This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. Defying the stereotype that paints gaming as an isolating hobby, Minecrafters use the virtual world as a means of connecting with family and friends in real life. Minecraft (2009) has redefined social gaming for nearly a decade, driven mostly
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. More than 20 million people use their imaginations to create endless virtual worlds in Minecraft (2009). Unlike most games, however, players (rather than developers) push the boundaries of Minecraft’s expansiveness. They build everything from
Having enjoyed a brief sneak-peek at Austin, Texas’ SXSW art and technology festival last weekend, My Urban Playground is an upcoming documentary from game publisher Paradox Interactive that tells the story of popular city-building game, Cities: Skylines (2015), and the fans who are using it to plan
Somewhere in Microsoft’s New York offices right now, an artificial intelligence is busy repeatedly trying and failing to climb a hill in Minecraft (2011), as if a modern day reenactment of the Sisyphus myth. This AI is being watched by a team of five computer scientists, and its many deaths are bein
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. For anyone who has tried to get down to a catchy pop song while holding a controller during a round of Just Dance, or missed a clutch tennis shot because the Wii didnt sense the swing, hands-free depth-sensing technology is a saving grace. W
Oh, I remember the halcyon days of 2010, don’t you? When we were all flabbergasted by some guy who had spent days and nights constructing a 1:1 scale model of Star Trek‘s Starship Enterprise. It was a one-man architectural feat and, actually, it’s as impressive today as it was five years ago. But we
Because of its nature as a sandbox game closer to LEGO than anything else, Minecraft has been used to construct entire cities from famous works of fiction, blocky versions of real-world places, and even a bipedal war robot made of slime and TNT cannons, but it isn’t unheard of to see 2D art recreate
The case for preserving brutalist architecture requires some strange contortions. Defenders of gems like London’s Robin Hood Gardens or the Orange County Government Center must claim that buildings whose charms are derived from their heft and imposing strength are at risk and in need of our protecti
Shakescraft hopes to reconstruct the playwright’s demolished home with videogames Can Minecraft help us restore Shakespeare demolished home? How Minecraft can help complete the most significant Shakespearean restoration project ever A Shakespearean restoration project turns to Minecraft to help r
We’ve traversed these blocky fields before—in Proteus, of course, and Minecraft, but also Eidolon, even The Long Dark. Still, the new procedurally generated world from Ed Curtis-Sivess holds allure: you can see the world being drawn, the horizon just a stone’s throw away, for one. We move from brigh
Earlier this year, eight-year-old Jivan Armen logged onto a Minecraft server in his home in east Vancouver to start building something new, as millions of his peers do each day. Jivan loves roller coasters and had begun constructing one to transport sheep throughout his world. Then disaster struck.
Notch is just awesome. The creator of Minecraft has paid an outlandish sum of $46,300 at auction for an extremely rare, unreleased pressing of an album by electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin. The album first had emerged on an online auction site. The Internet freaked out because it was never-before-
Quadrilateral Cowboy has gone through quite the metamorphosis over the course of development, as we can see in this footage of Brendon Chung showing off the new body-swapping, Betamax-hacking, entering-the-Matrix gameplay. Originally the game was due out in 2013 and was far less ambitious. It was o
Cliffhorse—Notch’s new horse-trotting sim where all you do is run over green hills—is perhaps a riveting work of irony ridiculing lazy, unfinished games on Steam Early Access. Or maybe the Minecraft creator just has a thing for horses walking sideways on cliffs. Either way, it’s a new game from Notc
Indie games are huge. I don’t know the exact percentage of games we cover nowadays but I’d wager if you ran some analytics the indies would outnumber the big boys by 10 to 1. They’re so predominant, so diverse, and so businesslike that the idea of indie games is quite nebulous. Sometimes we talk aro
