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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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*&$#$%: Curious where those profanities on Xbox Live come from? A short history.
Obscenties generally fall under three categories: sexual, animal/scatological, and religious. You might hear cursings from all three categories in a given Call of Duty session, but when was the last time you heard the religious curse “Golly!”? Words that are now laughable were once obscene: Golly, z
Google image search laziness caught at BBC, uses a Halo graphic to report on violence in Syria.
video In a report on the United Nations’ struggle to address the on-going violence in Syria, the BBC used a logo from Halo to introduce the story. The logo is taken from the Halo‘s fictional United Nations Space Command, the military group tasked with exploring and defending Earth’s interests throug
PAUSE: University of Maryland’s Gamer Symphony goes philharmonic on Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
video The University of Maryland’s Gamer Symphony Orchestra is a volunteer group of mostly non-music major fans of videogames who’ve decided to translate their favorite scores into full-blown symphonic pieces. The group was invited to play at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of its contin
Does the new iPad screen make games look better or worse? It’s mostly a wash.
Everything new is obviously better, except when it’s not. The new iPad’s “retina” screen, which displays bright and detail-packed 264-ppi images, is obviously better. All the numbers on its spec sheet are bigger, and its new graphics processor is four times more capable than last year’s. Sam Byford
Horror novelist Dennis Cooper explains Epic Mickey’s story and why characters aren’t worth caring about.
What are characters? What is the point of telling a story? These questions are timely indictments of the struggle many videogames have had reconciling storytelling with interactive mechanism. Yet, these struggles are not new nor are they unique to videogames. What is the worth of a character in an e
What are you running from? Jonatham Lethem on escapism and seeing Star Wars 21 times in the theater.
It’s become commonplace to describe videogames as escapism. Before they are about winning and learning new skills Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and World of Warcraft are about the creation of summary alternatives to the real world. They create an advanced version of the kind of escape movies
