15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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Think gamers are all white and male? Well, you’re wrong, unless you’re thinking of sports gamers
Yes, yes, we know the stereotypes: gamers are young white guys living in various lair-like setups featuring complicated chairs with speakers in them. While the rise of casual gaming and the proliferation of games for many different audiences has revealed this view as the relic it is, there is one se
Are modern gamers an exclusionary elite?
This dynamite column from John Brindle at Nightmare Mode compares the years of socialziation and knowledge-accumulation necessary to become a serious modern gamer to the tiny subset of people who make it through the most prestigious colleges at Oxford, and analyzes the ingroup-outgroup dynamics that
Are giant pilotable robots the new black?
From Mech Warrior to Xenogears, from Zone of the Enders to Armored Core, gaming has always been a safe space for giant pilotable robots, so often stigmatized elsewhere as “dorky” or “big-boned” (sigh, sizeism). What gamers have known all along is that giant pilotable robots are typically fun-loving
Watch the Double Fine dudes and dudettes make games, mess around
The people have voted, and Double Fine is now developing the four games chosen during the Amnesia Fortnight Festival (sadly, the office fart sim Silent But Deadly was not chosen). The bros and broettes at Tim Schaefer’s studio have set up a live stream around their office to cover the development of
Appartus demo mixes art school mannequins with Capri-Sun kids
IGF entrants are trickling out over the web; you can start the hype machine ‘a-rolling. (Hype machines have wheels btw.) Anyway, Apparatus is a new platformer tjat pulls from the high art of Scandinavian attic design. You’re a jumble of cubes that falls apart and reassembles at your command. Accordi
Routine, the indie horror game set on the moon, will be the "Moon" of gaming
Did you see Moon? It was a little sci-fi thriller directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s kid!) and it starred Sam Rockwell as a guy on a mine on the moon in the near future and Kevin Spacey as his robot frenemy. It paid tender tribute to the greats of heady 70s and 80s scifi, but was very much its
Someone beat Dark Souls in 32 minutes and nothing will ever be the same again
Beating Dark Souls took me a month and a half. The opportunity cost was… high. The personal cost was… high. The emotional cost was… high. Speed Demos Archive has released a video of some person, nay, some champion, defeating From Software’s magnum opus in less time than it takes me to commute to wo
