The Wii U Diaries, Day 5: Will we survive the herds of Nintendo’s connected future?
In the last weekday before launch, Jon Irwin enjoys his last day before the public sets in.
Columns
Think the Olympic closing cermony was madness? Wait, til you play Olympic videogames.
In our monthly sports column, Abe Stein explores the mad, mad world of Olympic videogames. Were they always this crazy and what can they tell us about our current Olympic predicament?
Strings and Swings
Why is pressing buttons more faithful to baseball or golf than swinging a motion controller? Abe Stein explains why videogames need to keep their distance from real sports—at least for now.
In Search of Mothra Fairies
What do onigiri treasure, killer doll heads, spreadsheets, and gymnastics have in common? It turns out nothing, but we can recommend them all in the sudden return of Flash Forward.
The Radioactive Circus
Is this London installation the most dangerous ride in the world? Jason Johnson speaks with artist Ryan Doyle about The Liquidator, a kinetic sculpture he built using radioactive metal collected from the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Glue Gun
Are developers cut-and-pasting a new canon of crossovers? Diana Poulsen traces the art of collage from Cubism to World of Warcraft.
Stray From the Path
The Path capitalizes on the horror of imagined terrors in a no-win journey; contemporary art like Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy and Hein’s Invisible Labyrinth have similarly terrifying and labyrinthine aspects.
Pixel City
Contemporary architecture is stealing pixels from videogames. Our columnist explores how and why this retro fad has become an unconvincing sign of the future.
Our Future Past
What do Halo and Portal have to do with 1950s universitites? They tell a surprisingly similar story through the hard lines of Brutalist architecture.
What’s Happening?
Installation artists like Yayoi Kusama and Allan Kaprow built interactive worlds decades before Zelda. What can videogames still learn from contemporary technology-based art?
The War Must Go On
Brendan Keogh examines the overlap between games and cinema via the Modern Warfare series and asks how much control the player has or even wants.
I Can’t Play Without My Radio
In Grand Theft Auto and Fallout, the soundtrack saves your life. Here’s how the power of pop helps gaming achieve the mundane.
An Old Hope
Most sports stories play out the same way. Two baseball narratives, The Rookie and The Natural, offer a different understanding of the game by beginning at the end. Our sports columnist responds in-game.
Playing Tricks
We have come to expect everything from gimmicky machinations to pure innovation in videogames. But are they part of a broader historical tradition? Diana Poulsen delves into the Baroque to shed light on gaming’s modern tricks.
Open Your Eyes
The bifurcation of society into jocks and geeks was supposed to end with high school. So why do the two groups eye each other with mutual suspicion? Our sports columnist argues that the videogame community has wrongly ousted sports gamers.
When Robots See Us Laugh
Have you ever asked the nearest robot how you can help it—not vice versa? If “charismatic machines” take hold, then we’ll have a lot to laugh about.
A Sound Design: L.A. Noire’s False Notes
We tend to think about the “uncanny valley” as something that we can only register visually. But is the it harder to stomach the almost human faces in L.A. Noire or the game’s replica and relic of a soundtrack? Music columnist David Raposa looks at the game’s sound and music design and wonders if hi
Next Time I’m in Rio
An experimental videogame called Hokra invites comparisons to sports, but not only for its rules. For Abe Stein, sport is a feeling that runs deeper than the inner workings of games, existing in the events and dramas that we cause to emerge from them. So how do a few pixel squares pull that off, and
To Build and Break
What do boardgaming’s stars look like? If Donald X. Vaccarino is any indication, they are difficult to grasp. The designer of runaway favorite Dominion builds games that change and remake themselves nearly to infinity. In his latest column Gus Mastrapa tries to get a foothold in Vaccarino’s twisty w
Like Looking In A Mirror, Only Not
Nicolas Cage may be our greatest living actor. On the precipice of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Scott Wayne Indiana talks to Brandon Bird, the insane genius behind the Nicolas Cage Adventure Set.
Dust to Dust
Somewhere in the desert, Aram Bartholl is about to build a life-size reproduction of Counter-Strike‘s most famous map, “de_dust.” Our architecture columnist Michelle Young talks to Bartholl about how he intends to disrupt space by bringing virtual reality into the air we breathe and walk in.
The Global Game Project: Brazil
The Duck, Duck, Goose model of kids games emerges in the latest entry into The Global Games Project. James Dilks explains how a South American rodent provides the basis to a simple Brazillian amusement.
The Global Game Project: Malaysia
We visit Malaysia for the latest Global Games Project. In this obscure take on everyone’s favorite Mancala, village houses replace the playing board.
The Global Games Project: Vietnam
The Vietnamese game of Bit Mat Bat De helps develop the fine art of trolling.
The Surreal One on One
In our new sports column, Abe Stein reminisces about playing Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One, how it compares to a modern sports videogame like NBA 2K12, and what is lost in designing for the realism of sports rather than the surrealism of games.