For years Major League Soccer has been trying to think up ways to drum up interest in the world’s most popular sport. Think no more MLS, because this youtube clip might be the ticket. Nothing about the game would have to change: attach shock training collars onto everybody on the field (including th
Nothing is 0k is a program that allows Atari 2600 consoles to write poetry. This is a substantial feat, considering the machine only has 4 kilobytes of memory. The way this is done is rather geeky, but also very cool. The machine spits out a pattern of shapes and colors, as seen above, which can the
Gridiron fans aren’t normally considered Mensa material, but becoming immersed in a game of football provides plenty of mental stimulation. When a fan watches a game, as one University of Chicago study showed, the same areas of the brain are activated as would be if that person were playing. This en
I got a chance to play around with a quadrotor drone in an empty parking lot on New Years Eve. What’s the big deal, I thought. Yeah, it was cool that I could control the drone with an iPad using virtual thumbsticks, exactly like I’d play a first-person shooter. But the drone was pretty flimsy, it go
Via This is Colossal, a piece of stop-motion whimsy. Keep an eye out for the Space Invaders plug: After organizing their own bookshelf earlier this year, Sean Ohlenkamp and wife Lisa re-doubled their efforts for Type Books in Toronto. After several sleepless nights of animating with a crew of over 2
It’s that time again. Here’s today’s wrap-up of mainstream gaming news. – 3 years of development later, much-anticipated downloadable game, Journey, is done and will hopefully be out soon. – Minecraft developer Markus Persson aka Notch, wants to fund Psychonauts 2. – After some pretty serious finan
When I was sixteen, I got a speeding ticket. I knew I shouldn’t have been driving sixty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five mile per hour zone, but on the other hand how awesome was it (until I got pulled over)? Pretty awesome (until I got pulled over)! Wall Street Journal explains: Recent studies
If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, you undoubtedly saw some Will Ferrell lookalike jumping up and down on a rope in what might have been the craziest moment of a Super Bowl halftime show full of very crazy moments. It turns out that guy has a name, and it is not Ron Burgandy. Instead, it’s And
In his review of Sundance film Room 237, Slashfilm’s Germain Lussier details how the film serves as a retrospective on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film portrays several different readings of its source material which range from almost plausible to hysterically absurd. The way the alternative
Neil Burgess’s TED talk on how the brain processes space is a fascinating look into the machinations of our minds but also treads some familiar ground. Burgess introduces the main component of how the brain processes and remembers space—the hippocampus—and then explains that each individual neuron w
Letting kids play can have some beautiful results. For her exhibit Look Now, See Forever, artist Yayoi Kusama painted an entire room white and handed out dots to all the children who came to see. The results are positively Seussian. -Josiah Harrist [via Flavorwire]
Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown give a good, long look at how people are learning today. Our schools—our playgrounds, classrooms and public forums—have a very real digital reflection. Over at Boing Boing, Thomas and Brown wax: MMOs draw in players from every walk of life, of every age, and acros
The following is more or less a family tree of controller evolution throughout the years. It’s pretty rad to see these juxtaposed like this; we’ve never really considered the Dreamcast controller’s influence upon the original Xbox controller, but it’s plain as day. And hey, remember the Virtual Boy?
Yes it’s still in production. No, no one knows why. But now Adam Sandler has signed on to the project, and it’s left Universal and been picked up by Columbia. It’s got a few decent names attached to it (Kevin Lima of Enchanted is directing, and Robert Smigel and Etan Cohen have given the script rewr
The new Tumblr virtualgeographic has a gallery of landscape photos taken in the style of Ansel Adams, probably with a little bit of help from good ol’ Instagram. On a related note, is the ease with which Instagram makes taking vintage-y looking photos ruining photography? Or democratizing it? All I
Jesse Kuhn is bringing his artwork to life in The Departure, a mobile game based on one of his illustrations. Granted, beautiful artwork doesn’t guarantee a great game, but with a simple design and singular charm, this one definitely has promise. He’s got some great incentives to give on his Kicksta
We’ve curated a section of the February issue of Popular Science, focusing on the future of fun, which games are on the cutting edge of everything, and what even counts as a “game” these days anyways. Today, Felipe Salgado discusses the best games you can find on your web browser. While big-budget g
Now that is one crossover episode I’m dying to see. Maybe next Halloween? – Adnan Agha
Before Game of Thrones came out last year, the series faced a great challenge in trying to introduce new viewers while pleasing hardcore fans. The same struggle applies to most if not all successful franchises and remakes within the games industry. The way that Campfire, the show’s marketing team, g
We just stumbled upon this, but The Cult of LEGO by John Baichtal and Joe Meno was released this past November and seems right up our alley. The book provides both a history and commentary on the ubiquitous LEGO bricks. Read a review of it here. Here’s a taste from the publisher: The Cult of LEGO in
Color is a web game that serves as a lightweight primer on color theory. The only mechanic is clicking in a color wheel to match the given color(s). Despite being extremely straightforward, the game’s demand for precision makes it addictive, catering to the art kid in me. With such a simple mechanic
February 3 saw the wide release of Chronicle, a faux-documentary (in the vein of J.J. Abrams’s Cloverfield) style blockbuster following the story of high schoolers suddenly endowed with super powers. What is maybe most exciting about the big budget project is that the director is a 26-year-old firs
In Final Fantasy XIII-2, your party traverses the expanse of time and space through a plot device called the “Historia Crux,” which more or less looks like a map that you can jump from time period to time period and dimension to dimension. It’s all very heady, metaphysical stuff that makes no sense
Razer’s Project Fiona is a PC that looks, in its current incarnation, like the love child of an iPad and a Playstation Move-with maybe a dash of PSP thrown in. As a prototype, it has a long way to go, but it’s following current trends to bring portability and motion controls to games you’d normally
Game arcades as social spaces have undergone reinvention, rebirth and resurgence. In Tokyo, it seems that arcades have found a new demographic: seniors. Once the preserve of rowdy teenagers, game arcades in Japan are rapidly becoming the hippest place to hang out for a whole new generation — their g
