John Pavlus at FastCoDesign jumps into a new study that looks at the obtuseness of programming languages like Perl. The problem, according to the study, is these coding languages are “so ridiculously opaque that, from the perspective of a novice programmer, a string of characters bashed out by a mon
French toy retail Artoyz opened their new exhibition yesterday dedicated to Raving Rabbids of, well, Raving Rabbids fame. Geek Art has more photos.
Silent protagonists such as Link from The Legend of Zelda are often seen as stubborn holdouts from the primitive days of videogamesChaplinesque mimes who’d be better suited for a silent film than modern media. But as described by John Lahr at Culture Desk, silence can be golden. The success of “T
What is the best analogy for the way our brains work? Perhaps it is videogames. In an interview on the topic of free will, Michael S. Gazzaniga, author of Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, describes consciousness, or the state of being aware of one thing or another, as a well
Apple is under fire again, this time at the hands of the NY Times who published their second report on work conditions in Apple’s China factories. Read the piece for the entire breakdown of FoxConn’s conditions, sloganeering like “”Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow,” and
Forbes has a wonderful profile of Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek. Aside from outlining Spotify’s rise to greatness and more than 2.5 million members, the piece outlines a telling tidbit from Ek’s adolescence: At 14 Ek latched onto the late-1990s dot-com mania, making commercial websites in his school’s com
Russia is planning to build a large domed city not far from the North Pole. ‘We aim to have scientific laboratories, houses, but also parks with attractions, an Aqua complex, hotels and a cathedral. Naturally there will be schools, kindergartens, recreation zones, a hospital, and sport facilities ar
Every year, NYU hosts New York’s Global Game Jam site. It’s a place where designers, coders, sound engineers and artists all come together to make games in 72 hours. No experience is necessary and all are welcome. Last year’s theme was “extinction” and heralded games from text adventures to platform
Several artists have pooled their talents to light up the path beneath a busy expressway in Brooklyn. Silent Lights is an architectural series of gates that frames a pedestrian pathway by day showing constant movement through shadows. It transforms sound into patterns of light at night as it mimics
Consoles previously deemed suitable for “hardcore gamers” alone have been going through lots of rebranding strategies as of late to become more family-friendly “entertainment centers.” But here’s one you probably haven’t heard of before, courtesy of the “Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prot House otype Sol
Back for that daily dose of mainstream gaming news. – Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo has said that the Wii U will launch by the end of this year. – Insomniac won’t be making any additions to the Resistance franchise. – The fallout from last year’s M-rated games legislation has left California
A lot has been said about stereotypical gamers that lead many of us to despise online gaming in its entirety. But like any area of human contact, multiplayer videogames define large areas of public space that naturally cohere into different forms of sociality and behavior. A new study featured in Ga
While some of the world’s leading museums have starting gamifying their content in one way or another, how games themselves fit into curatorial content remains an open question. This year’s GDC will tackle the question with a unique exhibition: The ‘History Of 3D Games’ exhibit includes original gam
In a long NYT profile of the precipitous rise of UFC as a national pastime, Dana White, one of UFC’s owners had some choice words on what makes the bloodsport so popular: Unlike a double-play ball or a pass-interference penalty, a fist to the face requires no further explanation for a foreign audien
Over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz reflected on a string on surveillance-themed TV shows and argues that our current obsession with live imagery has turned us into “watchers:” Modern TV series reflect this, especially the shows that revolve around military action, national security, domestic crime and
Read the rest of Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist here. (He worked on one of my favorite animated films
The Final Fantasy series is at a crossroads: After the poor reception of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, developer Square Enix chose to revisit the sporadically stunning but ultimately flawed Final Fantasy XIII, releasing a direct sequel to that game rather than introduce an entirely new installment t
I’m sure you’ve heard the complaint before. All art is a subjective experience. So what place do we have pretending to be “critics” when objective criteria for analysis doesn’t really exist? Leigh Alexander raises the question in an interesting Edge piece: People don’t talk about Ocarina in terms of
How many space marines have been capped in Halo 3 multiplayer? Enough for the entire alphabet to be recreated out of mangled corpses. The Halo Corpse Alphabet was a rather macabre project with the goal being to represent every letter of the alphabet by the twisted, curved, stretched, and otherwise
Author of The Lords of the Rings, a book which influenced exactly half of all computer games made before 1990, J.R.R. Tolkien was once nominated for a Nobel prize in literature. He didn’t get it. Why? The prose of Tolkien who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis “has no
Escapist points out that there’s a new video going around the YouTube that’s a scene-for-scene remake of Star Wars: A New Hope, as made in fifteen-second chunks. Some chunks feature wicked stop-motion animation, including a killer thing where Darth Vader is a spontaneously emptying and refilling bot
As a means of conveying information, media is power. Our games can entertain us and even teach us – what’s keeping them from being used to influence us as well? With Alex Gibney’s recent short documentary When Mitt Romney Came To Town taking heat for using the medium of film to do just that, this
This map was an obvious labor of love for Bill Mudron, who wanted to celebrate Zelda’s 25th year anniversary as much as anyone else. The map measures 24×36 inches and is available for purchase here. Sure, it’s not cheap, but cut down a few dozen bushes and you’ll get the money back in no time. -Jos
This one’s a bit old, but a Redditor’s 86th Birthday Rage comic gives us some perspective from the life of a man who lived through WWII and discovered Nintendo at 65. [pic: Reddit]
Hey guys! Look at all the rumors! From hardware to games, anonymous sources galore! – Everyone’s making claims about the next Xbox. Blu-Ray? Graphics processor? Release date? All I know is I’m gonna call it the Nextbox. – The WiiU is getting some hardware rumors of its own. – There’s no Blizzcon unt
