15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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Superheroics on the screen and in our hands
If you’ve seen the comic-book film The Avengers, you know that its military presence is perplexingly slight. There are a couple jets, a few weapons here and there. The truth is that the U.S. military was (somewhat surprisingly) uneasy about being involved in the project. Well, that’s strange: They w
This week in holograms: Microsoft’s MirageTable will let you play virtual chess in real life.
video Microsoft recently unveiled some new technology that may bring you one step closer to having that holodeck you’ve always wanted: The MirageTable uses a 3D-video projector to beam images onto a sheet of curved white plastic placed in front of the user. At each end one of Microsoft’s Kinect dept
English cathedral to use PlayStation game Flower as part of the worship service.
Video Andy Robertson of GeekDad will be using the videogame Flower for an upcoming religious service at the Exeter Cathedral: I was inspired to choose Flower for the Cathedral service after experiencing a public performance of it at the GameCity festival in 2009. There, the game was performed by one
Frogger recreated with real-life NYC traffic sans real frogs.
Video An industrious team of arcade-loving programmers finally have created the lifelong dream of bringing Frogger into being. I was always curious how an actual frog would fare in actual traffic. (Actually I haven’t.) There’s no real frog but I will say that 5th and 17th is no place for an amphibia
Maurice Sendak would have wanted children’s games to be Grand Theft Auto, not Super Mario Bros.
The world is in mourning this week for the passing of beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak. Like most people, I read Where the Wild Things Are and also, like most people, I spent much of my childhood buried in the world of videogames. What’s fascinating to me is that as a child of the ’80s, ther
Play of the Day: Lexcavator is word game for people with a mining fetish.
Video Earlier this year, we showed a build of Adam Parrish’s word puzzler Lexcavator and Parrish has now put a finished product on the market. It’s pay-as-you-want since all the cool kids are doing that these days and fans of SpellTower will surely get a kick out of Lexcavator dig down style. Get it
When did art begin? For some answers, look to Egypt.
The debate about when art was “invented” is a daunting question for students trained in the method of historical geneology. But looking at some extremely ancient objects from pre-dynastic Egypt, Jerry Saltz poses an interesting possibility: maybe the conception that art was simply to be “observed” i
