Christopher Ketcham’s “antimonpolist history of Monopoly” at Harper’s is a great read, a mixture of economic and social theory with a board game everyone knows. There’s a section that describes how the original version of Monopoly, called The Landlord’s Game was designed to teach people the threats
The news that Texas Instruments is adding color to its ubiquitous graphing calculators brought streaming back a torrent of gaming memories. What Dan Rubinstein never realized as he struggled to communicate to me the principles of trigonometry was that I was engaged in the management of a large-scale
This is perhaps the best response ever: “An Iranian non-profit company says it will honor U.S. President Barack Obama’s request that Iran return a drone that crashed there last year. But instead of the actual drone, the company says it will send miniature toy versions. A lot of them. “We plan to sen
Pig Chase is hands-down one of my favorite projects to emerge over the past year. Designers and researchers at Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Wageningen UR have been working on a project to allow farmers to engage with their pigs on more than a “feed me” level. Per the project’s mission, “Thei
Over on Nightmare Mode, Tom Auxier writes that while Borderlands 2 is a funny game, it isn’t really a comedy. There are many facets to video games, but boiled down, they’re a series of actions that tell stories. When I say Borderlands 2 isn’t a comedy, I mean exactly that: it is a very capable, if o
At this weekend’s Practice conference at NYU, experimental game designer Chris Bell described the four archetypes that he and the members of thatgamecompany uncovered during the course of development of Journey. It’s something that you’ve probably suspected all along — that the way you play a game m
This post was produced by General Assembly. Game Design is an exciting new field of critical and practical studies which explores how to design games that are fun, engaging, rewarding, and mind-changing. The systems we interact with every day as gamers are the subject of this field, but it equally
LittleBigPlanet is one of Sony’s great successes, not only because LBP has sold so well, but because it appeals to such a massive audience. Little kids can play it, adults can play it, and they can play it together. Does this sound like any other game? Mario perhaps? One thing that has plagued Sony