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April 6, 2011, 10:08 am
“Physics is imagination in a straight jacket.” — John Moffat
Kill Screen Staff
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TODAY ON KILL SCREEN: Say hello to your 3DS home screen
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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Every Man Has a Code (or Game)
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 Pong Plays to Your Strengths/Weakness, Will Be Your Best Friend
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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Why Can’t I Stop Playing Drop7?
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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Bad News for Katamari Fans: Clutter Affects Our Ability to Focus
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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April 5, 2011, 2:55 pm
“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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Random House Hopes That Videogames Will Add a Spark
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 on Kill Screen: Minecraft and landscape painting
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
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How Are Museums Lifting Their Hood?
To combat the view of being stuffy, private institutions, museums are using some of the language of game designers to bring visitors more inside of their world. We would call that “immersion,” the idea that you can be lost inside of place that is not your own. Museums are pursuing engagement and tr
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White Boards Teach Kids How to Use a Blank Slate
If you haven’t seen these interactive white boards, they’re something out of Ghostwriter. First of all, the boards are called Prometheans which is amazing. Second, they emulate what can be done on the computer screen with a pen so it’s a bit like a Cintiq pad. We’re excited for things like this as
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Surprise! James Cameron Is Making Realer Than Real Pictures
We like the idea that when James Cameron heard the term “cinéma vérité” he thought that it meant literally making real life. In any case, we game fans like watching film directors quixotic quest for verisimilitude as it matches game designers dogged obsession with realism. In any case, Cameron is ap