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Waiting Rooms is a building-sized game about the struggles of bureaucracy

When I left the Rubin Museum of Art’s Waiting Rooms exhibit, I had 14 yellow tickets, 24 pennies, and a form with a picture of a unicorn on it in my pocket. It sounds like the random hodgepodge of garbage a quirky Tina Fey character might carry, yes, but within the world of the exhibit, it was a ver

Creators of Never Alone to explore Ukrainian folklore in their next game

Never Alone (2014) is a game steeped in culture. Not just for videogames in the role of cultural accuracy, but in preserving the waning history of Alaskan Natives. The game, based on Alaskan Iñupiat (a hunter-gatherer indigenous people of Alaska) folklore, was an anomaly in the videogame space when

UNICEF combines 500 photos of war victims to give the refugee crisis a face

It’s difficult to grasp the meaning of a global refugee crisis. For much of the world this mass displacement is a moment on a newscast, a headline to be skimmed, a statistic to move us, but only briefly. UNICEF’s Sofia is the latest attempt to give us a deeper understanding. Sofia is a 3D animated g

A game designer speaks to how systems thinking can benefit journalism

Systems thinking is an approach to analysis, focusing on how different parts of a system relate to each other, and how they change over time and within the context of larger systems. That’s lot of words to process, but luckily Nicky Case has sketched up a great reflection on systems thinking in rela

A cyberpunk pottery game gives you something to think about

When Ludum Dare announced the theme for its 35th game jam would be “shapeshift,” it triggered something within the mind of Deconstructeam’s creative director, Jordi de Paco: a memory about a short story he once read in the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (1993)