertainment Software Association and supported by the John D. and

video In a recent interview with Joystiq, Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring talk about how they made their award winning Dream Machine out of handmade puppets and watching Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy. Chapters 1-3 are available on Steam.   Erik: Our game is called The Dream Machine and it’s e

EA and Google are bragging about their 3D robot fighting game largely built by interns in HTML5, and they want you to start making games in HTML5, too, The New York Times reports. Their “Strike Fortress” is a test game, but one designed for more casual gamers—a challenge for developers to start thin

Somewhere between the cruel irony of being too uncoordinated to eat the $30 New York Strip on your table and the haunted subjectivity of Ann Hamilton’s pin-hole mouth camera is the browser-game Table for One. Built in Unity and free on your browser, Table for One has one objective—to telekinetically

Every game will have its cheaters, but according to Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics and psychology at Duke University, lying and cheating are hardwired into the continuum of morality, and it’s more malleable and nuanced than we often have time for.  I’ve been talking to big cheaters, i

Photographer Henry Hargreaves, recently featured on Cool Hunting, envisions consumer technology as something harder to digest than we may want to admit.  Inspired by an internet video of a Japanese youth deep frying and eating his PSP, Hargreaves decided to refine the idea by toning down the danger

Like the fine motor touch over the analog stick that turns your finger into a dead eye, the Microsoft Touch Cover‘s pressure sensitive features are subtle. So subtle, in fact, that the feature was overshadowed by the screen when it was introduced—but the technology indeed opens up pressure senstive

Tiny rhythm games are like glorified toe-tapping or dancing with your finger. When there’s no room to dance, dance, and revolt, try and flush the fever into your phone with Beatstream.  The masterminds at Smule, who created Magic Fiddle, Magic Guitar, I Am T-Pain, Ocarina 2, and many other standout

Innovation often reveals itself as one long, circuitous process. Or at least it seems like it when we rediscover people like Thomas Wilfred and his early-20th-century multimedia inventions.  As part of their “Original Creators” series, the Creators Project recently remembered Thomas Wilfred. Coming

If anything can come out of Penn and Teller joining the debate to haughtily call bullshit on politicians’ war on violent videogames, it’s a surprisingly sympathetic defense of the videogame medium in general. In a recent interview with Game Informer, Teller lets down his spiked Libertarian guard for

Because we’re apparently that much sicker of playing with toys and games—but mostly because the videogame industry is doing that much better than film—Need for Speed will now also become a movie. Dreamworks will produce while Scott Waugh directs. The Act of Valor director, having spent time getting

Since 1995, Ocean Quigly has gone from artist, to art director, to creative directer for the Sim City series. But in his interview with Gamasutra, he talks like he’s been designing since 1940. The latest in the series promises a modern city of structural integrity, where the aesthetic is drawn from

video So that the console controller might eventually be spared its grimy-kids-toy aesthetic, grad students at MIT have made a circuit board that will turn any conductor in the natural world into a device for play. The MaKey MaKey uses alligator clips to carry your electronic touch to the board and

The 24-hour news cycle has dislodged and reached escape velocity. From its broken transmissions we have forged today’s headlines.  -Thatgamecompany makes a nice bundle of its groudbreaking titles. -Metal Gear Solid 5 is going to happen. -From the designers of Portal, Quantum Conundrum was released t

Perhaps a shameful realization of the misdirection of some of our best technology, rendering engines typically used to for immersive battlefields can now immerse you in the colon of Larry Smarr. In a new Atlantic profile and its companion video, Smarr baits scientists and hospitals to usher digital

If it wasn’t for Mario, if people actually thought vacuuming could be fun, then Nintendo might still be making these tiny guys from 1979. The dimpled and curved lump called the Nintendo Chiritorie (“dustpan”) could only turn left and clean up toy spills. What, the sticker set wasn’t enough to sell i

So you’re suddenly attracted to someone, trapped in a nauseating, tangential game of circling around the beautiful pseudo-stranger until the only choice is appoach or run- perhaps for something better. Chairlift’s new video allows both: the payoff of seeing each dazzling/tragic outcome. The video be

Helping to deconstruct that choose-your-own-adventure books and novels are mutually exclusive in theory, the new online writer’s tool, http://writer.inklestudios.com, is a platform for spinning divergent narratives as well as editing them. It works to disarm prejudice a writer’s writer might hold fo

The Puxxle is the vinyl sticker solution to all your analog, 8-bit idolatry needs–a puzzle made from pixels. Whether its Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Frida Kahlo, Salvado Dali, or a chipmunk, these Spanish designers will box it up and send it directly to your door. Order them al

Pippin Barr’s flash games have dark punchlines. The writer, scholar, and maker designs games like a Steven Wright or Mitch Hedberg writes a joke, sardonically exposing the terror of the banal (waiting in line for The Artist is Present) or the banality of the terrible (Let’s Play: Greek Punishment, S

video In a classic case of medium-is-the-message, a commercial-like manifesto or manifesto-like commercial called “The Evolution of 8-bit” appeared last week on Off Book, which is PBS’s alt-culture Tumblr. It’s a fun-sized, snacktime documentary of 8-bit history and ideology sans specific agenda. Pr

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. —Margaret Atwood from The Blind Assassin. Since 2007, we’ve praised touch-screen technology as the key to our technological intuition. Well, Atwood’s line from the science-fiction roman á c