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It’s one of the most tired clichés in modern life – that thanks in large part to the always-on, always-connected paradigm enabled by modern technology, American lives are busy, crazy, and unhealthy. That may well be true. But it has less to do with technology than we might think – and more interesti
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Like an athlete sobbing after a championship loss, Jesper Juul hates failing in videogames. “Why do we play videogames even though they make us unhappy?” he asks in his new book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Videogames. Comparing game failure to tragic literature, theatre, and
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We love MoMA. We’ve thrown an arcade with them and worked with them on the most recent acquisition of 14 games for the permanent collection of architecture and design. Tonight, senior curator and future Twofivesix speaker Paola Antonelli will grace the stage of the Colbert Report to talk about MoMA’
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Recent news from the American military has been all about modernization lately. The US will soon allow women in combat roles (roles they’re already playing in the current conflicts, thanks to the reality that the front lines are everywhere), LGBT soldiers can serve openly, and their families can rec
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The shooter is now legal drinking age, and from the early years to the awkward teens and on to today, it has come a long way. To prove it, a YouTuber has posted this montage, The Graphic Evolution of First Person Shooters: 1992-2012. Whoa! I had totally forgotten how bad Unreal Tournament looks. It’
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Here’s your weekly reminder that war is becoming uncannily similar to shooters. The Germans have rolled out a sophisticated combat system known as Gladius, Latin for sword, which is not only scary-sounding, but uncomfortably videogame-esque. The initial batch of systems will let the good guys ferre
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This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features a remarkable story on the junk food industry and its many secretive struggles for our mouths. Though the author, Michael Moss, kept his focus on obesity and nutrition, I couldn’t help but notice a few startling parallels with the many videogames I
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Blazing Saddles, The Three Amigos, perhaps WestWorld. These are the great Western spoofs, and now games have their own parody of the gritty genre about the American West’s sharpshooters, Sheriffs, and tumbleweeds. It’s called Even Cowgirls Bleed, a short, funny, poignant adventure game from Christin
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So many videogame to film adaptations end up in the dustpan that we wouldn’t blame you for not taking seriously the big-screen version of Deux Ex: Human Revolution. But, it sounds like the film will soon be going into production, so we felt free to speculate. What I’ve come to realize is that there
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Possibly the only live-action role-playing game (long for LARP) cool enough for me to actually consider playing, IRL Shooter (short for in-real-life) is the popular game native to Australia that blissfully unites laser-tag, a haunted house, and the campaign mode of first-person shooters. If the pros
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Back in the ‘80s—when MTV really was music television—music videos were just infiltrating mainstream America’s consciousness: video hadn’t yet killed the radio star. It was innovative, pioneering work; like all sui generis art forms, it eventually became ubiquitous. The zeitgeist is necessarily flee
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When we spoke to Brian Provinciano back in October 2011, he was nearing the end of work on his game Retro City Rampage, a parody of everything Eighties through the lens of a modern sandbox game like Grand Theft Auto (if that game came out for the NES). It was an ambitious project, especially for wha