Joseph Bernstein

Why is watching others play games more popular than ever?

Earlier this month at the PRACTICE conference, Christine Norman started her presentation on narrative in League of Legends with an aside about audience engagement. Norman, the lead creative developer on LoL, showed footage of the game’s World Championship, which was live streamed globally and featur

High school gamers are better than medical residents at robotic surgery

Science Daily reports: Both high school sophomores who played video games on average two hours per day and college students who played four hours of video games daily matched, and in some cases exceeded, the skills of the residents on parameters that included how much tension the subjects put on the

In Space is like Dyad in 2D

The new game from the indie developer Edward Curtis-Sivess is best described as a 2-D Dyad. Like that game, In Space features brainstem-tickling waves of hypnotic electronica. Like that game, you play as a little amorphous ship shooting shapes in the distance, and like that game, you get rewarded fo

Haven’t you always wanted to help Dikembe Mutombo stop the Mayan apocalypse?

Dikembe Mutombo‘s 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World is the timeless story of the retired Congolese NBA center’s quest to prevent the Mayan prophecy of a Dec 21 apocalypse from happening, at the behest of a hyper-intelligent English bear in a Fair Isle sweater. Along the way you take off in a rocketship

Permadeath and narrative: when will we get Psycho, the game?

There is a thoughtful piece on Game|Life today about the returning trend of permadeath, found in various permutations in games like DayZ, Dark Souls, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The real nugget comes from XCOM lead designer Jake Solomon: The downside of strong narratives, Solomon said, is that they’re