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Wired‘s senior editor, Adam Rogers, loves postapocalyptic science fiction—not for the allure of eschatology, but because he thinks these stories are imminent. As he says in the video, we need “not stories set 20 years in the future, but to quote Max Headroom, 20 minutes in the future.” What used to
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Wired recently did a profile on a company called California Skateparks—comprised of architects, designers, and skateboarders alike—explaining the balance of play, difficulty, and art that a good skatepark requires. Every park that California Skateparks builds has certain fundamental features, like
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The iconic pixel camo—or the Universal Camouflage Pattern—of our war-torn 2000s is on its way out. As told by Daniel Engber at Slate, the great digital experiment by the U.S. Army is a long story of high-fashion and high-hypothesis. If it never made sense to you either, don’t worry—the theory behind
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For shame.
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New York City’s Governors’ Island has become a slate for designing the park that revolutionizes the collective concept of playgrounds and parks. For many decades the design psychology has been one of paranoia and protection, as we explored in Yannick Lejacq’s history and future of New York City play
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Artist Ruganzu Tusingwire is creating a movable playground for Ugandan children entirely out of recycled water bottles. An artist and community organizer, Tusingwire has a…more imaginative idea for how to engage and empower the children of his home country: Play. Tusingwire became the first City 2.0
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The CEO of Wargaming.net, developers of the free-to-play, tank-based MMO World of Tanks, recently discussed the history of the company and its unlikely path to success, as well as its plans for the future. Kislyi has come a long way since first designing physical games directly on the bare floor of
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Jake Edelstein is an American journalist who has spent his career covering crime in Japan. He’s recently been published in an interview on Edge, where he speaks about the ties between organized crime and gaming in Japan. When asked about yakuza influence on the booming social gaming industry, he res
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The best real-time-strategy players are like orchestra conducters—they lead multivalent campaigns for what can be hours without pause. But what happens when you change their best-loved instrument for conducting with a supposedly user-friendly arrangement? Reactions amount to a resounding “meh.” Enga
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Chris Baraniuk, over at The Machine Starts (an allusion to the excellent short story by E. M. Forster), eloquently explains the “fifth wall” of games that some players always feel the need to transgress. Like many other games of the era, Super Mario 64 set each level on a kind of pixelated island s
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Divekick could be classified as a “minimalist” fighting game, or a fighting game parody. Or as just plain ridiculous. According to creator Adam “Keits” Heart, it started out as a joke, but grew into a seriously fun game. In Divekick, players only have two buttons: jump and kick. There is no means to
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In a rare instance of a company wielding the power of the ending, Blizzard suggests Diablo III players maybe get up and go outside while they take some time to figure out how to get you to keep playing. But games are especially hard to quit, if it’s indeed a game we enjoy. So how do we take it when