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Let’s Play Snake brings the classic arcade hit to Twitter

With visuals that can be easily represented using only a line and a dot, and rules no more complex than “get to point b without hitting anything along the way,” classic arcade game Snake has become renowned for its simplicity and elegant design. This, in turn, has lead to its prevalence among a number of platforms, especially those that struggle for visual fidelity, such as graphing calculators and early cell phones. There’s even a version of it that can be played over your favorite YouTube videos. Now, thanks to web developer Yannick Rochat, Snake has been adapted for Twitter. Rochat’s…

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Okay, fine: this robot is better at videogames than any of us

This year’s Awesome Games Done Quick charity event started on Sunday, and one team has already used a bot to put Twitch into Pokémon Red, and Super Mario Bros. into Super Mario World. Usually, a Tool-Assisted Speedrun can only be accomplished with an emulator—the button-presses have to be frame-perfect, and at 30 or 60 frames a second, that’s way too fast for regular humans. The TASBot—mounted on an R.O.B. unit, of course—is a modified Super Nintendo controller designed for accomplishing Tool-Assisted Speedruns in the real world. The bot is attached to a computer, and inputs a list of pre-written button-presses…

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Adventure Time creator gets all Twitch Plays Pokemon-y with crowd-played Twitter game

Currently, Pendleton Ward’s Twitter feed has been transformed from into a hand-drawn, old-school, first-person adventure game called Quest Attack!, hosted by none other than the walrus-bearded Adventure Time creator himself.  It’s no secret the cartoonist is connected to games, with nods to tabletop RPGs on his show and his collaboration with Double Fine. But we didn’t expect him to ad-lib one, drawing each scene depending on the actions requested by followers. The past few moves/tweets have involved taking a blubbery “thing” from the toilet, finding a dagger underneath, and someone pausing the game. The game doesn’t seem to be going…

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"It isn’t technology, it’s culture." Listen to our founder speak on the future of games

To me, hearing our founder Jamin Warren rhapsodize about expanding the cultural literacy of games is just another day at the office. But he also gets out and evangelizes games frequently, as he did in a talk at the recent PSFK Conference 2014. The subject was how games are becoming the world’s new research and development department, with devices like the Oculus Rift and social experiments like Twitch plays Pokemon leading the way.  The ironic thing is that while games are frontrunners in inspiring and developing future technologies that often change the broader world, the broader world doesn’t yet fully understand…