Golf is an inherently simple sport: Hit the ball, see if it goes in the hole. If it doesn’t, repeat until it does. It also comes packaged with a Byzantine set of rules, many of which seem designed to punish you for doing nothing wrong. Now, two of the more insane penalties-namely the player being pe
But they tried! During Practice, the inaugural game design conference put on by New York University, game designers tried to denaturalize the sport of football, and ended up with a simple conclusion: that when you take away all its trappings, football is a set of systems that players must engage wit
Before Parliament’s Tom Watson grilled James Murdoch this morning, he tweeted about the night’s preparations. Late, late night playing Portal 2. Early, early morning drafting questions and listening to The Clash on full blast. #brandnewcadillac How has Portal 2 (or the Clash) figured into your publi
[Above: A map of Tweets and Flickr uploads by Eric Fischer.] It seems your ex isn’t the only one reading your public tweets. According to The Atlantic, the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts… a
That’s what the BBC is speculating, at least. They point to the fact that this year the amount of PCs sold decreased drastically, with consumers instead spending their money on internet-abled devices such as smartphones and tablets. There’s one arena in which PCs still kill: gaming. “There are signi
If you’ve been playing Battlefield 3, you might have come across the following scene: In the scene in question, the player – a US Marine – is hiding from a passing army of Iranian soldiers. He crawls along a ditch until a rat crosses his path and starts to nip at him. The character, presumably afrai
It’s hard to think of where my wayward youth would’ve been spent if not for Ralph H. Baer, creator of the the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console. At the Utah Cyber Symposium recently he lamented that Modern Warfare was as far away from his image of gaming as possible, but he did sound a hopefu
As a pioneer of cyberpunk, William Gibson occupies an extremely relevant place at the intersection of culture and technology. Speaking last month during a conference at the Chicago Humanities Festival, he made some interesting observations on the decline of cyberspace and the future of technology. F