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.
We often throw around new genre terms in games and much like micro-genres in music, their definitiions aren’t always clear. So there’s the new thing called social games. You may have heard of it. It comprises at least 12% of Facebook’s revenues. But what are they? Raul Aliaga Diaz gives a brief prim
We want this. Performance artist Chris Burden has an installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that’s right out of FAO Schwartz. This is the same guy who had his assistant shoot himself in the arm during a performance piece, so you know he’s serious. It looks amazing. Via Hyperallergic: M
We had our own sports week last month, because we think they often get the shaft in the realm of thinking about games. Now, a curator named David Little at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is taking the same tack for the art world. Titled “the Sports Show,” it will feature work such as Richard Avedo
An item from last month’s NYT outlines the challenges of winning consumers over with “smart” technology. The big idea is that devices in your home should communicate with one another and with the Internet, but the challenge is that while tech-forward, many of the devices aren’t smart enough. “Smart”
Good artist steal, bad artists borrow, right? Then there are pirates. Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick pubbed a lengthy response to the Weekly Standard’s assessment of piracy. In summation, the Standard is in righteous indingation about the public’s blase treatment of piracy but Masnick points out th
Jamin Warren on the myth of the dying music game. Two new games, Rhythm Heaven Fever and Beat Sneak Bandit, show that less is more—and that music games need not be about music at all.
We talk to Rogers Redding, the man responsible for balancing the rules of NCAA football. What can one of our most beloved—but complicated and particular—sports tell us about the pursuit of meaning through limitations, success and defeat?
Is the game industry a well-oiled, profoundly risk-averse machine with a stranglehold on creative talent, or is crowdfunding about to destroy publishing as we know it? Jamin Warren takes a look at the unprecedented success of Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter project Double Fine Adventure and sees a potenti
Recent cash-in knockoffs of popular mobile games Tiny Tower and Triple Town have the gaming scene in a fury. But there’s a problem with this scenario: It’s nothing new, with plenty of precedent in other media. Game designers need to embrace their copycats. Here’s why.
The long-delayed shooter Duke Nukem Forever inspires disgust, conflict, and introspection in Jamin Warren. And totally breaks our review system for good.
The funnyman behind Double Fine Productions talks to us about fishing for a good nickname, the subconscious effect a bully named Bobby had on him, and how videogames kept him from ever feeling lonely.
The creators of the über-nostalgic indie hit Super Meat Boy reflect on their own childhoods in the latest edition of our ongoing series. Team Meat members Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes talk to us about the worst trouble they got into, their biggest childhood secrets, Calvin and Hobbes, Teenage M
As part of our ongoing series, we talk to EA Senior Creative Director Mark Turmell, who’s best known for his work on popular arcade games NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. His 31 years in game design include collecting checks as a teenager, turning down Bill Gates, and a mild case of pyromania.
Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell has become a major voice in the “gamification” debate that has raged in the game design community for the last year. His “Design Outside the Box” talk two years ago on the layering of games on every aspect of human existence became a big hit. We talk to Schell
More than five years ago, something strange happened in World of Warcraft. A spell gone awry known as “Corrupted Blood” ravaged the millions of players, leaving behind death, mayhem, and fear. That’s where Rutgers epidemiologist Nina Fefferman stepped in, and that’s where the story gets interesting.
Researcher Nicolas Nova thinks a lot about game controllers. Especially as design objects. What do videogame controllers tell us about technological evolution? What does the future holds for the modest controller? And which controllers stand out as ‘paragons’ of design? In this interview, Nova addr
As part of continuing series into the early lives of videogame designers, we talk to Manveer Heir, now a senior designer at BioWare working on Mass Effect 3. Heir, who’s been outspoken on the subject of race, talks about his early childhood discrimination in a DC suburb, why he’s captivated by the s
Do videogames count as design objects? NYU sociologist Harvey Molotch certainly thinks so as we are prone to think of videogames as another form of entertainment. But much like videogames, design faces the same problems of anonymity, disrespect, and cultural bias. However, design is now ascendant a
Pop artist Jeff Koons has drawn criticism and praise in equal doses over the life of his career, but a Florida art student has decided to express his opinion in a different way—by blowing Koons’ work to pieces. Hunter Jonakin created “Jeff Koons Must Die!” for his MFA thesis show as a first-person s
The “games as art” debate has fortunately waned a bit. Good riddance, I say. But a broader interest in videogames as a visual, interactive medium is certainly welcome. At least, that’s how John Sharp, who teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design, is approaching games. For the last year or s
