![[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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Science fiction author Neal Stephenson kickstarts his own sword fighting videogame.
video Neal Stephenson has long been an influential figure in videogame culture, from popularizing the use of the word “avatar” in Snowcrash to imagining a geologically distributed gold economy in an MMO with his most recent novel Reamde. Stephenson is finally ready to make a game of his own and he’s
Harvard brain bank melts
A hospital brain bank recently accidentally thawed over fifty brains. Luckily, some of the DNA is still intact. The NY Daily News reports that all is not lost: An initial review indicates that the DNA in the samples is intact and can still be used for genetic research. It’s unclear, however, whether
Street Fighter IV’s Yoshinori Ono comments on intense working conditions at Capcom.
Though videogames trade in fun and playfulness, the conditions under which they’re made can often be grueling. Earlier this year, Yoshinori Ono, Capcom’s producer in charge of Street Fighter IV, collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Speaking to Simon Parkin in an interview at Eur
E3: In Zelda Battle Quest fun is other people’s inexperience.
video At E3 Shigeru Miyamoto suggested a full Legend of Zelda game for Wii U won’t be coming anytime soon. The company did, however, show a smaller Zelda game built into NintendoLand, The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest. The game is a strange hybrid of classic Zelda mechanics combined with Nintendo’s
E3: Far Cry 3’s co-op adds a note of Charlie Chaplin to its jungle firefights.
video Carrying boxes has become a videogame staple. It’s a chore in Zelda games, a satiric puzzle in Portal, and in Far Cry 3‘s co-op mode it seems to become almost slapstick. The 4-player co-op demo on show at E3 involved a multi-step mission where players stalked through a jungle, ambushed an enem
New touch screen to revive the thrill of pressing buttons.
Like a child tapping glass at a toy store window display, the creators of Tactus Technology have felt a rift between finger and device since 2007, when Apple dropped the touch-screen veil over its devices and denied consumers the feeling of total manual domination. Perhaps seeing that child in all o
E3: Xenomorphs eat carrots, don’t they? How Aliens Colonial Marines fit itself into someone else’s canon.
video The Alien movies have become a semi-permanent part of western pop culture. H.R. Geiger’s slimy mouth-within-a-mouth designs, the idea that androids bleed white, and the suspicion that a feverish stomach ache is precursor to a little creature clawing its way out of someone’s chest cavity–these
Decade-long Civilization II game locked in 1700-year nuclear war; ice caps have melted 20 times.
This is madness. A Reddit user has been playing Civilization II for more than a decade and the results are awe-inspiring/depressing: A couple of in-game millenia later, the landscape is mostly “inundated swamp land,” as the polar ice caps have managed to melt 20 times. Engineers are constantly buil
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