![[Talk 4/17] Building Worlds While the Actual World Burns](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/size/w800/format/webp/2026/04/Kara-Stone-Joshua-Dawson-Header.png)
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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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Is Bad Piggies Rovio’s first original idea?
Over at Game|Life, Ryan Ringey has some words of encouragement for Rovio, who he thinks have finally dropped their bad habit of taking extant, unpolished games and turning them into profits: Bad Piggies makes it appear as if Rovio wants to be on a different trajectory. Sure, the characters themselve
The lessons learned from remaking Half-Life
Black Mesa, the fan-made, eight-years-in-the-making update to the fourteen-year-old GOAT contender Half-Life, released earlier this month. Gamasutra talked to project lead Carlos Montero about, among other things, what they brought from Half-Life’s sequels back to the remake of the original: “We act
Why are there no gaming memoirs?
Chris Suellentrop’s review of Papo & Yo wonders why the memoir-as-game is a virtually untouched genre. Papo & Yo is a magical-realist fable about the relationship between its creative director and writer, Vander Caballero, and his alcoholic father. No, the game isn’t an autobiography or a documentar
Evidence of a military-grade Pokémon-inspired seizure gun
In 1998 the US Army was trying to think of non-lethal ways to incapacitate enemy soldiers. One of these ideas was to induce seizures in them. Spencer Ackerman at i09 gets down to the details: The [Army’s analysis] cautioned that the effectiveness of incapacitating a human nervous system with an elec
Have opinions about interactive fiction? Judge these entries.
For the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition, the entries are short and many are playable online. The games range from hyperlinked Twine games to fully parsing text adventures. The game shown below, Guilded Youth, is a fun one for the Halloween season. Anyone can judge the games, though they have to
Sites charging for app reviews outed
For a new mobile app developer, doing PR is kind of hard. And when most app sites reply to your press release asking for money in exchange for an “expedited review,” developers might start wondering if this is just how the system works. Appynation has made a list of sites that charge for reviews. C
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