![[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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A wild SpellTower purse appears!
Close enough. “A” for unintentional effort. Spotted on Houston and Essex.
Fez’s soundtrack inspired by classical music.
video Fez‘s 8-bit visual aesthetic may be inspired by videogame history, but its soundtrack draws from a differing long-gone era: the romantic era of classical music. Listen to the above track from Fez‘s soundtrack, composed by Disasterpeace, and note that it is actually a synthesized version of Pré
Zelda cap makes us rethink our moratorium on gamer gear.
I don’t really wear hats. Nor do I like “gamer gear.” But this Zelda-themed cap will be my exception for today.
Bribery, porn and spam dot the road to mobile app success.
Ryan Tate at Wired dives into the seedy world of, um, apps. Getting to the top requires a bit of moral ambiguity and he outlines the many ways that app creators are artificially manufacturing buzz. Games, of course, are front and center. Buying users. Let’s say you’re playing a game on your Android
Streets of Chicago become a giant Monopoly board.
Anonymous artists by the name of “Bored” are taking the streets of Chicago one dice roll at a time. They’ve painted various sidewalk blocks that lovely hue known as Monopoly and even created houses and hotels in the process. Perhaps its tribute to the game’s inventor, Elizabeth Magie, who created Th
Freeman Dyson reminds us that hand-eye coordination means more than skill.
What’s unique to the audience of the videogame medium is that there’s a medium within the medium: the hand. Games revolutionize how we interact, and tools revolutionize the world. Or this is how Freeman Dyson, treasured (and lambasted) 88-year-old physicist and mathematician at Princeton (who’s been
Just signaling a reward makes us feel good? Oh no.
Kes Sampanthar recently discussed the effects of stimulus-reward conditioning (i.e. Pavlovian conditioning) from a neuroscientific standpoint. It turns out that your brain gets a dopamine burst whenever you receive the signal for a reward, not the reward itself. This presentation was not for the sci
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