Prints available for purchase from Society6. US$17.68
As a long time Sims fan, I really enjoyed this piece at The Atlantic in which Ian Bogost questions whether we lose sight of how games can explore and critique higher-level socioeconomic and political systems. I don’t agree with all of it, but Bogost makes plenty of on-point observations: "Amidst arguments on Twitter and Reddit about whose favorite games are more valid, while we worry about the perfect distribution of bodies in our sci-fi fantasy, the big machines of global systems hulk down the roads and the waterways, indifferent. It is an extravagance to worry only about representation of our individual selves while more obvious forces threaten them with oblivion—commercialism run amok; climate change; wealth inequality; extortionate healthcare; unfunded schools; decaying infrastructure; automation and servitude."
Boing Boing’s Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson launched Offworld this past week as a website dedicated to those people most ignored by mainstream gaming sites.
Bungie posted a lengthy video that examines the level design of Destiny in-depth.
Christopher Livingston has a tongue-in-cheek piece on Cities Skylines for PC Gamer that poses the question of What happens when you build a city designed for just a single house?
Critical Distance’s retired founder Ben Abraham considers the divide between games and other forms of media criticism and asks whether it may be possible to construct a more rigorous critical analysis for games.
Did you notice Portal’s fantastic hidden message when you played it?
Good news if you’re a Cards Against Humanity fan, you can now play the game for free online. Called Cards Against Originality, the game was created by Canada-based designer Dawson Whitfield.
Ian Dransfield's nostalgic reminiscence on the Commodore Amiga earlier this week nearly had me misty eyed remember my first computer.
"If they work together, and only then … they will find the answer and complete the whole riddle someday next year." Do Not Believe His Lies is an iOS puzzle game that was released 8 months ago. No one has solved it yet, despite crowd solving efforts.
Liz England has a great primer on Twine and other interactive fiction formats over on Gamasutra’s Expert Blogs section.
Madeleine Messer is a sixth grade student who went looking for why her mobile games rarely feature girls. For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. One day I noticed that my friend was playing a game as a boy character and asked why she wasn’t a girl. She said you couldn’t be a girl; a boy character was the only option.
March 11, was Douglas Adams’ birthday. Did you know you can celebrate by playing the 1984 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game in your browser at work this instant? Although games made with a text parser in which you type commands are a lost art at this point, the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, made by Adams and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky, was radically accessible for its time.
Netflix employees Guy Cirino, Alex Wolfe, and Carenina Motion participated in the company’s latest developer Hack Day by bringing an extremely low-resolution version of the popular video-streaming service to an original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The trio was able to accomplish the feat without actually modifying the console itself, instead tweaking a cartridge to deliver video that included an 8-bit version of the House of Cards intro.
Patricia Hernandez spoke to some people about how videogame breasts are made (and why they can go wrong). "Plenty of people theorize about why games often feature bad breast physics, but there is little hard information about the actual breast-creation process. After looking into it a bit, I found that many amateur developers seemed to genuinely have a problem figuring out how to tackle breast physics in their games. There are a startling number of forum posts and tutorials where people discuss the best ways to achieve good breast physics online. One person even created a four-part Powerpoint presentation titled “The Quest for Boob Jiggle In Unity.” People have developed specialized tools for other developers to use, to help demystify the enigma that is “how do breasts work.”" As someone who spent most of high school wondering this exact same thing, I can sympathize. This is one of those reasons it would be really handy to have female developers involved in the industry.
Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection "I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing. And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn't available the next time I was sitting at a Windows machine, or vice versa; so I arranged that everything in my personal puzzle collection will happily run on both those platforms and more." In addition to the desktop implementations available at the website, the collection is also available on Android and iOS.
What's the scariest thing in the world? Ask your teenage daughter. Jason Stark writes about his experience developing Ninja Pizza Girl, a game from independent game studio Disparity Games.
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