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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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Inside the BioWare writers’ studio
BioWare, creators of the beloved Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, is known perhaps more than anything for the quality of its writing. The Border House interviewed BioWare writer Ann Lemay. We work in an open-floor office, each in four-desk units with semi-clear dividers that afford some privacy, b
What should it mean to be a gamer?
All too often, the word “gamer” seems to describe a personality in its entirety. One’s gaming identity is somehow divorced from all the other aspects of one’s personality. Adam Ruch at Kotaku AU fights against this assumption. By being a gamer, I do not stop being a man, a university lecturer, a med
FTL is the space game that makes you forget all about exploring space
The new indie spaceship management game FTL involves a lot of, well, managing, and not a lot of space exploration. Rampant Coyote of Rampant Games found the game full of emergent narrative, with some surprising solutions to the problem of putting out fires. The focus of the game is not on space – it
The nostalgia buying cycle in videogames
Retro gamers will be familiar with the following cycle: you order a game online, you wistfully remember how awesome it was, the package arrives, and you have no desire to play it. This happened to me last time I stopped at GoG and bought Dungeon Keeper. Damien McFerran describes the problem at Eurog
Pac-Man: "like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."
The webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal retells Pac-Man in the mode of surrealist existential horror.
Dating and fish collecting, finally together in the same game
Everyone knows that there aren’t enough games set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by fish people. That all changes with Sealark, a kind of varation on Harvest Moon, with daily fishing taking the place of farming. Expect it in July 2013.
This hideous Darpa robot can sneak up on you
Everyone loves freaking out at a good-old Boston Dynamics/Darpa robot video, and here is the latest disquieting news: no longer will your cybernetic doom be augured by the deafening metallic squeaks and squooks of robot joints. Robot death is now 10 times quieter!
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