Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, thinks robots can do much more than vacuum our floors or perform a fan-dance. Previous “social robots” developed by her group have been able to display emotion in reaction to human prompts or even notice and understand
With the rerelease of the original Halo: Combat Evolved on the horizon, why wouldn’t Microsoft save their marketing dollars and just use the same TV ads from back in the day? Well… That generic heavy metal just isn’t cutting it anymore. Still, remember how cool it was when you first saw that dude ge
This September, Rockstar Games will release a free DLC pack for Red Dead Redemption called “Myths & Mavericks.” To get ready, we suggest seeking out this box of fireworks not only featuring Mr. Marston himself, but titled after the first DLC pack released last summer. (As seen on Kotaku, via Reddit
Life is hard. Getting mainstream videogame news should be easy. –NBA2K12 trailer features 15 NBA icons. –Resistance 3 has gone gold, and dev company Insomniac Games wants to show you its trailer. –League of Legends offers new map and game mode. -Bungie hints at mysterious new title code-named Ti
Many games offer a spike in blood pressure. But few allow access to a higher plane of existence. Noted spiritualist Deepak Chopra—author of books such as “Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles”—plans to change that. His new game Leela will be published by TH
Jeff Ryan, in an interview with Slate, talks about how Super Mario Brothers established videogames’ first folk hero, and how those games influenced the obsessive nature of pop culture fandom going forward. According to Ryan, “[i]nstead of passively ingesting their entertainment, they study it in min
From four students at the Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands, here’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese. No, not the delicious kind—the kind that’s an awesome animated short. Inspired by Team Fortress 2 and animated short Meet Buck (and perhaps channeling a little bit of Crank), the project took approximately fi
Time to get zapped with some mainstream videogame news! -Gearbox has announced Borderlands 2, shared game’s first details and clues. -Activision has previewed its Marvel game lineup at Comic-Con 2011. -Blizzard sales on the rise, but does not plan to release a 2011 title. -Microsoft is preparing f
Have you been feeling kind of weird today? Well, one reason may be that you’re glitching out. According to Nick Bostrom, philosopher at Oxford University, the chances that you’re a virtual creation living in a computer simulation are surprisingly high: This possibility rests on three developments:
The photos above belong to a whimsical, oddly humbling series called Relics, created by photographer Cody Williams. Williams took the idea of bringing an era alive—the 1980s, no less—and bleached it: Relics is a project playing off the idea that the white Greek statues that we see now were once bri
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry has once again teamed up with Icelandic avant-gardiste pop singer Björk to create a music video for her new track, Crystalline. The result? A weird, retro, lo-fi collision of bad 1980s special effects and Missile Command. As it should be.
As part of it’s Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects exhibition, MoMA recently put M.I.T.’s Senseable City Lab project, BackTalk, on display. To raise awareness about what happens with our discarded cellphones, printers and computers when we upgrade, BackTalk follows o
Let’s contemplate some more mainstream videogame news! –Introducing the Just Dance 3 Kinect trailer. -Get the latest on Tekken X Street Fighter straight from the director. -Blizzard’s next WoW expansion may be called Mists of Pandaria. -Ellen McLain, voice of GLaDOS, will be lending her talents f
-Capcom is promising its “final” version of Street Fighter IV is in the works. –Diablo III will require an internet connection in order to play at all. –Gears of War 3 will feature rapper Ice T, thrash metal band Body Count musically and otherwise. -What’s new in videogame litigation: Zynga is be
Brick Lane Remix I by David Batchelor, picked out of the London streets. For more click here.
Happy August! Let’s welcome the new month with a fresh serving of mainstream videogame news. –A Song of Fire and Ice author George R.R. Martin pays Bungie Studios a visit. -Capcom wants you to decide Poison’s gender for the upcoming Street Fighter X Tekken. -Creative director Trey Smith sings the
Scott Laidlaw taught middle school for years, always incorporating games into his classroom. Now, as CEO and co-owner of Imagine Education, he’s bringing that expertise to classrooms across the country. His new game, Ko’s Journey, is based on a story Laidlaw heard while traveling in Peru. After rece
Get ready for another eruption of mainstream videogame news! -Microsoft partners with IGN for Halo Fest. -Nintendo forecast is looking a little downcast these days. -Double Fine may be considering DLC for tower defense Trenched. -Ubisoft is impressed enough with its DRM for the rest of us. -NCSo
We threw a party at New York’s Museum of Modern Art last night! It was called Arcade and it was a celebration of games, culture, and fun. These games were shown: Bit.Trip.Beat Echochrome B.U.T.T.O.N. (with extra-large buttons!) Starry Heavens (a life-sized boardgame by Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie
The image seen above isn’t your everyday pixel art. In fact, it’s part of a game—err, more appropriately, a “vector graphics scripting framework”. The good people at Paper.js have created Q*bertify, an endlessly amusing vector graphics scripting toy which transforms any old image on your desktop int
–Lana Polansky Image by Laura Bifano
The question arises frequently: What did Dock Ellis feel that one day on June 12, 1970, when he threw a no-hitter under the influence of LSD? Editor-in-chief A. J. Daulerio of Deadspin.com, a sports and culture website, aimed to find out, using his Xbox 360 and a copy of MLB 2K11 in the pursuit of j
