The embedded preview of Evercracked! was very, very slow when I checked it just now, so I haven’t watched it, but the UK Guardian article on videogame documentaries also includes some links to existing movies. The King of Kong: Fistful of QuartersA fascinating look at the bizarre rivalry between gamers Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell…
The concept is simple: from the top of the screen a series of differently-shaped “blocks” fall slowly towards the bottom. The player can turn each block as it falls – making a line into a column, say – or move it sideways, but once it hits the lowest point, it stays. If the blocks fill…
In Montfort and Bogost’s case study platform studies also suggest a useful approach to media histories. Their work on the Atari VCS focuses on the role of creative individuals in the process of game development for the platform, and the book earmarks several important moments in videogame history. These moments are traced back to the…
A good overview of a genre I’ve been following from the beginning. I sometimes wonder why references to political cartoons aren’t more common in discussions of games about current events. At any rate, the article begins by mentioning the importance of Flash, the 9/11 attacks, and Gonzalo Frasca’s thought-provoking response, September 12th. Water Cooler Games,…
Soon after, Mario entered into the Mushroom Kingdom and proceeded to steal from their banks and museums with his brother Luigi in Super Mario Thieves. Throughout the game he is chased by Bowser, chief of police at the M.K.P.D. (Mushroom Kingdom Police department) and the Goomba’s and Koopa Troppers in blue. […] Bowser’s chase of…
Photopia unceremoniously dumped the idea of a ‘puzzle-based’ narrative in favour of what it called a ‘story-based’ narrative, a linear progression (linear in terms of interactivity, not time) from beginning to end that throws seemingly random fragments of a story at the player, which slowly start to weave into one another and create a cohesive…
Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month. One of the more unusual plays in this year’s Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the…
I’m sitting in the back of a meeting where the speaker has spent 40 minutes tracking down a technical glitch interrupting his presentation. Happily, the room has wireless access… Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (aka Rogue), created in the early 1980s[1] by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, is an intriguing game for many reasons.…
A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem. Today I Die Similar:Stop Using 'Poet Voice'This article analyzes (and skewers) that…AestheticsWhy did I only blog 3 times in June 2001?What was I doing during the summer of Ju…CybercultureGiving Obsolete Books an Afterlife as Theatre PropsOnce, someone really cared about these…
Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7. Coding is art, art is code. As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming…
The St. Cloud Times gives retrogaming its due, with this profile of Matt Barton. The most common misconception about video gamers is that they are young teenagers who absorb everything negative that the most violent games offer. Matt Barton has another take. The 30-something English professor at St. Cloud State University considers himself to be…
The always-interesting Language Log offers this detailed and thoughtful analysis of gender and sports terminology. Here’s just a snippet: I’ve never seen man used to refer to a female athlete in an expression like “guard her man” or “I had my man beat”. Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen woman used in such…
There’s nothing terribly stunning or new in this interview with Steve Meretzky, but I’m happy to read his memories about the good old days of text adventuring. SM: It’s kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge–not just of games, but…
My son watches, as a baby becomes totally engrossed with a pair of sunglasses, puzzling over how to get them on his face. The baby keeps manipulating the glasses, turning and twisting them in attempt to get them to stay on. “Look,” says my son. “It’s like his ‘Zork‘.” Similar:Liz Fosslien's insightful comic on unhealthy…
You can’t do this on dead trees. A great example of how a new media widget makes a news article interactive. From the Wall Street Journal. The Letter Law View Interactive Compare letter frequency across various English language sources, from Scrabble to newspapers to fiction. Similar:We Got A Look Inside The 45-Day Planning Process That…
Katie Retzinger, “Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity” Mathew S.S. Johnson “The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change” Phill Alexander: “Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft” The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture…
A brief overview of a handful of tools that help the game-creation process. if you’ve got a brilliant idea and don’t have the capital to build it yourself – or the inclination to pimp it to your local Big Name Publisher, create a proof of concept with these recommended game engine kits and let us…
“Playing video games all day, alone and friendless, is is simply the best way that we have to prepare our children for a life of solitude in a barren wasteland.” Similar:The First Programmer Was a LadyOver a hundred years before a monstrous …CybercultureGranting a Student SuperAdminGoddessOMGWhatHaveIDone Network PrivilegesI should probably not grant a student su…AcademiaPolice respond…
Nerd heaven. In chase mode, Pinky behaves as he does because he does not target Pac-Man’s tile directly. Instead, he selects an offset four tiles away from Pac-Man in the direction Pac-Man is currently moving (with one exception). The pictures below illustrate the four possible offsets Pinky will use to determine his target tile based…
I recently gave a brief presentation on games to our school’s education faculty. One faculty member (I believe he used to be a school principal) got fairly excited, asking me whether he could use Crazy Machines to set up a scientific experiment to show his students. I suggested that he was thinking of the game…