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So don’t tell the Prince, but Princeton researchers have found that clutter affects our ability focus. Essentially, the chaos of being messy distracts you from processing key information. Over at the Unclutterer, they give this breakdown: The clutter competes for your attention in the same way a to
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“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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Random House is looking to videogames as potential home for their work. A story in the Wall Street Journal indicates that THQ and Random House will co-publish properties together. This was already the case for THQ’s Homefront, which had a prequel, Homefront: The Voice of Freedom. As Lenny Brown of
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Today, our visual art columnist Kyle Chayka takes a look at Minecraft through the world of the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the Dutch Baroque: Minecraft is a revelatory genre of landscape art, with its interactivity and wide-open canvas of possibilities. But the concepts of natu
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To combat the view of being stuffy, private institutions, museums are using some of the language of game designers to bring visitors more inside of their world. We would call that “immersion,” the idea that you can be lost inside of place that is not your own. Museums are pursuing engagement and tr
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If you haven’t seen these interactive white boards, they’re something out of Ghostwriter. First of all, the boards are called Prometheans which is amazing. Second, they emulate what can be done on the computer screen with a pen so it’s a bit like a Cintiq pad. We’re excited for things like this as
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We like the idea that when James Cameron heard the term “cinéma vérité” he thought that it meant literally making real life. In any case, we game fans like watching film directors quixotic quest for verisimilitude as it matches game designers dogged obsession with realism. In any case, Cameron is ap
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We commissioned Richard Hogg, designer extraordinaire, to make this shirt for us. He is an artist and illustrator who also makes games in collaboration with Honeyslug such as Poto & Cabenga and the forthcoming Hohokum. There are apparently 20 videogame references in this shirt. Check it out!
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We have a fondness for bands with videogame names that don’t make chiptunes, so Brooklyn-based proto-punk band Mr. Dream is certainly in our wheelhouse. It certainly helps that the band’s drummer Nick Sylvester wrote an Angry Birds review for us a few weeks back (and for the sake of disclosure was a
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Do videogames count as design objects? NYU sociologist Harvey Molotch certainly thinks so as we are prone to think of videogames as another form of entertainment. But much like videogames, design faces the same problems of anonymity, disrespect, and cultural bias. However, design is now ascendant a
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Videogames graced the cover of ARTnews this month with a lovely roundup of all the games-related projects that have been appearing over the last few years. Carolina A. Miranda gave this succinct description of Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart (pictured) which closes at PS1 this week. Clever culture
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From Esquire UK for their 20th Anniversary Take Cover project: When you look at their impressive body of work, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne and LA Noire (coming in May), we suspected the results weren’t going to be straightforward. This, however, was beyond what we hoped for. As