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Playable poems now come with peer review
Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson's open-access magazine of short-form videogames, borrows the literary journal apparatus:
Pippin Barr
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Pippin Barr’s new game brings concrete poetry to life
Concrete poetry is the method of using a poem’s shape or visual arrangement to convey meaning or, at least, to form an image relevant to the poem’s themes. A famous example is Silencio (1954) by Eugen Gomringer, which repeats the world “silencio” (silence) 14 times to form a square block with a void
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A game about pretending to play chess is all about performance
It really is as if you were playing chess, except Pippin Barr’s newest game It is as if you were playing chess doesn’t include a chess board. There are no pawns, Kings, or Queens. No pieces at all, really—just instructions. Move this dot here. Look here. Now here. Tilt your head and cringe. Move aga
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A new game pays tribute to the many unfortunate deaths of Oregon Trail
Juegos Rancheros’s Mystic Western game jam, held between June 16th and June 30th, was a beautifully prolific two-week international event that gave birth to 50 games about the West and the weird things that happen within it. Alongside projects like Black Gold and To West was Independence, Missouri,
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New videogame asks: do we really need academics to study videogames?
When I was born late into 1990, the Super Nintendo had already been released in its home country of Japan. Over here in the States, Super Mario Bros. (1985) had already been entertaining my parents for years. Pong (1972) had entertained my pastor, and Tron (1982) had already hit theaters to the coll
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The hell of finishing a game and having nothing else to do
My grandmother cannot be seen. She is in the room but hardly visible—consumed by the beige. Her gradual decline into camouflage was incidental; the result of years spent sunk in her yellowed sofa, watching afternoon quiz shows and staining the walls with a million cigarettes. “Nan?!” I call out into
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V R 2 asks how much faith you’re willing to put in game makers
The town of Marfa is a repository of modern art and little else in the middle of the Texan high desert. “Whether you aim to remember history or forget it,” reads the first line of the welcome message on its website, a blockish, primitive piece of Internet. That is not the most promising of taglines,
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It’s time to confront the uncanny potential of virtual architecture
A room enclosed on all sides sits naked in grayspace. Inside is a trunk, a bed, a tube, a radiator, a light, and little else. A sharp sound swells and suddenly the room snaps out of place. Now it is upside-down. You can’t even enter through the open doorway, barely able to peer inside through the wi
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FPS has something to say about videogames and guns. But what?
Hugo Arcier’s FPS is about last year’s attacks in Paris, though it is not immediately clear in precisely what way. We know this because the artist says as much on his website: “FPS is a post November 2015 Paris attacks art piece. The artist deals with blindness hijacking video game codes, in particu
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In the post-apocalypse, there will still be performance art
Back in 2013, Lady Gaga quit smoking by employing the “Abramovic Method” during a three-day retreat in New York. It led to this extraordinary (and NSFW) video, in which Gaga is seen chanting into an empty room, stood blindfolded in a river to feel the rain drops against her skin, and getting intimat
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A videogame that tricks you into reading literature
The puzzle island of The Witness, released back in January, contains a theater in which you can unlock and watch movie clips. Among the documentaries and interviews about science progression and spiritual awakening is the last 10 minutes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). Since it’s been disco
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What if all videogames were Breakout?
Pippin Barr is a stalwart example of a videogame scientist. He’s one of only a few who fit that title—people who constantly experiment with videogames, testing their boundaries, remixing their components, taking curious lines of thought to their furthest iteration. Take his latest as an example. Cal