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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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The unseen, unspoken ethics in NYC pickup basketball.
A feature in yesterday’s NY Times charts the tale of an amateur baller who found his way to Brooklyn from Florida via Portland, seeking “the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball.” Intent on discovering the “city’s truths” in basketball, Isaac Eger found out how to take a hit, dance around
When killing avatars is justified.
In his review of the pseudo-subversive Spec Ops: The Line for Grantland, famed game writer Tom Bissell lists 13 potential reasons why we play a genre of games whose volume of violence surpasses that of most mediums up to this point. From passages to personal stories to jotted notes, the review is as
Humor, the purest form of play, explained by The New Yorker’s cartoon editor.
Humor is poorly understood—and frequently misunderstood. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker, posted an article yesterday that touched upon play and humor. And that episode of Seinfeld. Whether we find a comic funny or not, he says, is determined by the degree and nuance with which th
Learn what’s behind Diablo III’s best sound effects from Blizzard’s sound designers.
We gathered the sounds of our favorite monsters in Diablo III and had sound designers Joseph Lawrence, Michael Johnson, and Kris Giampa explain the unusual ingredients in each of them to us. Read the full feature by Yannick LeJacq for more. The festering maggots in the Witch Doctor’s “Grasp of the
Consider the drone the paradigm of present human experience.
Beyond videogames, simulacrum, shady politics, and even the best watch-dog journalism, independent filmmaker Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) wants us to realize drones as the synecdoche of present civilization. In a recent interview with the senior editor of New Inquiry, Rivera waxes polemic about how th
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