Category Archives: Video

Getting Shot: A 103-Second Retrospective

It’s Gun Week over at Kotaku (seri­ously, though, when are guns not an issue on a video gam­ing site?), and Mike Fahey has com­piled a 102-second his­tor­i­cal overview of 18 years’ worth of get­ting shot, First Per­son Shooter-style. The video is inter­est­ing, and some­what depress­ing: The cal­cu­lus of pro­jec­tile weaponry meshes so well with the [...]
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Pink on Incentive and Algorithmic Cognition

This semes­ter, espe­cially as we’re look­ing at mate­r­ial by James Paul Gee, we’ll talk about incen­tives to mas­tery, reward, and cog­ni­tion. This (fun! ani­mated!) excerpt from a recent RSA pre­sen­ta­tion by Daniel Pink is an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to an inter­est­ing behav­ioral prob­lem that the best games address in sur­pris­ing ways. The dilemma is this: Econ­o­mists [...]
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Mona Lisa / Duck Hunt Mashup

Close on the heels of the Ital­ian government’s recent pub­lic state­ments on the civic and aes­thetic mer­its of video games (and the tax­able appeal of game stu­dio rev­enues, no doubt), Asso­ci­azione Ital­iana Opere Mul­ti­me­di­ali Inter­at­tive (AIOMI) has released the first of what will be sev­eral video shorts pro­mot­ing inter­ac­tive media in Italy. And like a Bruno [...]
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Machinima, Done Well

I have a feel­ing that most machin­ima is watched the way we watch a first piano recital, or a mid­dle school pro­duc­tion of Annie Get Your Gun When the Mac­in­tosh com­puter intro­duced desk­top pub­lish­ing (DTP) to the world in the eight­ies, one wag observed that “Now every­one can cre­ate bad design.” While we fre­quently applaud tools [...]
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