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.
KS contributor, game designer, and general provocateur Pippin Barr is at it again with a new nugget of Flash goodness called Hot Coffee. Ha. He writes us: It’s a riff on the “Hot Coffee Sex Scandal” that surrounded GTA: San Andreas when it came out, with the sex mini-game and all that. I was intere
Womp womp. Nintendo posted its first loss as a public company in 50 years as competitors, specifically Android and iOS, have chipped away at their market. Despite building a base of more than 151 million DS users, other handheld devices have bridged the gap. The most telling note comes from an analy
Video Game designer Rusty Moyher (who I’m convinced has taken a stage name as an ode to Russ Meyer) has a new title called Bloop that’s taken a page from the B.U.T.T.O.N school of gymnastic game play. Tap the dots, elbow your friends and all that. Break fingers if you must!
In PopCap’s tower defense game, lively plants defeat a zombie horde. We asked a horticulture expert how real plants grapple with nature in uncannily similar ways.
The Atlantic muses that the Kindle has killed the idea of the book cover. While the device has enabled all types of new activities (social annotations, lightness of being, euphoria), the lack of cover is not without metaphorical weight: A digital book has no cover. There’s no paper to be bound up wi
Desiree Brown sat down with author Brian McGreevy to talk about his new novel Hemlock Grove, a modern twist on the vampire and werewolf genre. What ensues is a rather strange conversation about the nature of fear and the modern occult, but he does offer a twist on what a monster or a villain could o
When in doubt, look to Italo Calvino’s systematic writings about literature and the imagination. We use one of his essays to speculate on the creation of a gaming canon.
Way back in issue 3, we explored what games infants play when they play games in our piece “The Young and the Scoreless.” Ryan Bradley examined the world of electronic games through the lens of three-year-old Jackson who’s been working out some life issues through iPad games: Play can be serious bus
I’m trying to finish every episode of the wonderful science and culture podcast/radio program Radiolab this year and during my quest, I came across a quote from their 2008 episode titled “My So-Called Life” about the boundaires of science, morality, and bioengineering. They quote theoretical physici
Daniel Rehn points out a project I missed called the Joint, a fictional collection of rooms in a fake apartment building where each site is a byte of pixellated goodness.
Rhett Allain is an Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and his is obsessed with Angry Birds Space. (So are we.) Part of series of posts exploring gravitational physics, he’s updated his previous model that suggested “the gravitational force was constant and there was
One of my favorite new blogs is as simple as it sounds: Context-Free Patent Art. It’s a collection of images pulled from the US Patent Office’s archive documenting potential “new” advances in technology. But patents also feature diagrams to describe said work and the results are often delightfully c
Two works from German visual artist Gerhard Richter. 4900 Farben (4900 Colours), 2007. Enamel paint on Aludibond, 680 x 680 cm. 1024 Farben (1024 Colours), 1973. Lacquer on canvas, 299 x 299 cm [via Flavorpill]
A woman named “Rachel” has launched a new site devoted to something surprisingly simple: cataloguing the number of women and girls featured in videogames. She writes: “As I grew older, I found that video game culture and girly culture rarely intersected. Yet, happily, there were places where the tw
About a week ago, I was at a bar with a friend of mine in the East Village and we ordered a cocktail. I’m often asked what I do and in the course of talking to the owner, we started talking about iPhone games. His big complaint was with freemium games, especially those with “pay to play” structures.
Exciting news from the Louvre, one of the greatest art museums in the world. To enhance the museum experience, visitors can now use 3DS devices to listen to more than 700 recordings about the works there (although that’s a tiny portion of the more than 35,000 in the museum’s collection. The Japan Ti
This weekend I attended Rhizome’s annual Seven on Seven conference which presents 24-hour collaborations between artists and technologists. This year featured a host of new work including a fascinating collaboration between Aaron Schwartz and photographer Taryn Simon that allows you to see the diffe
The New York Times profiled Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, and tracked his movements while he conducted with the help of tech from NYU Movement Lab. Turning the ethereal nature of music into kinesthetic reality is a challenge and that’s what makes the best conductors amaz
In an attempt to explain the popularity of Mad Men, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik postulates the “Golden Forty Year” rule for nostalgia. Essentially, that’s the amount of time it takes between the production of something wonderful — a fashion style, time period, book, scultpture — and its subsequent
We’re fans of simulation games like Game Dev Story, but developer Bryan Lunduke may have taken the cake for the genre with Linux Tycoon. Look at these thrilling challenges!: Analyzing and selecting software packages. Fixing Bugs. Managing volunteers and paid staff. Keeping the total size (in MB) of
Video Daniel Knauf, who created the HBO series Carnivàle, has created a new storytelling system called Bxx that allows viewers to watch a story unfold over the course of 48 hours. This is an unwitting nod to how machinima makers work inside game engines, leveraging the same work across a wide variet
Cloning has been an issue near and dear to our hearts, specifically the difference between simply copying someone’s idea and making it better. Over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Daniel Ben-Horin frets over what he calls “innovation obession disorder” — that we are too focused on the nove
