oregon trail
Carol Ann Has Dysentery
Living, learning, and dying on the steps of The Oregon Trail
education
SFPC
SFPC's HTTPoetics reads the handmade web as memory work
Tyler Yin and Kayla Drzewicki revisit the class's hand-built sites: a CD-ROM homage, a hammam of grief, pop-up loops of a toxic relationship.
School of Machines
An evening of alt-ctrl games closed a Berlin summer school
Press Play capped a month of hardware-and-play experiments at School of Machines, with Niklas Roy, Chloe Desmoineaux, and Lorenzo Pilia among the instructors.
interactive art
Body, Spirit, Code: Salome Asega's Participatory Digital Art
Artist and educator Salome Asega creates embodied digital experiences that bridge technology with cultural heritage, while building inclusive tech education spaces through her work at POWRPLNT and the Ford Foundation.
indigenous design
Playing with Purpose: Elizabeth LaPensée's Cultural Game Design
Elizabeth LaPensée integrates Indigenous knowledge into game design, creating experiences that honor traditional ways of knowing while addressing contemporary issues.
News
NYU Game Center’s new scholarship targets women game designers
Famously, the videogame space can be an unpleasant place for women. From professional game designers to the most casual game players, women have repeatedly encountered a two-fold problem when exploring the world of videogames: our experiences are continuously ignored (often accused of being “fakes”)
News
Musikinésia, a game that teaches you music theory
Musikinésia is a game about mastering the telekinetic powers of a dusty piano by learning how to play a real one. Not long ago, Rock Band 3 (2010) had a plastic keyboard that let players get the hang of rhythms on the piano, and Synthesia (2013) got a little closer to actually being a pack of lesson
Feature
Civilization is coming to classrooms, and that’s a bad idea
If you wanted to find a small, distilled encapsulation of the Civilization series of grand-scale strategy games, you need go no farther than the musical trailer for Civilization IV’s (2005) original game and its theme song, “Baba Yetu.” The trailer depicts—as only Civilization can—the vast scope of
News
New videogame asks: do we really need academics to study videogames?
When I was born late into 1990, the Super Nintendo had already been released in its home country of Japan. Over here in the States, Super Mario Bros. (1985) had already been entertaining my parents for years. Pong (1972) had entertained my pastor, and Tron (1982) had already hit theaters to the coll
News
How scientists are using MMOs to study sexism in videogames
For the past few years, one of the more common debates to be found on social media has been over whether women are discriminated against within videogames. This can relate to a number of factors, including skill, female presence in the community, and how women are represented within games, but conve
Feature
I Took My Outdoor Education Professor On A Canoe Trip In Twilight Princess
When you think of outdoor educators, someone like Z (name changed to protect privacy) probably comes to mind: grey hair in braids, wearing a wool sweater with jeans and mukluks, she uses her university email account with reluctance and sees devices as a harbinger of the end-times. Her pedagogy born
Review
1979 Revolution is a history lesson for the Netflix generation
As a school-aged kid in the 1990s, I didn’t spend a lot of class time talking about Iran. The name Ayatollah Khomeini meant more to me as a reference to a joke from The Simpsons than as an actual historical figure. As an adult, I became marginally more aware of Iran’s contemporary position within Mi