This article was funded with support from Longreads members. * * * No one wore stripes that spring and summer in Leavenworth. Stripes were for rule breakers, and no one was breaking the rules. “Baseball As A Corrective” read the front page of the New York Times that May. It was 1912 and “the magic o
One of the first things that people notice when they flip on their consoles are the catchy intro sequences; the flashy animations of the screen. Videogames have a quantified area around them that’s visual. After all, so many game elements are conveyed through visual means, such as objective markers
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” says the pick-up artist. “I’ve just got more game than you,” says your roommate who wears too much cologne. Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in our web-obsessed culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. For an entire generation of players, there is nothing sweeter than scoring the winning kill in a Halo death-match and leading your team to victory. With the first-ever Halo World Championship, Microsoft is making a concentrated effort to get
It’s no secret that media’s treatment of female bodies is all around terrible. But for videogames and other animated media, the idealizing of women’s bodies presents some uniquely awkward issues (have you seen the breast physics?) For example: according to the 2013 Game Developer Magazine survey, on
Cortana—everyone’s favorite blue-skinned malfunctioning AI buddy from the Halo games—has a knack for predicting World Cup soccer matches, it seems. Since Microsoft has adopted her voice as the equivalent of Siri for Windows phones, she’s carrying out all kinds of non-shooting-oriented voice commands
Once upon a time in 1989, before app-whisperers like iPhone’s Siri and Windows’ Cortona fit conveniently in our jean pocket, people built rather large and strange-looking speech synthesis machines, like this one. The Talking Machine, a 230cm rack of pipes that looks like something out of Dr. Seuss,
Destiny, Bungie’s upcoming MMO and first new intellectual property since Halo, looks outstanding. Glad we’re all in agreement about that. But from the sound of things, it isn’t abiding by the traditional ‘grind for months to max your character’ structure consistent across MMOs. In fact, The Guardian
The biggest and best rumor of this young year materialized in the blogosphere today, as it’s being reported that Neill Blomkamp of District 9 and Elysium fame is directing the pilot episode of the upcoming Halo TV show. If true, Microsoft’s doing something very, very right. Until we get confirmation
