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Common to gamers and early internet users, the favorite pastime fantasy of totally faking your identity online actually used to be illegal in Rhode Island. But that changed last month, according to Ars Technica. Rhode Island state law makers voted this month to repeal an obscure 1989 law that forbid
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Because it does seem a little redundant to workout on machines indoors, more and more playgrounds for adults—which is just a more exiciting way to say outdoor gym—are appearing across the country, according to The New York Times. It remains uncertain from the pictures whether the adults have engaged
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video Before Unicode became the vernacular of 2000s internet subculture, 1995’s Text Fighter for Apple II used CGI text to animate a story and make a seemingly sound fighting game. (Warning: Turn volume down to survive infinitesimally compressed, ear-splitting 8-bit soundtrack.) [via Text Mode]
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Spin reduces record reviews to tweet-length, and Johann Hari at GQ wants us to revaluate what critics mean to us—and how much they mean to us. When something new and startling comes along, it often baffles us, and we are tempted to drop it, pained, for easier cultural lifting. A great critic can he
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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
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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
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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
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Datura, a surreal new videogame from Poland, is based on the realistic hand movements of the PlayStation Move controller. But like a David Lynch film it travels in the opposite direction, leading you to a place where everything is wrong, and your choices don’t matter.
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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
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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
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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
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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