15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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PAUSE: Check out these custom, steampunk-esque 3DS speakers.
Remember when the Game Boy was little more than a dot-matrix with stereo sound, and required wacky contraptions like this to be played and enjoyed under many circumstances? Perhaps that’s not the case today, but these custom speaker/amplifiers are awesome anyway.
Here is a 3D map of the universe-four billion lightyears by four billion lightyears, roughly.
The Havard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicists has released the largest-ever map of space, locating millions of galaxies, quasars, and black holes. The point of all this—besides tempting us to make a Katamari out of it—is to study the past six billion years of universal growth and find out where
Disney can now clone your face, put it on a robot.
In the noble pursuit to inject verisimilitude into the virtual, photorealistic videogames have gone at length to perfect face-capturing technology. Now, Disney researches have taken the captured data out of the database and onto silicon, around a head, then onto a robotic body. Science, Space & Robo
Japanese ruins tell a story; inspire indie game.
If your posessions were found in fifty years, what story would they tell? For one house in Japan, the ruins tell the story of a Western man with ties to the Queen of England who married into a Japanese family. Someone in the family didn’t like him, as he was cut out of some of the photos. Why did th
Nintendo linked to Congo-warzone controversy.
When the mobile game Phone Story was banned from Apple’s app store, it raised further awareness about questions of human rights violation that encircled the production of iPhones, from outsourced labor in China to the controversial extraction of precious minerals from the Democratic Republic of Cong
The locally-grown game movement starts with this chart.
The slow food movement has been gaining popularity in the USA. Hip restaurants boast that their food is locally sourced and completely organic. Purchasing food locally can reduce gas consumption and supports the local economy. Purchasing videogames locally might not reduce gas consumption, but it p
Elmo plays an RPG to learn letters.
Sesame Street has a history of creating parody music videos (like Cookie Monster’s “Share It Maybe“). Videogames are prevalent enough in popular culture that they’re deserving of Sesame Street parodies as well. After all, the target audience of Sesame Street today has always had access to things li
Do games need harsher critics?
Critical discussions of videogames take place largely on the internet—much of the intellectual runoff filtering into Twitter and Facebook feeds, waiting to be shared. But does our desire to be ‘liked’ and ‘followed’—as critics or artists—come at the expense of honest critical thought? For the New Yo
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