To cope with long-distance relationships, partners often train memory like a muscle, flexing in times of desire a truly sensational remembrance of compassion, in order to rejoin lost love with the present. But if you would rather let this extraordinary part of the brain atrophy in lieu of a cheap technological surrogate, you end up kissing a lumpy, bloated device of mechanical grotesquerie called a Kissenger. The lips contain pressure sensors and actuators. When you kiss them, the shape changes you create are transmitted in real time over the net to a receiving Kissenger. There, the actuators reproduce the mirror…

When the Brooklyn tech agency called Breakfast signed on to help TNT advertise another detective show, called Perception, they built the billboard of the interactive future. Made out 44,000 black and white electromagnetic discs, the billboard displays letters until someone or something walks into its view. Creative director of Breakfast Andrew Zolty says he wanted “to make something that was going to sell the idea of perception itself.” We can’t be sure whether finding anagrams on giant billboard will remind you to tune in, but people do indeed enjoy playing with the massive word game. 

In a recent article on Tech Crunch, Nir Eyal—a founder of two startups and a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business—admits that he wants you to be addicted to his products. Despite the abounding rhetorical drug associations, he believes that a certain reinterpretation of addiction via consumer manipulation might improve our lives, seeing as how the people who manufacture these addictions are people with morals, too. That’s why he created his “Manipulation Matrix.” The matrix seeks to help you answer not, “Can I hook users?” but “Should I attempt to?” The argument rests on one’s individual,…

Kickstarter rarely delivers a viable market product, so what makes a Kickstarter project make money? Professor and creator Ian Bogost at Fast Company sees the most attractive projects like compulsory TV. The instant jackpots, like the OUYA, are not the ones that are in high enough demand to float the market, but they entertain us, give us the thirll of buying a dream. The fact that OUYA raised so much money so fast speaks more to our fantasies than the market reality. Whether or not OUYA will disrupt the console business is beside the point–no one could predict such a…

When Microsoft developed the Kinect—a TV mounted gesture recognition device used for at-home bowling and dance games, they also accidentally created a way for artists to engage the technology as a medium in and of itself. After the Kinect hit the market, a hacker developed an open source driver for it, meaning anyone could download the software, buy a Kinect from your local game store, and see exactly what it sees: baroque arrays of live polygon rendering that people have used to generally experiment with the realtime abstraction of human forms. Is Microsoft the post-modern Medici? The video above from…

If games are meant to encourage trust and maintenance in systems in general, then we might think of art in games as doubt and subversion of these systems. But does this mutual exclusivity reflect why we struggle so openly about wanting more of the latter in our games? Writing for IGN, Keza MacDonald suggests that a large part of the problem is how the industry lets quantifiable criticism of Metacritic define how games are made. Apparently, our second-only-to-porn industry so lacks an consequential voice and vision that companies regularly base decisions about who to hire and what games to produce…

Making cigarettes cute and interactive might not be the best way to stop kids from starting, but the Ukrainian artist’s series “No Games For Smokers” does cleverly simplify smoking’s generally accepted dangers. Whether or not game imagery make cigarettes more attractive than repellent is ambiguous, but the message is bleak— also kind of fun. Notice, though, that “Y” is highlighted.

“All story is manipulation.” — Ken Burns In the video above, the acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns goes ahead and admits that even his documentaries manipulate the audience in order for them to be moving. Only this is his advice to all storytellers. So perhaps we should consider that the thing that sets apart videogames from regular games is the director, the creator, designer, the auteur, the storyteller. We don’t even have an accurate name for this authority yet, but if we indeed want our the stories of our games to live up to the power of mediums that came before, perhaps…