15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture

Can gaming make you a better writer?

The New York Times has a piece on the dozen or so serious writers who honed their chops not through writing short fiction or practicing journalism, but by playing Ambermush, an online, text-based RPG from the 90’s that lasted until 2009. Consider the case of Jim Butcher, the author of the Dresden Fi

PAUSE: Stack the Bones

Just in time for Halloween, you can now buy Stack the Bones a new game that’s well, like Jenga, but with bone-shaped blocks. For some reason, the game reminds us of this 1848 political cartoon featuring Zachary Taylor, but then again, some of us were history majors for two years. Anyway, like we sai

Scientific Study Finds that Tutorials May Stifle Discovery and Exploration

Wired reports on a unique experiment that was meant to discover the impact different approaches to introducing a toy might have on the children’s attitude and pursuit of that toy. The first group was given the toy by an adult who acted as if she had just discovered it, and encouraged to find out exa

The right music for the right patch of grass.

D.C. duo Bluebrain releases its new album Listen to the Light today. It takes the form of an iPhone app but it’s really a location-aware album composed for NYC’s Central Park. Check out the behind-the-scenes video here with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye and AOL’s Steve Case.  We recently interviewed Bluebr

Glitch: like life, but cuter

The above video is the trailer for the game Glitch, a new, free MMO that, by the looks of this trailer and press release, boasts (a) overwhelming cuteness (the press release brags that what makes the game different from everything else is that they have “egg plants”), and (b) the ramifications of in

REMINDER: Play Johann Sebastian Joust today in NYC!