Over at Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott teaches how to play Skyrim with the under-7 crowd by sharing his experience in playing the high-fantasy game with his 4-year-old daughter Zoe. Unsurprisingly, it’s a constantly-supervised activity, but with the right guidance an open-world RPG can be a great teac
ModDB, a site that gathers and distributes videogame mods, (also known as modifications, usually fan-made changes to a game’s code), celebrates its tenth anniversary. Back in 2002, before MySpace, right after Napster went under, was when ModDB was created to help organize the modding community. For
We have pretty dang good graphics in our blockbuster games. But when are we going to get a game where we can have a natural conversation with a non-player character? Emily Short, who wrote the text-based dialogue game Galatea, is interested in exploring the problem of NPC dialogue. She’s helping dev
As we get older, it gets harder to make new friends. We hold our high school and college friends closer; making a new friend seems to take lot of time and effort. We’re less willing to befriend someone completely strange to us. The NY Times has some explanations in their article: As external conditi
There are plenty of ghosts, liches, and spectres in games set in Renaissance and Medieval times. But how did people at the time, in our world, explain things like static electricity and diabetes? Robert Burton (1577-1640), in investigating depression in his Anatomy of Melancholy, digressed into a st
Learning a foreign language often includes making a lot of flash cards and just brutally memorizing their meanings. Well, now you can brutally memorize language vocabulary in a virtual world, with visual aids! Rob Howland’s 3D Dictionary, or SanJiten, is a game where your mission is to study virtual
Whether you’re catching up on classics or re-living your childhood, this browser-based Game Boy Color emulator has all the most popular games available. The only downside is that you can’t save your progress or trade any pokemon.
Videogames in exotic locations like India, Japan, and Brazil have the thrill of tourism along with their other game portions. But how do locals feel? For one Brazilian, playing Max Payne felt like a way to get revenge on his muggers. Instead of feeling like a tourist, Nightmare Mode’s Fernando Corde