Daniel Rourke /stream

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Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There…

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Attempts to provide a taxonomy of game genres founder on the lack of consistent criteria, and usually have to be arbitrarily assigned. Connecting ‘shooters’ into a lineage suggests scrolling shooters were…

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Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes we…

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When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk." In 1770, a Hungarian engineer…

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How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which…

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Create your own trip in sound and animation using YouTube video clips (this one features Alice in Wonderland)

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Offsets images automatically to create simple, but effective glitches

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GIFs (the name stands for graphics interchange format and can be pronounced with either a hard or soft G) began life in the mid-'80s, image files so efficiently compressed that sluggish…

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Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game – it…

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What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music…

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Pac-Man is one of the most iconic video games of all time, and most people (even non-gamers) have at least a passing familiarity with it. The purpose of the game is…

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Video games are worth loving, but loving them comes with shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at the…

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Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is visual:…

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THE DUDLEYS! takes the adolescent memories of a man and translates them into a malfunctioning 8-bit video game, the kind he used to play as a young adult. But instead of…

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In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next,…

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Sometimes it's really hard to let go. Like that vinyl collection you've got stashed away in the attic or those VHS cassettes of movies that you've already replaced on DVD that…

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How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends,…

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A lot of game critics you talk to will tell you that, after making a career of playing games, it takes a lot to impress them. But that's not exactly the…

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A head spinning new take on the classic videogame. Play it until your sense of direction explodes.

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Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There…

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Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page magnum…

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Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes we…

Bookmark

How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which…

Bookmark

Create your own trip in sound and animation using YouTube video clips (this one features Alice in Wonderland)

Bookmark

Offsets images automatically to create simple, but effective glitches

Bookmark

GIFs (the name stands for graphics interchange format and can be pronounced with either a hard or soft G) began life in the mid-'80s, image files so efficiently compressed that sluggish…

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In a clever juxtaposition of biology and technology, Stanford physicist, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team are creating paramecia-based versions of classic video games that you can play by controlling the movements…

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What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music…

Bookmark

Pac-Man is one of the most iconic video games of all time, and most people (even non-gamers) have at least a passing familiarity with it. The purpose of the game is…

Bookmark

Lanchester allowed that computer games would never tell us as much about character as other forms of narrative, but pointed out two great virtues of the form: “The first is visual:…

Bookmark

THE DUDLEYS! takes the adolescent memories of a man and translates them into a malfunctioning 8-bit video game, the kind he used to play as a young adult. But instead of…

Bookmark

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next,…

Bookmark

Sometimes it's really hard to let go. Like that vinyl collection you've got stashed away in the attic or those VHS cassettes of movies that you've already replaced on DVD that…

Bookmark

When one plays most videogames there is a tacit understanding that one is entering into a fictional world – the term virtual world, is often deployed to mean exactly this. It…

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A lot of game critics you talk to will tell you that, after making a career of playing games, it takes a lot to impress them. But that's not exactly the…

Bookmark

A head spinning new take on the classic videogame. Play it until your sense of direction explodes.

Bookmark

What breaks your sense of presence in a story? The culture of video game playing has developed a tolerance for the common practices and limitations in designing and producing games. We’ve…