Farah Rishi

Beglitched starts the cyberpink revolution

I struggle every Halloween to decide on a costume. I’ve dressed up as all the basics: a black cat, a vampire, a witch—twice. But Beglitched may have saved me the hassle this year. It has introduced to me a whole new concept: a cyberpink computer witch. Now, the title computer witch itself would be c

Starbound rockets you back to childhood

Socrates asserted that “man must rise above Earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” This sentiment is at least in part why NASA was established, and why investments are made in “NASA’s grand dream.” It’s why Elon Musk’s Spac

Bound makes a case for ballet in videogames

I was eight years old when I watched my first ballet performance, the Nutcracker, at an old, musty local theater. When the show ended, my mom asked if I wanted to be a ballerina, and to her surprise, I cringed. There was no way I could be a ballerina, I insisted. My body, short and stubby, could nev

Literature games and the future of book publishing

It was called “the end of days” for literature. Bold doomsaying letters across headlines predicted that with the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the era of books would meet its untimely end, and the larger publishing world would be rendered obsolete. But traditional books didn’t die—they simply fled

Screw diamonds, the dildo hoverboard is a girl’s best friend

Don’t you just hate it when you need to give the ol’ honey pot a little self-loving but you’ve got an early morning meeting at work that you’re already late for? Me too. That’s why I’m totally psyched for the creator of the Dildo Drone, Michael Krivicka, and his newest invention: the Dildo Hoverboar

Erotica Robotica proves sex with robots is tricky

In this fantastical world of booming technological advances in robotics, you’d probably be lying if you said you’ve never thought about sex with robots. After all, the topic has been almost unavoidable, cropping up in the news thanks to very possibly sex-craved innovators like this man, who made his

Nadia Was Here plans to dish out 8-bit existentialism

I’ll be honest: if the world imploded in a deadly apocalypse every 100 years without fail, I would probably live my life beneath my bedsheets, refusing to do any work or, actually, anything at all. Any mark I’d make on the world would be erased with my existence, so what’s the point in getting out o

Find peace with Sodzen, a game about watering a plant

I kill nearly every plant I touch, and over the years, I’ve wasted so much money on every plant imaginable in the hopes of finding the one species that can withstand my black thumb. But only now, with Sodzen, have I finally found my perfect plant. Sodzen is a low resolution, highly pixelated game su

Gross digital animation brings Bosch’s painting of Hell to life

Late medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch is known for highly-detailed, nightmarish paintings so fantastical that the Surrealists, including Salvador Dali, found inspiration in them. And it so happens that Bosch’s unique brand of grossness continues to inspire future generations. As the 500th anniversa

Emoji Poetry is the literature class you never had

There’s an almost magical quality about tweets by Carrie Fisher, which probably half stems from the fact that I usually have no idea what she’s saying: her tweets are almost entirely in emoji, indiscernible like some new art form that I’m not cultured enough to understand. And with the rise of emoji

LARP game has players cope with the expectations placed on different genders

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of LARPing (live-action role playing). A player can both cosplay and let go of their inhibitions in a safe space by acting out a character-driven narrative. Though I’ve never LARPed before, actress Felicia Day convinced me of its potential for sheer fun in an e

The Furry takeover of media

It wasn’t until I was halfway through the Korean visual novel Dandelion – wishes brought to you – (2012), when I had already spent hours trying to get in the pants of a guy who had previously been a black cat, that I began to wonder if I was actually a Furry. Jisoo, the object of my affection in Dan

Media artist makes cute little sex machines

If you’ve ever wondered how it would look to watch virtual machines masterbate, Latvian artist Elstons Kuns has you covered. In his surrealistic virtual art project Erotic Objects, Kuns celebrates the human body by reducing it into a cleaner, less-messy series of colorful automotron, or more precise

Jason Rohrer’s personal games get their own museum retrospective

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is now exhibiting The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer until June 26th, 2016. It’s a retrospective of Rohrer’s unique videogames, exemplified by his earlier works such as the semi-autobiographical 2D sidescroller Gravitation (2008) which explores, in Rohrer’s own wor

How female modders are bringing better diversity to videogames

For as long as we’ve had games, we’ve had mods. They’re an integral and maybe necessary part of gaming, used either to personalize an experience or simply as a creative outlet. As a South Asian, I’ve banked on mods to make characters that actually look like me and not a version of myself that looks

How to Spot a Terrorist: the videogame

Don’t be a puppet. That’s the FBI’s new mantra in response to terrorists and their would-be recruits. And in light of the growing problem of terrorists trying to recruit vulnerable teenagers over the internet, the FBI has created an interactive website, adorned with a flailing wooden puppet on strin

Your favorite playground is actually a work of art, apparently

A Swiss art exhibition center finds sophistication and the potential for modern art in a most seemingly ordinary place: children’s playgrounds. The Kunsthalle Zürich, a center known for seeking to break boundaries in art by redefining its concepts, has begun crowdfunding The Playground Project, a bo

Classic videogame worlds reimagined as subway maps

Few moments are more familiar in an old-school dungeon-crawler than the opening of a treasure chest, only to find a dungeon map. But if—for whatever whim of your fancy—you’ve been hoping instead for a subway map to unfold itself from those chests, you’re in luck: graphic designer Matthew Stevenson h