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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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Where do secrets come from? One Apple engineer describes having a hobbyhorse go top secret.
Videogames are beset with rumors and speculation about what secret mysteries developers are holding back. The process of keeping secrets, and determining what should and shouldn’t be a part of public record, is murky and haphazard. Writing in a Quora thread about how Apple keeps its secrets from sli
Japanese Ronald McDonald as final Earthbound boss: terrifying
This vision of Japanese Ronald McDonald as the final boss in Earthbound is even more surreal than the original game. The not-so-subtle commentary on fast food may make its way into your nightmares. video
Researchers use Kinect to keep track of missing car keys.
In another example of people finding interesting uses for Kinect outside of games computer scientists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have created a program that uses the camera to keep track of household objects. Shahriar Nirjon and colleague John Stankovic use Kinect cameras in ea
Silent protagonists have a personality, and it’s not yours
In early Zelda games, Link had little personality, but he did have a role to fulfill, whether it was as an adventuring son or a fairyless boy. His silence let players more readily identify with him… or so the Art of Gaming 101 puts it. Over at PopMatters, Kevin Dickinson argues that “silent” protag
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
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