![[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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One man’s trash is another man’s…playground?
Artist Ruganzu Tusingwire is creating a movable playground for Ugandan children entirely out of recycled water bottles. An artist and community organizer, Tusingwire has a…more imaginative idea for how to engage and empower the children of his home country: Play. Tusingwire became the first City 2.0
How to build a global game empire from cotton balls and watermelon seeds.
The CEO of Wargaming.net, developers of the free-to-play, tank-based MMO World of Tanks, recently discussed the history of the company and its unlikely path to success, as well as its plans for the future. Kislyi has come a long way since first designing physical games directly on the bare floor of
Social gaming, brought to you by Japanese organized crime.
Jake Edelstein is an American journalist who has spent his career covering crime in Japan. He’s recently been published in an interview on Edge, where he speaks about the ties between organized crime and gaming in Japan. When asked about yakuza influence on the booming social gaming industry, he res
Now all you need is a 26-button controller to play StarCraft II.
The best real-time-strategy players are like orchestra conducters—they lead multivalent campaigns for what can be hours without pause. But what happens when you change their best-loved instrument for conducting with a supposedly user-friendly arrangement? Reactions amount to a resounding “meh.” Enga
How play helps us out of the walled garden.
Chris Baraniuk, over at The Machine Starts (an allusion to the excellent short story by E. M. Forster), eloquently explains the “fifth wall” of games that some players always feel the need to transgress. Like many other games of the era, Super Mario 64 set each level on a kind of pixelated island s
Divekick is a parody of your favorite fighting game, making its way to PC.
Divekick could be classified as a “minimalist” fighting game, or a fighting game parody. Or as just plain ridiculous. According to creator Adam “Keits” Heart, it started out as a joke, but grew into a seriously fun game. In Divekick, players only have two buttons: jump and kick. There is no means to
Diablo III actually ends, Blizzard not too sorry.
In a rare instance of a company wielding the power of the ending, Blizzard suggests Diablo III players maybe get up and go outside while they take some time to figure out how to get you to keep playing. But games are especially hard to quit, if it’s indeed a game we enjoy. So how do we take it when
DIY City looks like crowd-sourced graffiti.
An interactive exhibit designed by Usman Haque and showcased at Specialmoves aims to “empower people to reconfigure their city.” Using an array of projectors, phones, and laptops, DIY City 0.01a is an “experiment between two independent interactive specialists who are keen to push the boundaries of
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