Essay
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.
Essay
Essay
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
Essay
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.
Essay
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.
Essay
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.
Essay
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.
Essay
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.
Essay
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.
Essay
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.
Essay
My Purple-Haired Made-Up Best Friend, and Why She Had to Die
With the Transmedia fad at large, questions of authorship threaten to detract from the point. Chris Dahlan recounts a literary heroine’s stint in the blogosphere.
Essay
Difficulty and the Neoclassical Era
What sense can be made of the influx of game mechanics and forms? Michael Thomsen argues that recent videogames have pruned their rules with purpose, bringing us into the beginning of a neoclassical era of game design.
Essay
Things I Ate in Skyrim
Gus Mastrapa tells the consumer’s side of the story in Bethesda’s upcoming role-playing sprawl, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.