![[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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Are games preventing you from being truly idle?
In an article last Saturday, Tim Kreider threw a punch at the old Puritan adage that says “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.” Idleness, he argues, is a requisite part of the creative process that we often sacrifice to increase productivity. But are we really being productive? Idleness is not jus
New "energy" system is a perverse tax on gamers.
Game publishers are exercising new, cruel methods to get you to keep playing their games. Not only a nefarious metaphor for money, “energy” perverts the exchange economy that was once an unspoken agreement between games and their designers. The balance is tilting upward. Over at Hookshot Inc., Simon
Help filmmakers tell the epic of UK videogames.
video WIth the help of their Indiegogo campaign, the documentarians of From Bedrooms to Billions promise to tell the untold story of the Britsh videogames industry, and ultimately help to bridge a gap between traditional broadcast and videogames. “It’s a story that really hasn’t been told,” Caulfie
Stop and think-pause is power.
Frank Partnoy, author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay used be an investment banker—a career whose pillars of spontaneity, risk, and unchecked ambition loom over the so called failures of hesitation, procrastination, and delay. Then he stopped to write the inverse. With semantics and science, P
Interference is a game that makes you cheat.
Recently debuted at Joue le jeu at la Gaite lyrique, Interference is a game designed by Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi. Unlike most games, Interference is “complicated by the fact that in order to play [the players] steal pieces from each others’ games.” Aesthetically, it looks as if Calder stepp
The sociology of ‘nerdrage’ is explained through Diablo III.
In an attempt to tackle one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, Jesse Singal has broken down his theory of nerdiness and, more specifically, the ‘nerdrage,’ which I assume is the antonym of nerdgasm: nerdrage: the overwhelming feeling of anger engendered when a nerd is disappointed by that thing
Fibbing online legal in Rhode Island again. Xbox Live to feel the pain.
Common to gamers and early internet users, the favorite pastime fantasy of totally faking your identity online actually used to be illegal in Rhode Island. But that changed last month, according to Ars Technica. Rhode Island state law makers voted this month to repeal an obscure 1989 law that forbid
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