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PopCap Games, makes of the popular Plants Vs. Zombies and Bejeweled franchises, are taking a note from the Disneys of the world and creating a much smaller studio to deliver one-offs and other creative projects that might not fit under the larger brand umbrella. Titled 4th and Battery, the mini-lab
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Documentarian Danfung Dennis wanted to find a more realistic way to cover the conflict zones that he found himself filming. His iPad app in development, Condition ONE, uses both cameras on the device to expand the field of view. We could see some interesting uses of this for war games as well.: Con
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Over at the BBC, Banksy has apparently left a mark of his affection for the platform puzzler Lemmings, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. A member of staff who has seen the graffiti said: “This image seems to have sprung up in the last day or two, so may well be Banksy’s own tribute to
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“Physics is imagination in a straight jacket.” — John Moffat
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John Irwin takes a closer look at the oft-overlooked home screen in the 3DS. What he finds is a world of childlike wonder and majesty: These moving placeholders-a swirl of photos represents the camera application, for instance-float within some cauterized, antiseptic arena. The place has volume. Th
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David Simon’s The Wire may be one of the greatest tales of any sort committed to media of any kind. Jason Mittell at the Electronic Book Review sees parallels in the HBO classic with the type of play found in simulation games. Certainly, the “rules of the game” that embody the code of Baltimore co
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Machine learning is always a fascinating field especially when it pertains to games. Creating difficulty curves that actually match player’s abilities is the Holy Grail of single player games. So a researcher from Mexico and another from Spain set out on the simplest of quests: to make a game of P
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The devilishly simple Drop7 is a puzzle game par excellance. If you have not played this wonderful game developed by NYC studio Zynga New York (formerly area/code), then you should download it immediately. Savannah College of Art and Design professor John Sharp takes a closer look at the game. Unli
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So don’t tell the Prince, but Princeton researchers have found that clutter affects our ability focus. Essentially, the chaos of being messy distracts you from processing key information. Over at the Unclutterer, they give this breakdown: The clutter competes for your attention in the same way a to
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“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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Random House is looking to videogames as potential home for their work. A story in the Wall Street Journal indicates that THQ and Random House will co-publish properties together. This was already the case for THQ’s Homefront, which had a prequel, Homefront: The Voice of Freedom. As Lenny Brown of
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Today, our visual art columnist Kyle Chayka takes a look at Minecraft through the world of the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the Dutch Baroque: Minecraft is a revelatory genre of landscape art, with its interactivity and wide-open canvas of possibilities. But the concepts of natu