Kill Screen Staff

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One of our wonderful designers, Keenan Cummings, is also the designer for a new startup called Wander. We don’t know what Wander is, but we know what it has: sweet, sweet points. We suspect some type of cosmic farce at work here, but we’re not sure. Points are quite seductive after all and for those

In the same vein as the FoldIt project that deciphered a difficult AIDS enzyme, a new DARPA-funded military game will apply the same crowdsourcing approach to refine weapons systems: The goal is to create puzzles that are “intuitively understandable by ordinary people” and could be solved on laptops

Should game designers names go on their title’s boxes? A recent article from The Economist gives perspective on our traditional notions of “authorship” in a work of art:  The notion of the artist as the sole creator of a work of art is actually relatively recent. In pre-Renaissance times the artist

How better to eulogize the late and great innovator Steve Jobs than create a creepily life-like action figure of him? Apparently, that was exactly the idea that Hong Kong-based company in icons had before they preemptively backed away from the intellectual property giants at Apple, explaining in a s

Well, its better than the prequels flashing before your eyes. With the mildly anticipated Bioware MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic on the horizon, no one, besides the regulars, paid attention as Sony aimed a Death Star-caliber ray at the original Star Wars MMO. On Dec. 15th, the long running Star War

More love for the Indie Game: The Movie coming down the pike. According to Deadline, Mega-producer Scott Rudin has acquired the film with HBO to turn the film into a comedy series. Pretty rad! UPDATE: On their Facebook page, the filmmakers have stated that the “comedy” designation was an internal HB

“Pixel Sand” is on Kickstarter right now, and it looks promising. Pixel Sand is both a game and a fantasy-physics simulation where you can take tons of different elements and mix them together to make your own ridiculous concoctions.  With a strong emphasis on player creation, the game is vaguely re

For reviewers, assigning a game a score can be a sticky situation. The very act assumes that games are quantitative objects whose qualities can be cut into pieces and weighed, like a pig before a butcher. Start looking at a game too closely and the reasons you like it fall apart. Converting feelings

Dear Esther is a surreal Victorian ghost story originally conceived as a Half Life 2 mod. The game has been in development for two years, and it looks gorgeous. You might have seen it at the Independent Games Festival.  The focus here is on exploration. It’s released February 14 on Steam. –Josiah Ha

Continuing our look into the Sundance Film Festival, we are excited to see what comes from Sundance’s New Frontiers, a part of the festival dedicated to new ways to present narratives. Even the ubiquitous James Franco has had his hand in it.  One of such projects comes from Italian-based Molleindust

In a move to get youth off the couch and into a war zone, the U.S. Army has officially licensed a fairly realistic toy assault rifle. The camouflage plastic gun can be used in tandem with a Playstation Move motion controller to play first-person shooters such as Resistance 3 and Battlefield 3. Next

Recently, the Village Voice caused a stir when they fired the long-time, reputable film critic, J. Hoberman. The NY Times today has a piece out in which their own big name critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott (you’ve seen their write-ups on Rotten Tomatoes, surely), speak with the now decommission

In our Public Play issue, Jon Irwin wondered if the short-lived career of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was “just a hint of what is now being fully realized.” 3D technology is certainly seeing a resurgence today, but a new device showcased at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show seems closer to the headge

Shandy from San Francisco has made a woodcut board of “Settlers of Catan”. His project has already been funded via Kickstarter, but you can appreciate his handiwork here and here. It’s a shame you can’t still pledge; for $1,000 dollars he promised to hand deliver the set in a “super embarrassing Cat

So, you fight with your roommates over dirty dishes but your guild in WoW could not be getting along better. Ever wonder how it does so well?  Recently, researches at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria have looked at the behaviors of more than 400,000 people who play the online MMO Pardus t

As the specter of the Stop Online Piracy Act looms on the horizon, threatening our internet sovereignty, many sites are trying to get the message out. Wikipedia had their black out and many tech sites shut down for the day. Ludum Dare, a community devoted to creating games in a limited time frame, l

A firsthand account of John Madden’s “man cave.” A rumination on the intricacies of sports A.I.. The question, “Are Sports Games Art?” It might be easier to tell you what isn’t in writer Tom Bissell’s investigation into EA’s Madden franchise. But the part that struck a chord with me is that John Mad

DICE is a games conference in Las Vegas. It is expensive and exclusive, but has yielded some classic talks such as Jesse Schell’s now-legendary future of gamification/points for brushing your teeth talk.  I’ll be there to grapple with Adam Sessler of G4 on what writing and talking about games actual

The American military’s long and much-discussed use of videogames for training, public relations, and (arguably) recruitment strategies have reached a new level of immersive virtualization, Wired reports: “You design an avatar that has the individual facial features of a soldier,” James Blake, the A

Role-playing game tropes have ventured onto hipper ground, thanks to Troll Slayer by the Jullien Brothers, a music video that retells the classic videogame story of boy meets girl, monster steals girl, boy kills a bunch of skeletons and hairy beasts. One scene gave me a flashback of my sadistic tort

The PC’s position at the foreground of game development has been in question for some time now, as legends of game development such as John Carmack even admit that they’re no longer the “leading platform for games.”  A recent post from Business Insider makes the situation look even more dire. PCs, t

To the late free jazz composer Sun Ra, space wasn’t merely the place, but a metaphorical stage where he could claim to be an alien from Venus, dress like an Egyptian god, and geek out to an “arkestra” of cosmic sounds. A similar assessment can be made of Jeff Minter’s universe. Like so many of Minte

Think about the most recent Taylor Swift album you listened to. Come on! We know you listen to a lot of Taylor Swift! If you’re like me and maintain some sort of vague interest in all things remotely pop music-oriented, you already know that Swift’s albums are all about her life. The recipe for a Ta

There’s been a lot of recent interest in developing coherent scientific theories on issues affecting urban planning and design, such as the logic of crowds. And while many aspects of the open-world experiences of games like L.A. Noire and Assassin’s Creed have been praised, this type of authenticity