Who among us hasn’t looked at a car and thought, “What if this complicated mechanical device operated a little bit more like the bestselling game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014)?” A version of this thought may have passed through the minds of Elon Musk and the people of Tesla, who announced on Thu
Fall of Magic is the kind of free form storytelling you could do with your friends on the floor just about anywhere. Play some Howard Shore soundtracks in the background, light a few candles, and unroll the scroll. As an engine for creating stories it’s deceptively slight. From the rulebook: “Someon
Even with the advent of adult coloring, it’s difficult to find an outlet that makes you feel like you’re creating unique art without actually having the talent to do so. Paint Bug, made in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare game jam, attempts to do just that. Paint Bug gives the player control over a serie
You shake some cereal into a bowl and pick up a box of milk. As you’re about to pour, you see a sign on its side: Have you seen this building? Well, not exactly. Some mischief has been done here. At least it’s mischief of the architectural instead of criminal variety. (Granted, this line is occasion
We all know that art can exist in virtual reality, from games like Adr1ft, to films such as Collisions. Virtual reality has shown itself to be a unique medium for immersing audiences in a work of art. But what about creating art within virtual reality? Google’s Virtual Art Sessions set out to experi
Mason Lindroth’s animations exist somewhere between the realm of a hellish nightmare, surreal art, and collages. It’s all those things, and also none of them. Lindroth’s repeated animated aesthetic is wholly unique—there’s nothing else like it (and in fact, he even hand-sculpts some objects from cla
Popularized by the 122 tape-recorders scattered across BioShock’s (2007) sunken city, the audio-log is a device for dispensing story details in voiceover to a player who might be more absorbed by shooting baddies. Audio-logs allow for writing to be integrated into a game which otherwise would not su
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. The Pit and the Pendulum (PC) BY PAPER PIRATES AND SOKOLAB Given that Edgar Allan Poe focused on sensation to communicate the terror of torture in his 1842 short story The Pit and the Pendulum
It is very, very hard to talk about death and grief without falling into platitudes. But we have the elegy to save us from the cliché—that form of poem or writing that seeks to capture the abyssal depths of the writer’s despair over the absence of the departed and impart some singular meaning to tha
Legend has it that before recording “Maggot Brain,” Funkadelic frontman George Clinton told his guitarist Eddie Hazel to “play like your momma just died.” The resulting track is a 10-minute journey through the cosmos that slowly calcifies into a sad, wonderful kind of musical ego-death. Not only is
According to a new post over on the PlayStation Blog, bullet-dodging puzzle game Soft Body will be releasing on May 17th for both PlayStation 4 and Windows, with PS Vita and Mac versions to follow soon after. It’s also got a new trailer to go along with the announcement, as well as a sneak preview o
This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. /// You probably saw the news about the Chinese guy who created his own robotic Scarlett Johansson in his flat, right? Ricky Ma has caught the attention of many during the past weeks not just beca
We are all just collections of limbs and appendages, naked before the Internet. Some of us—or some of our devices—just may not know this yet. Curiously, it’s our devices that lag that lag behind in this regard. The Internet, as was correctly noted in Avenue Q, may be for porn, but identifying nudity
New York City has a clichéd nickname: The City that Never Sleeps, referring to the restlessness of nightlife in the city. Similar is the metropolis in the newly released Cyber City 2157: The Visual Novel, as it also never sleeps. But that’s because the sun never sets. Night never comes to toss its d
In 2007, Jo Yardely visited Second Life (2003) for the first time. She looked around, took in the view, and left immediately. “[Second Life] was a place where weird people spent all their time chatting about uninteresting things,” she said on her blog, “pretending they were having virtual hanky pank
Chinese studio Dotoyou recently released its game Koi on the PlayStation 4, making it the first game from its native country to be released on the PlayStation 4 in the West. Koi stars a koi fish facing dangers beneath the surface of its resident lotus pond, such as predator fish and spiked barriers.
My anticipation for the recently released Street Fighter V probably came from a different place than most people. I’ve only ever really followed the series as an observer who watches tournament matches, and as a listener of the games’ soundtracks. For me, then, Street Fighter V’s release held two po
Is there anything cooler than sunglasses? Yes. Leather jackets. That one sword move from Shinobi. Anything but vaping. But sunglasses are still pretty high up there. Inspired by the meme of the same name, the Deal With It bot is a simple web application that takes any photo of one or more faces and
Fashion, like everything else in the age of technology, is about fear—fear of what is coming next; fear of looking silly in the long run; fear of trying something new. How else to explain the often-underwhelming interpretations of “Manus x Machina: Fashion In An Age Of Technology” theme for last nig
Open-world games nearly always have choices—where to go, what to do, what side of the law to fall on. In one of Bethesda’s sprawling ones, like Fallout 4 (2015), you practically have the freedom to do whatever you want, by which you quickly learn means that you can kill whoever you want. In the high
Postcards from Google Earth, a project by Brooklyn-based artist, Clement Valla, which started in 2010, is a collection of warped Google Earth screenshots. As eerie and uncanny as they appear it can be easy to dismiss the images as nothing more than odd screenshots, but by touching on these visual mi
In The Mind’s Eclipse, players will take on the role of Jonathan Campbell, a scientist who wakes up to find that he’s seemingly the only person left alive in the ruins of a fallen utopia known as the CORE. His only companion is an AI known as L, who is just as mysterious as her single-lettered name
You first encounter them in the Undead Settlement. It’s a moment of incongruous reprieve: having rolled and dashed your way through a hail of human-sized arrows and swarms of rake-wielding peasants, you come up a hill and into a dark, somber cathedral that all but invites you to stop and smell its f
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. For Shigeru Miyamoto, the inspiration for The Legend of Zelda (1986) series lay in the natural beauty of his hometown of Kyoto, Japan. As a young boy, the Nintendo designer behind Mario, Zelda, and Pikmin would take hikes around nearby forest
Content warning: Death, PTSD, graphic imagery I don’t have many memories from when I was eight-years-old. It feels so long ago, and if I try to think back on them now, they tend to blend together. But there’s one night I’ll never forget, even in the smallest details. We had pizza that evening. I got
