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Stop calling drones videogames-war has consequence.
Drones court comparisons to videogames via the remote-controlled dissociation of violence and physical feeling between interface and human. It’s the idea that operating drones is so like a wartime flight simulator or shooter that soldiers are never convinced that they’re actually killing people. But
How to play Skyrim with small children
Over at Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott teaches how to play Skyrim with the under-7 crowd by sharing his experience in playing the high-fantasy game with his 4-year-old daughter Zoe. Unsurprisingly, it’s a constantly-supervised activity, but with the right guidance an open-world RPG can be a great teac
ModDB celebrates 10 years of modding
ModDB, a site that gathers and distributes videogame mods, (also known as modifications, usually fan-made changes to a game’s code), celebrates its tenth anniversary. Back in 2002, before MySpace, right after Napster went under, was when ModDB was created to help organize the modding community. For
New short film indulges the greasy thrill of gamification.
Sight—a new short film making its rounds on the internet—is a grim tale of a seduction-turned-cock-block app that in reality seems to be about soft-tech’s colonization of human compassion via apps and gamification. It’s set at the endpoint of augmentation, at least for this very rich white guy. Appa
This indigenous society in Papua New Guinea hates playing.
A small agricultural group known as the Baining in Papua New Guinea is infamous among anthropologists for having eradicated the desire to play from its culture—the Baining do not engage in festivals, games, or religious ceremonies. Researchers such as Gregory Bateson studied the group as early as th
Videogame AI has room to grow
We have pretty dang good graphics in our blockbuster games. But when are we going to get a game where we can have a natural conversation with a non-player character? Emily Short, who wrote the text-based dialogue game Galatea, is interested in exploring the problem of NPC dialogue. She’s helping dev
