Kill Screen Staff

We meant that literally.  –Lana Polansky [via]

It’s kind of hard to know where to start with this one, but let’s start with the perceived problem: women take their husbands or significant others furniture shopping at Ikea, only to find them zoning out and complaining the whole time. Leave him home? Dump him? No, pacify him.  Manzone is Ikea’s ow

It was bound to happen. The University of Southern California has introduced a program that studies computer code—not for what it produces, but instead actually examining code through the lens of critical theory. It’s called Critical Code Studies, and it’s one of the most exciting nascent fields of

This is an oldie but a goodie. The best part about this video is everything about this video. -Drew Millard

Gaze at it the Minecraft iteration of “Relativity” in all its byzantine, surreal glory. Minecraft is truly a virtual Lego set. Game designers have been influenced by Escher for years now, but this is completely different. We can’t wait to see the next awesome thing Minecraft-ers come up with. -Drew

A new gaming platform using the Kinect?  Artist Eric Mika’s überbeamer is a hand-held, spatially aware augmented reality projection system and a means of making any surface writeable.  The überbeamer takes the basic premise of augmented reality – the mediation of a physical environment via an overla

Artist Tom Gauld has crossed the Brontë sisters with Super Mario Bros. in this adorable cartoon published in the Guardian.  You can check out more of his work here.  –Lana Polansky [via]

Finally, concrete evidence of gaming’s ability to help change the world: for the first time, “gamers” have received credit for a scientific breakthrough. Using a program called Foldit, they produced an accurate model of the monomeric protease enzyme, a result which could have implications for treatm

Guardian has a nice interview with Jason Nelson, an artist/poet who, along with Cory Archangel, is on the forefront of digital art. The interview touches on Nelson’s exodus to Australia (good), the death of Flash (bad), his games (purposefully Byzantine) and where he was giving the interview (a wait

ArtInfo reports that artist Pippin Barr created an 8-bit video game to simulate the experience of sitting with Marina Abramovic at MoMA, which was available in real-life in Fall 2010.  The game includes waiting in line and paying museum admission.   Players are confronted with a long queue of 8-bit

Well, sort of. The newest installation in EA Sports’ long-running NHL series now offers the ability to, when creating a playable character, to give your avatar a female face. The change— a first for EA Sports— comes at the behest of Lexi Peters, a 14 year-old from Buffalo, New York who wrote the spo

GameCity, a prominent UK videogame festival, recently unveiled the GameCity Prize, a new type of videogame award meant to honor a game that most significantly pushes the artistic limits for what they call “one of the most significant cultural forms of our age.” The winner will be judged by a panel c

From the Workman Says Things tumblelog:  There are 3 people on Earth who own one of these. I am one of them. We are painfully jealous.  –Lana Polansky [via]

Over at Slate, Michael Thomson has some thoughts about why keeping civilians out of the line of fire in videogames is standard practice, and why it’s a bad idea. Responding to Battlefield 3’s lack of civilian bystanders because, as executive producer Patrick Bach explains, he doesn’t “want to see vi

Flavorwire has a really cool list of fictional games they’d like to see played out in the real world. It includes Eschaton from Infinite Jest (it’s like Risk, but you’ve got to be really good at lobbing tennis balls), Double Cranko from M*A*S*H (think Go Fish but with booze), that terrifying war sim

Grantland’s Tom Bissell writes on gamification, and the numbers game played all over Techland’s zombie survival game Dead Island. In a game about running from things that want to eat you, what is more important: the emotional experience of running from things that want to eat you, or knowing that th

What you’re looking at is a real baseball game. This is science fact, and it’s brought to you by the new iPhone app, MLB’s AtBat. What in the bejeezus is going on, you ask? This real, live, honest-to-goodness baseball game is being rendered, via all kinds of space-age techno-magical what-have-you, w

Good news, Germany readers! After seventeen years of being persona non grata in your nation, your government has finally lifted the ban on the controversial videogame Doom. At last, you can get your hands on the damn thing and see what the fuss is all about. The game had been barred from German shel

A study published on the website for the journal Psychology of Violence suggests that it’s not the bloody fatalities which inspire aggression, but the heated competition which leads to them. The study, led by Brock University PhD student Paul Adachi, tested players’ aggression levels after playing g

Bill Kunkel, often known as “The Game Doctor” and “Grandfather of Videogame Journalism,” passed away on Sunday, September 4th. He was 61. Kunkel led a diverse, exciting life. He wrote comic books, helped found the first videogame magazine entitled Electronic Games, invented the terms “Easter Egg” an