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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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Link: selfless hero or destructive jackass?
Imagine: you live in a small town, a sunny place in the woods where some people have summer homes, little vegetable gardens, even a dairy cow or two. No one is rich but no one is hurting for cash, either. It’s such a sweet town that no one even bothers locking their doors. The only real problem in t
An artificial intelligence that makes videogames
Videogame developers may be soon be out of a job: Back in March, Ars wrote about PhD student Michael Cook and his artificial intelligence machine called Angelina. Angelina was special because she was creating games from scratch with little help from her human counterparts. By dividing the concept of
Recreating the recreated arcade experience
How do you emulate an experience? That’s the question that Rantmedia Games is trying to answer with their Vectrex Regeneration, the iCade recreation of the Vectrex, the 1982 vector-graphics system that itself aimed to recreate the arcade experience at home. This piece at Ars Technica is fascinating,
Why we need to stop criticizing game company CEOs
Bobby Kotick, the brash, outspoken, much-maligned New Yawhkah who is the CEO of Activision Blizzard, came in for the New York Times profile treatment over the weekend. It won’t do much to change the gaming community’s perception of him: Even in high school in Roslyn, N.Y., he had a taste for showman
It was only a matter of time before the Oculus Rift got porn
Well it’s happening. Before the Oculus Rift even left development, a startup is exploring all the advantages of the device’s VR abilities. Specifically, its capability for adult entertainment. At Sinful Robot, we are currently developing the world’s first series of fully-immersive erotic encounters
This weekend, play this Contra and Metal Slug tribute
Indie developers have dusted off and recontextualized old genre after old genre. Yet one of my favorites – the sidescrolling shooter in the Contra vein – has gotten relatively little love. Is this becuase this type of game doesn’t lend itself to thoughtful mechanics or narrative? As the PA Report wr
The definitive account of Japan’s rejection of the Xbox
Microsoft’s struggles selling the Xbox in Japan are legendary, and here is the definitive account of its failure, at Eurogamer. The factors at play range from a poorly received introductory speech at the 2001 Tokyo Games Show by Bill Gates, to a lack of understand of and respect for complex Japanese
Questioning religion with Walk of Faith
Walk of Faith invokes the classic problem posed to those of faith whereby they are challenged to have their god alter their situation, usually one of mortal peril. (See: all of the Bible, or Matthew 4:3). This is not much of game. It uses our expectation of interaction and accomplishment in games to
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