News
By all accounts the Kinect is a pretty fascinating doohickey. Like all new and innovative gadgets, it has received its fair share of paranoid critiques about how it may soon be able to read your mind or control your house. While a lot of these are most likely improbable incarnations of science ficti
News
Gamification has made many a game designer, game-player, and anyone with less than a flair for business recoil in horror in one way or another. Quantifying and measuring degrees of efficiency and success, a natural behavior of governments, bureaucracies, and companies often seems strange to anyone o
News
“Button-mashing” used to be entirely a matter of player skill meeting the impossible difficulty of a game, ultimately ending with the controller being hurled at the screen in frustration. Engineers from the University of Utah are taking the concept to the next level with a new videogame controller.
News
The Kinect’s technology is largely controlled by the physical borders around it—the finite space between the single-camera -holding-console and the user that can detect movements with an adequate level of precision. Chris Harrison, a researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie
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A common theme in videogames and their corresponding criticism is the question of portrayal and intent. The medium tends to exchange in a hefty currency of violence, sex, and death (see Jamin’s introductory essay to Kill Screen in Issue 0) that bears a correspondingly heavy cultural baggage. Greg Pe
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So this game Mass Effect 3 came out today, and if online videogame journals teach me anything, it’s a pretty big deal. Longtime fans of the series and newcomers alike wondered: what’s going to happen to Shepard and his multispecies team of intergalactic ass-kickers? Will the third act tie everything
Interview
Does fun have a new future? Yannick LeJacq speaks with a founder of Uncharted Play, a startup that has developed a soccer ball that produces light via kinetic energy.