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As part of the upcoming Babycastles Summit, Keita Takahashi—the endearingly sardonic director of the Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy—has teamed up with the avant-slacker game producers/party throwers Babycastles to carry out Takahashi’s real-world dreams of classic videogames, i.e. Dunk Hunt and P
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It’s fun to play with LEGO, building things and then imagining how they fit into a world. The versitility of LEGO make them great tools for psychologists, who use them to asses spatial reasoning, as play therapy for autistic children, and to help salarymen and women think creatively. David Whitebre
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In the 2011 issue of Game Studies focused on reward systems, Christopher Moore tackled the subject of achievements within Team Fortress 2 and, in particular, the game’s hats. If you’ve ever been compelled to learn more about the psychology, social theory, and economics of downloadable fedoras, read
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Drones court comparisons to videogames via the remote-controlled dissociation of violence and physical feeling between interface and human. It’s the idea that operating drones is so like a wartime flight simulator or shooter that soldiers are never convinced that they’re actually killing people. But
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Over at Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott teaches how to play Skyrim with the under-7 crowd by sharing his experience in playing the high-fantasy game with his 4-year-old daughter Zoe. Unsurprisingly, it’s a constantly-supervised activity, but with the right guidance an open-world RPG can be a great teac
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ModDB, a site that gathers and distributes videogame mods, (also known as modifications, usually fan-made changes to a game’s code), celebrates its tenth anniversary. Back in 2002, before MySpace, right after Napster went under, was when ModDB was created to help organize the modding community. For
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Sight—a new short film making its rounds on the internet—is a grim tale of a seduction-turned-cock-block app that in reality seems to be about soft-tech’s colonization of human compassion via apps and gamification. It’s set at the endpoint of augmentation, at least for this very rich white guy. Appa
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A small agricultural group known as the Baining in Papua New Guinea is infamous among anthropologists for having eradicated the desire to play from its culture—the Baining do not engage in festivals, games, or religious ceremonies. Researchers such as Gregory Bateson studied the group as early as th
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A startup called Use It Better uses statistics gathered from games to predict the behavior and characteristics of players. While the company began by helping developers detect cheating players and improve user experience, it recently found that it could determine players’ gender, age, personality, a
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We have pretty dang good graphics in our blockbuster games. But when are we going to get a game where we can have a natural conversation with a non-player character? Emily Short, who wrote the text-based dialogue game Galatea, is interested in exploring the problem of NPC dialogue. She’s helping dev
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According to Lizzie Stark, author of a new book on the history of Live-action Roleplay (LARP), Leaving Mundania, the history of LARP dates back far beyond the era of Tolkein-esque fantasy to the Romans and Elizabethans: Queen Elizabeth I presided over some serious, and seriously expensive, larplike
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As we get older, it gets harder to make new friends. We hold our high school and college friends closer; making a new friend seems to take lot of time and effort. We’re less willing to befriend someone completely strange to us. The NY Times has some explanations in their article: As external conditi