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Why racing your ghost in marathons (or Mario Kart) actually works.
Josh Hutchinson’s wonderful piece at the Walrus outlines the limits of brain science and how tweaking our internal motivation systems can push our bodies to amazing things. It also featured this little nugget on how racing an avatar of a past successful performance can spur an even more successful n
How Microsoft is becoming tech-art’s newest patron.
When Microsoft developed the Kinect—a TV mounted gesture recognition device used for at-home bowling and dance games, they also accidentally created a way for artists to engage the technology as a medium in and of itself. After the Kinect hit the market, a hacker developed an open source driver for
A machine is not a critic.
If games are meant to encourage trust and maintenance in systems in general, then we might think of art in games as doubt and subversion of these systems. But does this mutual exclusivity reflect why we struggle so openly about wanting more of the latter in our games? Writing for IGN, Keza MacDonald
New art cigarettes guilt you for fun.
Making cigarettes cute and interactive might not be the best way to stop kids from starting, but the Ukrainian artist’s series “No Games For Smokers” does cleverly simplify smoking’s generally accepted dangers. Whether or not game imagery make cigarettes more attractive than repellent is ambiguous,
Violence against games is the new violence in games.
According to a recent report from The New York Times, Resorts World Casino in Queens, NY is facing a continual slew of assaults by angry players against its gambling machines. “I lost $300 without a bonus, so yes, I broke the machine,” George Govan, a 56-year-old man from Brooklyn, told security gua
In a good story, 1+1=3.
“All story is manipulation.” — Ken Burns In the video above, the acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns goes ahead and admits that even his documentaries manipulate the audience in order for them to be moving. Only this is his advice to all storytellers. So perhaps we should consider that the thing that
Is the art of videogame fragrance even a thing?
According to Epic Scents, a new company set to create air-fresheners of licensed videogame characters, Capcom’s Mega Man smells like “the essence of a boy put into a man’s role.” Um, ok. But what does that smell like? “There is a purity in him, he has a real pure heart,” Kavanaugh said, “but there i
