Jamin Warren founded Killscreen. He produced the first VR arts festival with the New Museum, programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the first arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, won a Telly, and hosted Game/Show for PBS.
It’s unclear who would buy an $840 Master Chief lamp. I can’t imagine that thing looking over me, judging me while I sleep. The Chief sees all, knows all. But Michael McLane spent more than 40 hours putting this fella together.
If you haven’t read Joshua Davis’ epic profile of software-pioneer-turned-narco-obsessive-turned-alleged-murderer, you should go do that right now. The whole thing is surreal as John McAfee flees the United States to avoid potential litigation then starts his own pharmaceutical lab and then has craz
I know you have this problem. You’ve downloaded a piece of wonderful pixel art from, say, Rich Grillotti on the Russian black pixel market. You have guests coming over to open that heady new bottle of red you picked up while in Nice. The evening is prepped to be a wonderful time. Only this precious
Josh Nimoy spent a half year writing software art that became part of Tron: Legacy. He’s since posted a rundown of his process and his work. It’s total eye candy and for the code artists out there, a total sneak peek at the process of one of the most talented creators out there. There was one sectio
David Bianculli is the propreitor of TV Worth Watching and is the tv critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. He was generally pretty pessimistic about the lack of creativity in 2012 and 2013 isn’t off to a better start. While reviewing The Following, a new crime drama starring Kevin Bacon on the trail of a seri
The strange thing about touch is that it’s all abstraction. You’re translating physical behaviors into digital ones. Never is this more apparently than when we’re playing games, of course. When you throw you’re angry bird or cut the rope, your indicating to your mobile phone that you want one action
The strange thing about touch is that it’s all abstraction. You’re translating physical behaviors into digital ones. Never is this more apparently than when we’re playing games, of course. When you throw you’re angry bird or cut the rope, your indicating to your mobile phone that you want one action
Over the past two years or so, bullying has become a national news, Last summer, 16-year-old Brandon Elizares committed suicide after a string of threatening text messages. In a highly publicized 2010 case, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi lept off the George Washington Bridge after a roommate secretly ca
My parents never bought me a videogame console when I was a kid. In fact, you can probably take a therapist’s eye to the whole Kill Screen thing as some sort of delayed rebellion against parental wisdom. But in a recent conversation with my father, my parents didn’t withhold the NES or Genesis from
Recently, I had someone ask me about comments on Kill Screen. Specifically, he wanted to know why we had them at all since, as he astutely noticed, no one reads comments and nothing good seems to happen there. Slate goes as far as to sequester commenters entirely in a hotbox they call “The Fray.” We
You might have seen this yesterday. We’re obviously incredibly happy for Joe as he moves on to new territory. While it’s the most unfortunate kind of compliment, we’ve had several former writers file bylines for Kill Screen before moving into posts at other amazing publications — Kirk Hamilton at Ko
This announcement didn’t make it to CES, but it’s no less nifty. Brian Benchoff at Hackaday devised a clever scheme to reuse his old Game Boy for Android gaming. After gutting an old DMG-01, [Chad] set to work turning the D-pad and buttons in the Game Boy into something his Galaxy Nexus could unders
The Kickstarter campaign for Radio The Universe seems to defy all the conventions of the crowd-funding site. There’s no dialogue in the video, there’s no name for the creator, and the pitch adds this amazing bullet about gameplay: “Players who die in-game die in real life.” That seems a little bit s
The developers at Media Molecule have a penchant for texture. Their breakout franchise LittleBigPlanet oozes with tactile goodness, so much so that they practically invited a toy campaign all on their own. A couple of years ago, art director Kareem Ettouney regaled me with stories about the joys of
A couple years ago, I was invited by the fine folks at ITU-Copenhagen to give a talk for the Nordic Game Jam. I’d never been to a game jam before and obviously, the chance to get to Denmark was incentive enough, but what I saw was amazing. Aside from the first play session of Johann Sebastian Joust
Theresa Christy has the coolest job in the world. As a mathematician for Otis Elevator company, she’s spent more than a quarter-century tweaking how things go up. She also knows that the longest we’ll wait for a door to close is 20 seconds, Japan has the smoothest rides, and the average American rid
I was catching up on some late fall Instapaper reading and got around to reading Gareth Cook’s marvellous exploration into the world of autism in the work place. The article follows Thorkil Sonne who was spurred by his son Lars’ own autism to find a creative way for those diagnosed with autism to fi
Every neighborhood has one. That one park or school or restaurant that had the playground you never could turn away from. My brother’s school had one — the twisting, wooden spires of his montessori, and the sheer size! It was enormous, with byzantine pathways, ample room to hide, and several walk wa
Originally designed for two players on a trampoline (seriously), Get On Top is the newest local multiplayer piece of brilliance from academic-cum-game designer Bennett Foddy. It is also the name of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but that is neither here nor there. As someone who loves the stripped do
Virtual world research Edward Castronova reflects on Star Wars: The Old Republic failed to attract enough paying customers, while EVE Online continues to thrive. The secret is context and design: What makes a world different from a game? Well, in a world, there’s downtime and exploration and life. D
I spent a lot of time working through Halo 4 last week and man, there’s a lot of crazytalk. What the Didact, Composer, or “rampancy” actually means is not significant, but it did remind me that we put up with a lot of made-up language when we deal with sci-fi. Ultimately, none of this really matters
