Tobias Zarges wants to experiment with the videogame form and its capacity to be art. This comes natural to him as a student of fine art, design, and music at Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany. To this end, he’s working with programmer Moritz Eberl on Close, an upcoming game about exploration and ex
In the strata of books about videogames, I offer the following overly simplistic codification: 1. Books about a specific game or game developer 2. Books about a specific period of time in the history of games 3. Books about how videogames are art, dammit And then there’s Ian Bogost’s new book Play A
As a child, imagination turned the familiar and mundane into something more during play. Legos let you create amazing structures and recreate your favorite heroes and cartoons. Battles worthy of their own comic splash pages took place between action figures. A playground wasn’t just baking metal sli
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel Ancient India produced some of the oldest and longest surviving games in history, and though the country’s videogame creators face modern day challenges, its contributions to game design are undeniable. They’ve gone by many different names and
Lions are fucking awesome. These animals aren’t called king of the jungle for nothing, and it’s not hard to see why they’d instantly became status symbols to human kind, from monarchies to incestuous Game of Thrones houses alike. I mean, just look at this thing: This is a portrait of raw, unadultera
While members of the press struggle to properly label Wattam (is it a puzzle game? A sandbox? A friendship simulator?), the latest trailer only continues to defy all categorization and genre. If you haven’t played on of Keita Takahashi’s games before then you haven’t seen a game quite like Wattam, a
Brutalism gets a bad name. Ok, let’s be honest, it has a bad name. If tomorrow morning you were tasked with encouraging parents to send their kids to a specific playground, you probably wouldn’t call it brutalist. Or would you? For a brief, wonderful moment in the middle of the 20th century, archite
If “Feel the Pain” is your favorite Dinosaur, Jr. song, then you’re in for a treat. Michael Hand of the Revision3’s show DIY Tryin‘ has put together a devious game concept that will surely upset everyone you know and likely send another to the hospital. Titled Shocker’s Bluff, the concept is simple.
After designing Ultima Online, Raph Koster went on to write A Theory of Fun for Game Design, a book for game designers with a lesson for all of us. After ten years, it’s being republished, and its lesson still applies. We need to learn how to have fun. “After we grow up, we sometimes wonder, ‘Where
The human capacity to be playful never ceases to amaze. Even while hurtling through space at around 17,500 MPH (a statistic memorized during a childhood of astronautic ambitions) in a metal tube, with almost no leisure time, astronauts still make the time to make up – and play – games. Mostly, they
