15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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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
Review of Spec Ops: the Line or coffee capsule? You make the call.
Mitch Krpata analyzes the language from reviews of Spec Ops: The Line and Keurig instant coffee capsules. “Spellbinding complexity… deep, dark, and intense” or “Rich, robust, and powerful.” Only answers await you through this door.
Junot Díaz’s new short story collection has Brickbreaker on the cover.
I loved The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from Pulitzer-winning novelist Junot Díaz and his review of Grand Theft Auto IV a couple years back is equally magical. Good to know his new short story collection (below) wears its loyalties on the cover.
New robotic legs have robotic muscles, robotic nervous system, robotic funny bones.
Looks like biology is still our ideal model for technology, as these builders take a step back to try and replicate the complexity of the world instead of simplify it. From Wired: The research, published today in the Journal of Neuroengineering by researchers from the University of Arizona, could he
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