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Bring Your Own Game
When are boring games more fun than fun games? Kyle Chayka visits the Play Station exhibition at Postmasters Gallery and finds challenging and rewarding experiences.
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How Will Videogames Pass Go?
A rumination on the effects of rationality and irrationality on videogames big and small, including Skyrim, Dark Souls, Passage, and Braid—and why it’s important that game systems come out of culture.
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Drinking Games: Angry Minority Flip Cup
In our first installment of Drinking Games, Manveer Heir? lays down the new Flip Cup law in an update to a modern classic.
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Coloring Machines
The musician and artist Roberto Carlos Lange talks to us about making art with Atari Video Music, a childhood playing with machines, and seeing music.
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The Illogical End
Are all games the sum of their rules and systems? According to the field of ludology, the formal logic of a game is where its soul resides. Jason Johnson argues that bridging the gap between system and meaning is a more tenuous proposition than ludologists acknowledge. Read the first of this three-p
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Why Rainbows Matter
This past summer New York’s High Line park was overtaken by rainbows. The artists behind the installation Rainbow City talk to us about colored smoke, the toys they handmade as children, and the deeply spiritual uses of play.
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Augmented Remembering
Our art history columnist wonders if videogames will deliver on the promise of the socially-conscious Rosewood and the cyberpunk scenario of Total Recall—where the memories of others can be experienced vicariously, for the better. Her case? A lost boy in Heavy Rain.
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What Do You Call It?
Gaming’s biggest hurdle may be to reach outward—beyond the masses, to the upper echelons of culture. Lana Polansky attended the Montreal International Game Summit 2011 and came back inspired, if not brimming with answers.
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Who Rules the Rules?
Kirk Battle uses the law to explain why handing a game’s rules over to the computer fundamentally changes its nature—in this case, collectible-card game Magic: The Gathering.
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Point and Shoot
Developer Morgan Jaffit on retooling the first-person shooter in the new demo of Warco, a game that gives you a camera instead of a gun.
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Piranha Kid
A local Peruvian champ tries to rise to global prestige in Street Fighter IV. In doing so he’s forced to rethink where he is from. Luis Wong tells the story.
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Killing the Turtle
We talk to Jennifer Estaris, a designer of alternate reality games and children’s games, about trying to retrieve a sense of childhood and what she learned from Nickoledeon.