As part of the upcoming Babycastles Summit, Keita Takahashi—the endearingly sardonic director of the Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy—has teamed up with the avant-slacker game producers/party throwers Babycastles to carry out Takahashi’s real-world dreams of classic videogames, i.e. Dunk Hunt and Pac-Man. With these “play-scapes” Babycastles is looking to faciliate such visionary projection like Takahashi’s in the minds of young people. At the summit, he’ll aslo undergo an interview with Frank Lantz, director of both NYU Game Center and Zynga New York. This will be the main draw of the The Babycastles Summit, hosted by the NYU’s Game Center…

Drones court comparisons to videogames via the remote-controlled dissociation of violence and physical feeling between interface and human. It’s the idea that operating drones is so like a wartime flight simulator or shooter that soldiers are never convinced that they’re actually killing people. But as we learn more about the actual soldiers behind the screen of the these drones, we can begin to imagine better how soldiers deal with the violence their inflicting on the other side of the world. The New York Times talked to some operating from Syracuse to the Southwest. Routinely thought of as robots that turn…

Sight—a new short film making its rounds on the internet—is a grim tale of a seduction-turned-cock-block app that in reality seems to be about soft-tech’s colonization of human compassion via apps and gamification. It’s set at the endpoint of augmentation, at least for this very rich white guy. Apparently, everyone’s eyes in this affluent, high-rise world have been cast in a glassy operating system. What’s remarkable is that it sharply curbs what is often the internet’s conditioned salivation for self-styling tech. The short instead projects an ecstatic loneliness and desperation onto living in this high-fantasy, high-grease city—where you can’t stop…

The third in what looks to be a series (following a “Brief History of Videogames” and “Game Deaths“) of videogame montages that run from the first pixel to the latest BMP masterpiece, “The Evolution of PC Games,” dishes out references to the new canon of virtual desktop games. Of course, the result is a mix of nostalgia and dimensional evolution via Flatland. 

Puma’s interactive ad game, Run Puma Run, drops the languid austerity of their typical design for the sexy memory of the screen-lit suburban basement or the dingy arcade. Perhaps London 2012 could have predicted the pixelated fever dream of this year’s favorite screen fashion, but then again that would have made the logo even clunkier. Choose your olympian and accelerate down the infinite track, and remember that the chip tone is the same as it ever was.

A writer over at Make spotted this Paris game-store floor on Facebook. True, it’s flat, but is that really the right word for it?

“Most people have no idea of any game designer. They might be able to name one, maybe.” —Rod Humble, executive on The Sims, Second Life, Everquest, The Marriage, etc. Perhaps it’s time we stop and let the developers, artists, designers, and directors do the talking. In preparation of an upcoming documentary presumably of the same title, the Critical Path is a heavily curated collection of interviews with those to whom games matter the most. You’ll hear, to name a few, Ian Bogost, Nolan Bushnell, David Cage, John Carmack, Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, Denis Dyacktoby, Gard Richard Garriott, Chris Hecker,…

Because no human would ever stoop so low as to write voiceless, rote information and expect to get paid for it, Wikipedia has largely relied on bots since its launch. The BBC reports that the bots have only increased in number and gotten better, becoming better aggregators than even your most humble intern. They delete vandalism and foul language, organise and catalogue entries, and handle the reams of behind-the-scenes work that keep the encyclopaedia running smoothly and efficiently and keep its appearance neat and uniform in style. In brick-and-mortar library terms, bots are akin to the students who shelve books,…

Superhuman, a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, catalogues the history of synthetic human empowerment. From ivory dildos to telekinetic microchips, the show seems to jostle between historic sex show and cybernetic world’s fair. One piece in particular, the embedded chip of Kevin Warwick, challenges us to think of a future beyond language, while also conjuring an image of cyborg love that makes your heart swell. In 1998, a British professor of cybernetics, Kevin Warwick, had a microchip embedded in his forearm. It’s a little grey lozenge less than an inch long, a diminutive object which nevertheless enabled…