Travel to other distant planets is a central conceit for many videogames, from Star Fox to Halo to EVE Online. Being in an alien world gives developers an easy excuse for tweaking the laws of physics for the sake of fun and drama. But just how plausible is the idea of reaching another solar system? Following a Prometheus viewing the Washington Post’s Brad Plummer has done some investigation and, drawing from a recent research paper by former NASA scientist Marc G. Millis, he concludes humans are anywhere between 200 and 500 years away from interstellar travel. Imagine we merely wanted…

For years players have created a roughshod kind of cinema using the games Halo and Splinter Cell, but rarely have professional filmmakers thought to use game design tools for their films. Shane Acker, who directed the Tim Burton-produced 9, aims to change that. He’ll partner with partner with Valve to use its Source Engine to create his next film, Deep. The movie is set in the aftermath of World War III where the few surviving clusters of humans live in the the wreckage of sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean. The story will center on a man called…

The creation of fear in a videogame is an inexact science but there’s evidence to suggest a neurological mechanism can influence it in some important ways. Writing for Gamasutra, Maral Tajerian, a neuroscientist at Thwackel Consulting, explains the role mirror neurons play in connecting players to their onscreen avatars in horror games. Mirror neurons are neurons in certain regions of the brain that are active when an animal performs an action, or observes another individual performing that same action. Discovered a few decades ago, these neurons are argued to be the key in understanding other individuals’ intentions and feelings, empathy,…

Quinn Pitcock was an All-American defensive lineman at Ohio State and a third round draft pick by the Indianapolis Colts in 2007. Despite the early promise of his athletic career, he developed an addiction to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare‘s online multiplayer mode, which contributed to his decision to give up professional football. “I didn’t want football to be a part of my life,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. “It wasn’t just football. I felt like doing nothing.” The next several years Pitcock indulged his shooter habit, letting the game dominate his life. “I couldn’t put it down,” Pitcock said.…

Videogames are beset with rumors and speculation about what secret mysteries developers are holding back. The process of keeping secrets, and determining what should and shouldn’t be a part of public record, is murky and haphazard. Writing in a Quora thread about how Apple keeps its secrets from slipping out into the world, Kim Scheinberg writes about the time her husband John Kullmann, an engineer at Apple, helped translate OSX to Intel-based computers in 2001.  Kullmann had originally started work on the project as a way to transition to telecommuting in hopes that Apple would allow him to move back…

In another example of people finding interesting uses for Kinect outside of games computer scientists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have created a program that uses the camera to keep track of household objects. Shahriar Nirjon and colleague John Stankovic use Kinect cameras in each room of the house and lets them track people and objects as they move from room to room. By following the location of objects over time, Kinsight can even distinguish between two identical-looking things – if it records a mug that seems to have jumped from the living room to the kitchen without…

video Neal Stephenson has long been an influential figure in videogame culture, from popularizing the use of the word “avatar” in Snowcrash to imagining a geologically distributed gold economy in an MMO with his most recent novel Reamde. Stephenson is finally ready to make a game of his own and he’s gone to Kickstarter to raise money for it.  Clang will be an attempt to bring realistic sword fighting into videogames, moving beyond the traditional conventions of button pushes using a “Low-latency, high precision motion controller.”  At first, it’ll be a PC arena game based on one-on-one multiplayer dueling (which…

Though videogames trade in fun and playfulness, the conditions under which they’re made can often be grueling. Earlier this year, Yoshinori Ono, Capcom’s producer in charge of Street Fighter IV, collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Speaking to Simon Parkin in an interview at Eurogamer, Ono recalled his unexpected illness and the working conditions that contributed to it. After I passed out, I was thinking in the hospital: there are so many people at Capcom that, over the years, have disappeared at one time or another. Suddenly, in that bed I understood what happened to them… The…

video At E3 Shigeru Miyamoto suggested a full Legend of Zelda game for Wii U won’t be coming anytime soon. The company did, however, show a smaller Zelda game built into NintendoLand, The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest. The game is a strange hybrid of classic Zelda mechanics combined with Nintendo’s isolated gestural controls and Mii aesthetic.  Battle Quest is a 4 person game played with a mix of archers and swords people. It is presented from a tight third-person perspective with the Mii character appearing translucent. It’s a straight-forward on-rails action game in which two swords people in front…