15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
Become a subscriberSee what we’ve written lately
Rogue AI loses Knight Capital $440 million, scares the hell out of humans.
We are not, as Richard Brautigan once (ironically) hoped, all watched over by machines of loving grace. Last Thursday, newly installed trading software at Knight Capital, which is designed to anticipate swift changes in the market, ungracefully glitched out, taking an estimated $440 million with it,
Zelda prototype cartridge went for $55,000 on eBay.
Further proof of the quantified nostalgia we extract from the hardware that projects an original story: According to Examiner, an original prototype of The Legend of Zelda will find a new, undisclosed home after selling for a record-breaking $55,000 on eBay. The price is the highest-ever for a Ninte
Bit.Trip.Runner 2 trailer imagines the terror of a pixelated world.
Gaijin Games has a sequel to Bit.Trip.Runner in the works and recently released this trailer. The trailer asks us to “Imagine a world where everything is 8-bit… where your greatest retro dreams come true. Well f*ck that place.” The Bit.Trip games are where some players’ retro dreams come true; Gaiji
The Chinese real-life avatars spending "time" in prison.
It is surprisingly common, in China at least, for the wealthy to hire scapegoats to confess to unfavorable crimes. More unbelievable, though, is the practice of hiring lookalikes to serve the upper class’s prison sentences. Geoffrey Sant over at Slate has published an excellent article detailing the
Five secret ways that games are changing the world.
This post is part of a content series presented in partnership with smartwater. smartwater, simplicity is delicious. Jane McGonigal’s 2011 best-selling book Reality is Broken inspired a young generation of game-players to think more broadly about the impact that their controller-wielding lives had
