![[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)
15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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We’re hiring a new Managing Editor.
For the past two years, Ryan Kuo has been our wonderful managing editor. Before that, he helped us put issue 1 to bed way back when. Now, he’s headed to MIT to pursue a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology. We wish him well and he’ll be posting a farewell note later. But in the interim,
Kickstarter as pure entertainment.
Kickstarter rarely delivers a viable market product, so what makes a Kickstarter project make money? Professor and creator Ian Bogost at Fast Company sees the most attractive projects like compulsory TV. The instant jackpots, like the OUYA, are not the ones that are in high enough demand to float th
On modern travel as consumption and its digital opposite.
Amherst professor Ilan Stavans laments the state of modern tourism, fearing that we’re missing the point. Modern tourism does not promise transformation but rather the possibility of leaving home and coming back without any significant change or challenge. Tourists may enjoy the visit only because i
Why racing your ghost in marathons (or Mario Kart) actually works.
Josh Hutchinson’s wonderful piece at the Walrus outlines the limits of brain science and how tweaking our internal motivation systems can push our bodies to amazing things. It also featured this little nugget on how racing an avatar of a past successful performance can spur an even more successful n
How Microsoft is becoming tech-art’s newest patron.
When Microsoft developed the Kinect—a TV mounted gesture recognition device used for at-home bowling and dance games, they also accidentally created a way for artists to engage the technology as a medium in and of itself. After the Kinect hit the market, a hacker developed an open source driver for
A machine is not a critic.
If games are meant to encourage trust and maintenance in systems in general, then we might think of art in games as doubt and subversion of these systems. But does this mutual exclusivity reflect why we struggle so openly about wanting more of the latter in our games? Writing for IGN, Keza MacDonald
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