Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SHENZEN I/O (Windows, Mac) BY ZACHTRONICS Some games and educational apps try to ease you into the art of writing code. SHENZEN I/O isn’t so soft. It’s a throwback to the 1980s, when there was
“Most things in the world are broken,” noted RAD Game Tools owner Jeff Roberts in a 2013 vodcast with programmer Casey Muratori. Roberts was talking about the busted, often unusable state of technology in our every day lives. You’ve probably seen examples of this when you’ve simply tried to install
Pixelsynth is a new web app from coder Olivia Jack that allows anyone to compose songs simply by drawing or uploading pictures. It’s available for free over on her Github, and it works by setting music to images in a method similar to a commonly used scientific and musical tool called a spectrogram.
Everything we know and love virtually is the source of meticulous coding. Coding is the backbone of videogames. Coding is in the DNA of the websites we visit daily. In fact, coding can be the reason why some of our favorite creative endeavors exist at all. Coding all too often makes the impossible p
No videogame is perfect. Somewhere lurking in the seams of polygonal landscapes lives the glitch —a graphical hiccup that could lead to characters not loading properly, items malfunctioning, or walls losing their solid form. However, in recent years the glitch has transcended its status as a technic
Cat++ is a code developed by Nora O’ Murchú, an Irish new media art curator, designer, and academic. Oh, and a cat lover, of course. Created during a residency at Access Space in the UK, Cat++ is thought of as a one-of-a-kind “cat simulator.” The coding alternates cat interactions with random and un
The computational science of randomness is a way to establish a firm balance without bias; a gateway between an artist and code itself. In videogames, randomness can take hold anywhere from a laughable Bethesda glitch, a serendipitous discovery in Metal Gear Solid V, to the randomly generated levels
A new Kickstarter entitled Giapetta’s Workshop wants to blend coding, crafting, and narrative into a single game that encourages 8-12 year old girls to be interested in STEM. The game begins in the real world, with a necklace and jewelry box that each girl can customize to fit her own style. The nec
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Else Heart.Break() (PC, Mac, Linux) BY Erik Svedang Life kinda sucks until you find out you can hack the world. That’s been the through line of a lot of cyberpunk and hacker fiction over the
Several lines of command-line text fade into the left side of your monitor. The sounds of primitive processor clicking and ancient operating system chimes remind you of the birth of the PC. The opposite of the clean and intuitive UI designs that we’ve all grown accustomed to jumps out at you, in an
With the technology industry considered male-dominated, many have wondered how to encourage more women into coding. Alexandra Diracles and Melissa Halfon have an idea: change the language. The result is Vidcode, interactive software geared toward teenage girls that enables them to customise Instagra
I was super-impressed along with everyone else when I saw the code’em-up Hack ‘n’ Slash at a live demo a month ago. The idea is that you solve puzzles like those found in the overhead Zelda games, but instead of dropping bombs and pushing blocks, you pull up a computer terminal and alter the code.
This fall, all the wide-eyed schoolchildren of England will begin learning code, as computer language is becoming a mandatory part of the curriculum in the UK. This is part of the British governments’ Year of Code program, which puts the country on track to outpace the USA and plenty of other nation
