Benjamin Jackson earlier this year explored the roots of social games like FarmVille in the behaviorialism of B.F. Skinner, questioning their core ethical principles: Many people defend FarmVille as a harmless distraction, arguing that the thousands of hours spent playing the game would still have b
The Week reports on the future of running. All I could think of is the drones from BioShock 2. For those who lack a human partner, researchers Floyd Mueller and Eberhard Grather, of the Exertion Games Lab at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, have developed “Joggobot,” a quad-
Free-to-play games are all the rage. Dmitri Leonov offers a tri-fold theory on what actually makes sense in the freemium model: The Evernote-like Paywall: The way the product is designed, a significant portion of the users will inevitably cross the paywall. The longer you use the product, the more v
Slate advises on the right and wrong ways to name your galactic vessel. (Icarus is a terrible one): Otherwise, if you’re taking on a mission of vital or, let’s say, hubristic scale, the names of Greek tragic figures should generally be avoided. Bellerophon, for example. Sure, he was pretty mighty, a
Wow. Remember that 16-bit episode of Community. An industrious Reddit user has turned it into an actual game. Enjoy it now before some funsucker at NBC takes it down. [via AV Club]
