15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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A designer, architect and skateboarder walk into a bar…
Wired recently did a profile on a company called California Skateparks—comprised of architects, designers, and skateboarders alike—explaining the balance of play, difficulty, and art that a good skatepark requires. Every park that California Skateparks builds has certain fundamental features, like
Why the US army’s camo is covered in pixels.
The iconic pixel camo—or the Universal Camouflage Pattern—of our war-torn 2000s is on its way out. As told by Daniel Engber at Slate, the great digital experiment by the U.S. Army is a long story of high-fashion and high-hypothesis. If it never made sense to you either, don’t worry—the theory behind
A playground for kids to explore and parents to grow.
New York City’s Governors’ Island has become a slate for designing the park that revolutionizes the collective concept of playgrounds and parks. For many decades the design psychology has been one of paranoia and protection, as we explored in Yannick Lejacq’s history and future of New York City play
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
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