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

Chatting with Kepa Auwae, the man behind Punch Quest

Chances are if you see a Kill Screener on his or her phone in the office these days, they aren’t texting. They are playing Punch Quest, the free-to-play infinite PUNCHER. The point of the game is that stuff keeps getting in your way, and you keep punching it. In a way it’s like you are a quest, of p

Tetris lets you feel like you’re tidying up, without actual tidying

Tetris has affects the human brain strangely, whether it’s with afterimages or blocking traumatic experiences. Tom Stafford at Mind Hacks theorizes that the appeal of Tetris lies in its continual presentation of unfinished tasks… much like popular RPGs, only without any pretenses. Tetris holds our a

Identifying with a character is easy. Let’s create empathy in games

It is an inherent fact of games that the player will identify with the play-character; the act of playing literally requires it. Perhaps, though, it’s time to realize that creating characters to identify with and characters to empathize with are two hugely different things. Maciej Szczesnik, lead ga

A year of memories turned into a video game

Open book. That is how we describe people who are easy to understand: they are easy to read, as it were. But perhaps that is an outdated expression and a videogame metaphor would be more apt? Alan Kwan, an artist of all trades, may have something we can work with.  Early next year, [Kwan] plans to o

This Halloween costume is strong to quite strong

MIT Game Lab makes the theory of relativity into a game

Educational games are getting better. Instead of being interactive flash cards, they’ve become worlds where players can come to an understanding of real-life concepts. A Slower Speed of Light from the MIT Game Lab looks at what it would be like if you could walk at the speed of light. From their sit

Lana Wachowski on how Dungeons and Dragons birthed the Matrix

The New Yorker goes deep on the Wachowski sibs as prep for their upcoming adaptation of Cloud Atlas. Fascinating little nugget buried below: It was around the time that Larry and Andy saw “2001” that they first directed together: on cassette tape, they read a play inspired by the “Shadow” comic book