In the noble pursuit to inject verisimilitude into the virtual, photorealistic videogames have gone at length to perfect face-capturing technology. Now, Disney researches have taken the captured data out of the database and onto silicon, around a head, then onto a robotic body. Science, Space & Robo
If your posessions were found in fifty years, what story would they tell? For one house in Japan, the ruins tell the story of a Western man with ties to the Queen of England who married into a Japanese family. Someone in the family didn’t like him, as he was cut out of some of the photos. Why did th
When the mobile game Phone Story was banned from Apple’s app store, it raised further awareness about questions of human rights violation that encircled the production of iPhones, from outsourced labor in China to the controversial extraction of precious minerals from the Democratic Republic of Cong
The slow food movement has been gaining popularity in the USA. Hip restaurants boast that their food is locally sourced and completely organic. Purchasing food locally can reduce gas consumption and supports the local economy. Purchasing videogames locally might not reduce gas consumption, but it p
Sesame Street has a history of creating parody music videos (like Cookie Monster’s “Share It Maybe“). Videogames are prevalent enough in popular culture that they’re deserving of Sesame Street parodies as well. After all, the target audience of Sesame Street today has always had access to things li
Critical discussions of videogames take place largely on the internet—much of the intellectual runoff filtering into Twitter and Facebook feeds, waiting to be shared. But does our desire to be ‘liked’ and ‘followed’—as critics or artists—come at the expense of honest critical thought? For the New Yo
The Super Friendship Club, a forum for casual videogame creators, encouraged participation in a “slowjam” to make a game about rituals in two weeks. One of the resulting games by Michael Brough is called VESPER.5. In this game, you may take one step each day, and then you must wait for the next day
The payoff of sex, music, and drugs? The guaranteed satisfaction of more music, sex, and drugs. According to this animated video from AsapSCIENCE, this Epicurean triumvirate stimulates our brains’ supply of a neurochemical called dopamine, which always leaves you wanting more. In the same way that a