This week is the annual SXSW festival, an event where many a figurehead from the fields of art, tech and culture descend on Austin, Texas for a mash-up of pseudo-democratic panels discussing all of these things. Covering the event for Salon, Irin Carmon noticed a particular steadfastness in white ma
Kickstarter has recently gained a lot of attention and acclaim from communities of gamers in particular for its newfound ability to crowd-source funding for fan-adored games made by legendary designers that have somehow slipped through the cracks of modern game-industry publishers. Now the yeti of m
Theoretical and scientific explorations into whether or not videogames may actually benefit your health are not uncommon, but how many game developers have gathered around the idea to use games specifically for therapeutic applications? The new Boston-based company Akili Interactive Labs is beginnin
So since it’s friendship week here at Kill Screen, I wanted to bring something up that’s bothered me more and more in the current generation of gaming. See, I grew up at a time when playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was still the penultimate arcade experience, when LAN-parties of Starcraft and Qu
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
If dog is man’s best friend, what are cats? Humans have grappled with the creatures since the beginning; and as videogames show, we are still circling each other warily.
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
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
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
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.
