![[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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This indigenous society in Papua New Guinea hates playing.
A small agricultural group known as the Baining in Papua New Guinea is infamous among anthropologists for having eradicated the desire to play from its culture—the Baining do not engage in festivals, games, or religious ceremonies. Researchers such as Gregory Bateson studied the group as early as th
Videogame AI has room to grow
We have pretty dang good graphics in our blockbuster games. But when are we going to get a game where we can have a natural conversation with a non-player character? Emily Short, who wrote the text-based dialogue game Galatea, is interested in exploring the problem of NPC dialogue. She’s helping dev
The surprisingly long history of live-action role-playing.
According to Lizzie Stark, author of a new book on the history of Live-action Roleplay (LARP), Leaving Mundania, the history of LARP dates back far beyond the era of Tolkein-esque fantasy to the Romans and Elizabethans: Queen Elizabeth I presided over some serious, and seriously expensive, larplike
It’s hard to make new friends after college. Can videogames help?
As we get older, it gets harder to make new friends. We hold our high school and college friends closer; making a new friend seems to take lot of time and effort. We’re less willing to befriend someone completely strange to us. The NY Times has some explanations in their article: As external conditi
More montages for the short history of games on screens.
The third in what looks to be a series (following a “Brief History of Videogames” and “Game Deaths“) of videogame montages that run from the first pixel to the latest BMP masterpiece, “The Evolution of PC Games,” dishes out references to the new canon of virtual desktop games. Of course, the result
Neither angels nor demons will pad my stats for Dragon Age.
There are plenty of ghosts, liches, and spectres in games set in Renaissance and Medieval times. But how did people at the time, in our world, explain things like static electricity and diabetes? Robert Burton (1577-1640), in investigating depression in his Anatomy of Melancholy, digressed into a st
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