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Video Fresh off the heels of our Soundplay project with Pitchfork, Swedish four-piece The Amplifetes take their own swing as music game excellance. To promote their upcoming album, they’ve created a the Guitar Hero-like interactive music video Where is the Light. (They’re planning to turn it into an
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video The juxtapositions one finds at E3 are a marvel. On the one hand you have perfectly tame things like Micrsoft’s new music streaming service, and on the other hand there is an ocean of explosions, executions, and non-sequitur dustep. Jarosh Barkdale has done a fine job capturing this bizarrenes
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Dana Goldstein ties high-paying jobs in tech to young girls playing more games. The effects of this gender gap reach far beyond whether women are building video games or coding Web apps alongside men (and making technology female-friendly—remember the Siri/abortion flap? Or the more recent dust-up o
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video Creative destruction has been an important idea in the U.S. presidential election, with Mitt Romney claiming the fecund growth that occurs after bankruptcy and mass layoffs is an essential part of the capitalism. The concept finds a surprising co-conspirator in God of War: Ascension, which wil
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At Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott turns to film to predict what the spate of samey shooters means for modern games. He looks to the demise of Westerns despite their widespread popularity in the 50s: Westerns began to disappear in the late 1960s for reasons relevant to modern game developers: 1) Genre
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video The last few years have brought a bounty of new evidence about how the subconscious guides our actions. Where this leaves the concept of free will is up for debate but we are discovering large parts of our lives run by the rote guidance of the unthinking mind. ZombiU dramatizes the stress betw
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video Like all games that support stealth, Dishonored can be played by silently watching other people from the shadowy wings. In playing through the E3 demo mission without killing anyone, you’ll need to trail behind guards, eavesdropping on idle conversation to learn who’s running the show, what ar
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Today E3 gave the world a parting hug in the form of these headlines. –Final Fantasy Dimensions, an episodic retro-RPG, coming to iSO and Android. –Angry Birds coming to consoles. -Shigeru Miyamoto talks about potentially connecting the 3DS and WiiU. -1,000 workers riot and Foxconn’s Chengdu factory
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The original Star Trek series was an unspooling yarn of multicultural adventurism that celebrated the discovery of new species and new ways of life. These discoveries sometimes left human beings in the unflattering light of savage cowboys always ready to reach for the phaser when a simple “how do yo
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Video How can we help overweight people eat less? Convince them they’re eating more than they really are. At the University of Tokyo, augmented reality glasses have convinced test subjects the snack they were eating was 50% larger than it really was, helping them eat ten percent less than usual. The
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video Hitman: Absolution is a game about assassinating people in public spaces. The E3 demo puts players in control of Agent 47 in a bustling Chinatown quarter surrounded by hundreds of people, all potential witnesses to his crime. Paradoxically, in the moments before the violent outbreak, no one ca
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Spy films are tiring of the old femme fatale. For the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), apathy and demoralization may have extinguished sexual desire, making sexual tactics defunct. Or at least that’s what Samantha Hinds argues in the New Inquiry. The new style in spy cinema has been one of a