In 2001, author Marc Prensky coined the term “digital native” for those born without knowledge of an analog world. For kids coming up today in the ubiquity of touch screens, they may not know a world where those surfaces weren’t open for manipulation and control. The idea of a “touch generation” is
This is awesome. A Manchester, NH company is giving employees paid time off for big releases: Given this reality, Dyn has recently refreshed their employee benefits to take account for major game release days, giving an optional PTO day per year for big releases. The New England-based provider of en
As part of our ongoing series on the life of a videogame intern, Joseph Bernstein deals with the discomfort of playing excessively violent videogames: My adult enjoyment of violent videogames was always girded by two assumptions. The first is that eliminating or surpassing an obstacle is the basic u
This is amazing. A videogame player in Texas has been competing in recent Super Street Fighter IV tourney — without the use of his hands: At first, she was baffled by the condition, but after she sought the help of several geneticists and specialists, Begum was diagnosed with arthrogryposis. “It was
The military, understandably, is obsessed with adding the newest technology, but to date, smartphones haven’t been added to the mix. That’s been a big challenge and one the military is trying to tackle, according to Danger Room “Every kid’s going down to whatever local store they want and they’re b
This weekend, Beantown plays host to the Boston Cyberarts Festival which will turn the entire town into an augmented reality paradise. We just hope they stay away from Lansdowne Street. That gets real ugly at night. Daily Serving has the rundown: The disembodied art on display include (in collabora
The RoboCup Japan Open is a tournament for robots where they play soccer and apparently show each other photos of their WAGs. Above is Hajime Robot 31, a humanoid creation from the Chiba Institute of Technology 1m tall weighs just 5kg and comes with 17 joints. I look forward to the day when American
The Tempest Free-running Academy is a new LA gym designed to teach the mystical art of parkour. Naturally, they channeled one of the great jumpers of all-time: Mario. (Side note: the Ellie Goulding remix is here if you’re curious.) [via]
We review Portal 2 today with an emphasis on what makes the game so buoyant: Portal 2 is still Portal, the sleeper hit that began life as an extra in The Orange Box. It’s still a game about using portals, pairs of doors that connect distant places, to navigate through a level. There is simply more P
“We need games that, while still allowing us the escapism we turn to them for, allows us a better look at the realities of decision making than “I ate your kitten” or “I will die for you.” — editorial from Bitch Media
We’ve all dealt with cheaters at various stages of gameplay — on the playground, at the kitchen table board game, on Xbox Live. Their ways seem inscrutable. Why would you deliberately defraud someone if you’re ostensibly playing the same game? The New York Times this past weekend approached the na
8-bit crimes will be a thing of the past! The device is a video camera that allows a face detector to capture a 25×25 pixel cropped face image. A mask is then applied to remove the background and the image is then passed on to a classifier which outputs the gender of the person. It is interesting to
Exciting piece on the burgeoning of female game designers, highlighting Margaret Krohn (above) who went from QA to game designer at Sony Online Entertainment: “I started with ‘EverQuest’ and MMO-style games. That was back when there was one girl to every bazillion guys. Now it’s like I could have 20
Videogame ratings are far from perfect and the poor Entertainment Software Review Board is tasked with assigning moral values to the hundreds and now thousands of games that hit the market each year. They have apparently given up the soft touch of their human board of reviewers and turned some of th
So this week, mindful parents around the country will be shutting down down their televisions for Screen Free Week, a national effort to curb television watching for kids. This seems all well and good — too much of anything is a bad thing. But over at Slate, lawyer KJ Della’Antonia points out that t
Today on Kill Screen, we talk to Rutgers epidemiologist Nina Fefferman about her research on a real outbreak of a disease known as “Corrupted Blood” that ravaged the community about five years ago. Below, two excerpts on the utility of studying online communities and another on griefing: All told, h
This may be a fad, but oh well, there are a handful of 3DS photoblogs bopping around Tumblr that take advantage of the devices GIF-making ability. The shot above comes from Fuck Yeah 3DS Photography. Brandon Boyer, Mare Odomo, and Cory Schmitz made another called Wigglevision. Any others?
