Set against the backdrop of a Victorian seance, “Dust & Shadows” is a strange blend of theater and gaming. Dust & Shadows is part of the Unorthodox Arts foundation’s current initiative, ‘Project Gamestage,’ which seeks to take theater off the stage and video games from behind a screen. The shows th
Google’s daily puzzle challenge is a great way of improving your search skills and learn something new. The riddles aren’t too challenging so they’re a nice break, but don’t threaten to spiral into timesuck of similar sites and games. – Adnan Agha [Google via Wired]
TED’s new Conversations section has already sparked some great talk, debate and even personal recollections of videogames that have reshaped people’s perspectives. The list ranges between Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, Smash Bros, Bioshock and more. The anecdotes of experience and effect beauti
News late last year of things like a potential widespread Steam hack and a frustrating Skyrim “patch” that just seemed create phony DRM for PC gamers gave rise to some suspicion of Valve’s innovative and ubiquitous platform. Rock, Paper, Shotgun takes this concern one step further in an alarming and
Back to work! Let’s check in with today’s mainstream gaming news! – Kazuo Hirai will soon replace Howard Stringer as Sony’s CEO and President. – THQ has been having some serious financial troubles which have led to massive layoffs and potentially being removed from NASDAQ. – The next Humble Indie bu
We tend to associate old people with, well, old games. But one woman had a different idea for how to settle into the triple digits: Kit, who turned 100 last week, only started playing video games at the age of 96, but she now relies on her DS console to keep her mind active. “The Nintendo has been a
Lev Grossman at TIME has a deep look into the world of fan fiction, a place where fans act as authors and take their favorite characters from film, television, and beyond to new narrative environments: Fan-fiction writers aren’t plagiarists who can’t come up with their own ideas, and they’re not all
Elaine Edwards wants to make an interactive eBook for the iPad called “Doggie and Me”. She writes, With the ‘Doggie & Me’ story, I want to teach kids the importance of sharing a bond. I believe when children grow up with pets- particularly dogs, they learn the importance of building kind, loving re
QR codes—the black-and-white, bar code-esque emblems found in magazine adverts and on blogs—aren’t good for much. The Atlantic recently chided the strange squares, calling them “the roller-skating horses of advertising.” Though they are meant to convey information to your smartphone via its camera,
EA Sports’ Madden football juggernaut has accurately predicted the winner of the Super Bowl six out of eight times since 2004. What’s even more impressive is that the game predicted that the Giants and Patriots would be in the Super Bowl at the beginning of this season. This year, Madden is saying t
Looking good old buddy. – Adnan Agha [via Reddit]
To this day, one key aspect of Deus Ex’s original brilliance still impresses people for its rarity: the fact that you could beat the game without killing a single person! A new piece in the Wall Street Journal suggests that this innovation may finally be becoming a larger trend: Videogames have long
Once again it’s the Rap Map, where we talk to our favorite hip-hop artists about their favorite videogames. Danny Brown’s mixtape XXX was named hip-hop album of the year by SPIN Magazine. Fresh off a tour with Das Racist, Brown spoke with us about his early gaming experiences, how videogames inform
Well into his post-Beatles career, critics and purists have viewed Paul McCartney with varying degrees of suspicion for his particular ability to cash in his musical talent. According to a recent story in Express, he’s once again heading into uncharted territory to give his music a wider audience: T
As Amazon continues to subsume the retail industry whole and digital distribution platforms continue their climb, the question of what becomes of physical retailers like GameStop becomes a real question. The used-game giant purchased its way into the retail age by acquiring flash game portal Kongreg
Russian illustrator Dima Je has produced these marvelous cards as accompaniment to popular parlor game Mafia. See the rest of the set here. -Jamin Warren
Rumors beginning last week about all things Xbox 720 (?) have provoked a flurry of speculation and statements about the industry’s stance on used games. Bitmob has a great essay up challenging the assumption that used games are actually costing publishers and developers as much as they claim: I can
Hats off to SPIN’s Rob Harvilla, whose 1,300 word opus on Lana Del Rey’s new album Born to Die is the definitive document of the Del Rey Experience. Especially impressive is his breakdown of the goofus Del Rey sings about in her hit “Video Games”: It’s instructive to picture what this guy would act
In an NPR interview with his cousin/This American Life host Ira Glass (!), Philip Glass mused on the nature of repetition and how it informs his understanding: I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert son
We’re not huge makers here at Kill Screen. We tinker with prose, not with Arduino. But if you are one of those handy types, O’Reilly publishing is releasing a new title called Making Things See as handbook for computer vision projects: Learn about face recognition, gait analysis, and depth imaging
Joe Sabia’s quick TED Talk on technology’s influence on storytelling skips over videogames. Obviously this isn’t the first time it’s happened, videogames are often not very respected as a storytelling medium, but they should at least garner a mention. Even when the games themselves don’t have magnif
Over at PC World, Benj Edwards has made an argument supporting piracy, not just because it is the popular thing to do but because it preserves our cultural history. The article analyzes how obsolescence and medium shifts have lead to software’s short halflife. Pirates have kept alive several of thes
Probably! Or anything that give you some temporal separation from what you’ve just created. Wired reported on a study that used a videogames to create an artificial buffer between the time ideas were generated and the time they were evaluated: 112 university students were given two minutes to come u
Why does everyone rush through games, anyway? Sometimes it seems like it’s too much “On to the Next One” and not enough “Never Change,” to put it in terms of Jay-Z songs. Luckily for everyone, there’s the new “slow” movement, which basically tells us to stop and look around every once and a while. B
This past weekend was Art Hack Day and by far, one of our favorite entrants comes from a team of employees from image-sharing community start-up Canv.as. The title is: “aliensthatlooklikeskrillex.tumblr.com” Yes, that’s the title but also the name of the actual tumblr that’s about the game. I know,
