Zynga caught a lot of flack recent for their less-than-subtle appropration of NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower when they announced their remarkably similar game Dream Heights, leading many videogame commentators to question the relevance of traditional copyrighting techniques to an evolving industry and mediu
I’m going to admit something here. I really don’t like Star Wars. Here’s the thing: There are certain stories that work well as videogames, just as there are stories that work well as movies or films. Space operas, with their seemingly infinite room for expansion, endless idiosyncratic planets and f
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
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
“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.
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
