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The Super Friendship Club, a forum for casual videogame creators, encouraged participation in a “slowjam” to make a game about rituals in two weeks. One of the resulting games by Michael Brough is called VESPER.5. In this game, you may take one step each day, and then you must wait for the next day
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The payoff of sex, music, and drugs? The guaranteed satisfaction of more music, sex, and drugs. According to this animated video from AsapSCIENCE, this Epicurean triumvirate stimulates our brains’ supply of a neurochemical called dopamine, which always leaves you wanting more. In the same way that a
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Academic journals are often awful about accessibility. If you don’t have access to a university library, it’s almost impossible to know what’s going on in the academic community. Fortunately, “open-source” or free, online academic journals are gaining in popularity. Mediascape, UCLA’s journal of cin
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To many educators here and in the UK, consumable digital technology and social media are only distractions, pastimes, ways to escape the monolithic institution of education. But as schools build firewalls around their classrooms, are they depriving their students from learning how to graduate from u
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It’s here! The last game from our Soundplay project with Pitchfork and Intel comes to life this week. Built by Aussie developer Pachinko Pictures, it’s a simple tale of beetle that dreams to be a frog that dreams to be a chicken that dreams to be… You get the idea. Play it here! More on the team: Pa
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Kickstarter makes it looks easy to get funded for a project. Just put together a good enough video and people are dying to give out money! While it’s easy to see all the successfully funded projects on Kickstarter, it’s harder to find the failed projects. It makes sense not to show them to consumers
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Japanese games are frequently criticized for sticking to a formula. Games evolve rather than innovate; even the latest Zelda game started out with three starter dungeons, as did many of its predecessors. For those of us eager to see radical new ideas out of Japan, indie games might be a good place t
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We’re fans of combining music and games, as you can tell from our Soundplay project. Tabor Robak, who we interviewed last year at the New Museum, made a music game set to an entire 35-minute album. David Kanaga describes the game on his blog: Exo brings us face to face with tensions that have the p
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A new biology textbook called Inquire is being called “the world’s first intelligent textbook.” We’ll take that to mean that all the extra human cognition that goes into reading, interpreting, and teaching—like drawing larger parallels between abstract concepts, reading between the lines—will be spe
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In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, “Feelies” are augmented movie theaters equipped with technology that manipulates the audience’s sense of touch. A sex scene, for instance, can be felt as much as it can be watched—i.e. the sensation of silken fur on a bearskin rug as lovers copulate on it. No
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Papo & Yo is the forthcoming magical-real, semi-autobiographical adventure puzzler by Vander Caballero, a former EA Montreal developer who broke off to form his own studio called Minority. Here, a cinematic splicing augments the game’s deeply personal narrative: how the young Vander coped with his f
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New environmental sensors for the iPhone let consumers take stock of their surroundings. The nitrate sensor can tell if food is really organic, or if your garden needs more fertilizer. Three other sensors for radioactivity, humidity, and electromagnetic fields will increase the quantification and di