News
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
News
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
News
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
News
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
News
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
News
The videogame violence debate is old but not over, because it’s not just worried parents and politicians anymore. Recently, Warren Spector–revered designer of System Shock, Deus Ex, Epic Mickey, among others—told G.I.biz: We have to stop loving it. I just don’t believe in the effects argument at all
News
The accidental aesthetic of Quick Response (QR) codes has gained the attention of artsts looking to explore its vast storage capabilities and (smart phone) user-friendly scanning. A few QR artists have hung whole galleries, courting comparisons to Piet Mondrian. Another Dutch artist, Sander Veenhauf
News
The social game giant who owns Facebook’s Farmville and mobile fads like Draw Something and Words With Friends has watched their stock deflate rapidly in the past few trade days. Just a couple of possible reasons for the recent tailspin: dwindling interest in previous games from mobile players and F
News
At last capitulating to the growing digital hegemony, the hermitic, not-dead-yet novelist–whose beautifully explosive books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, The Crying of Lot 49) have left readers, writers, and critics in awe for the last half-century–is all-of-the-sudden fine with his books bec
News
Tim Schafer, lead writer and creative director of some of the most inventive and moving adventure games ever (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend), writes beyond what his games show on the screen. His recent interview with On The Media–cut from a longer interview about Schafer’s multimillion d
News
Who knows why the endearingly blustery 21st-century philosopher from Slovenia hung a poster of Call of Duty: Black Ops in his living room? Either way, according to this recent Guardian profile, the celebrated/ridiculed genius/”Borat of philosophy” does indeed have the poster. We can only hope that h
News
Drifting toward a more Deist approach to the in-game world, Big Robot’s in-development Sir, You Are Being Hunted generates its own environment. Ostensibly, Hunted is a game of surviving on moors patroled by rabid, robotic, tea-drunk gentelmen poachers, who presumably shoot on sight. But these spooky