15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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E3: New Super Mario Bros. 2 and the fabricated scarcity of gold coins.
video It’s sometimes said that scarcity is what gives a thing value. Super Mario Bros. levels offered a model of this balance between scarcity and value, both determined by the game’s designers. The 100 coin benchmark for achieving an extra life had such immediate meaning precisely because of the sc
Want to live inside a FPS? Here’s what it’d be like.
Imagine you’re a game designer obsessed with recreating your games in your apartment, and that you’re looking for a roommate. Beth Newell imagines just such a situation: Future roommates are responsible for buying their own food and should NOT eat anything from the refrigerators in the biohazard con
The circumambient connection of Wii U’s Panorama View and iOS 6’s flyover maps.
video In the push toward a kind of pure, rule-based understanding of what videogames really are, the sensory pleasures of being in another place are often treated as secondary experiences. Yet, for many the experience of simply being somewhere can be as powerful as the experience of winning at somet
New York’s playful side shines in park-wide truth or dare
Stumbling on a note left by a stranger is always a bit exciting. For New Yorkers last weekend, Chelsea Davison challenged them to a game of truth or dare: She left 300 cards around the park that asked people to answer “truth” questions via Twitter or perform often embarrassing “dares” in front of fe
E3: Comedy Central’s Indecision Game turns politics into a sport for personal glory.
Though we have become overfamiliar with the terms, it truly bizarre to think of elections as something a person can win or lose. The process of determining how to organize and execute national bureaucracy has become another vessel into which we can pour our needs to be seen as good, great, or better
Want to learn to play Dwarf Fortress? O’Reilly has a 238-page book to teach you.
It’s in the programming section. Ha.
E3: In Halo 4 the (mostly) silent hero finally gets a voice.
video Like many shooter heroes Halo‘s Master Chief seldom speaks. Conventional wisdom says the absence of a specific voice makes it easier to identify with the hero, projecting parts of ourselves into the game. During a short video demonstration of Halo 4 at E3, Master Chief again breaks this genre
Cheat Sheet 6/12: Disney plugs Wreck-It Ralph with Fix-It Felix, Verizon drops phone plans, and Crytek freezes Timesplitters 4
We wake, unblinded by the Retina Display, to see the sun shine once again over earthen headlines. Disney plugs Wreck-It Ralph with the playable Fix-It Felix, the game from the movie about the “bad” guy from the game. Verizon to drop ordinary phone contracts, pick up “Share Everything” plans. Far
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