Article

Faceless breathes new fear into old stories.

For ten years in Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson captured a terrifying childhood ritual. Nightly, Calvin dialogued with the monsters under his bed about their existence. “Are there any monsters under my bed tonight?” he’d ask, only to hear in reply, “Of course not. Come and see for yourself.” from somewhere underneath the bed. Calvin lacked the facts, and without them, consistently stayed up all night with his best friend Hobbes, bloodshot and terrified of ghosts, the bogeyman, and other creatures they could only venture a guess on whether they existed or not. Faceless would have terrified Calvin. A new…

News

An NYU professor explains why failing at videogames makes us unhappy

Like an athlete sobbing after a championship loss, Jesper Juul hates failing in videogames. “Why do we play videogames even though they make us unhappy?” he asks in his new book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Videogames. Comparing game failure to tragic literature, theatre, and cinema, Juul looks at why failing in videogames is so personal and why it’s okay to get angry when we do. In an interview with Kill Screen last year, Juul describes how breaking the cycle of failure is difficult, “I actually wasn’t learning the sort of stuff I was supposed to be…

Interview

Italian team hopes to find digital meaning in videogame riot simulator.

In 2011, Time Magazine awarded “The Protester” their “Person of the Year” award stating, “All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries’ political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt.” Lost in translations is the human element behind the groups fighting for their freedom. What does it feel like to ignite a riot or be asked to suppress it?  We asked Leonard Menchiari who experienced riots firsthand and used his personal adventures to develop his simulator, the aply-named Riot. – – – The game allows the player to play both sides of a riot…