MachineMachine /stream

Link

The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era…

Link

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator.…

Link

The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the…

Link

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer)…

Link

When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk." In 1770, a Hungarian…

Link

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in…

Link

How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him,…

Link

Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

Link

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep…

Link

What is it that constitutes (a) post-digital art, and how can it be thought in terms of aesthetic theory – or even post-aesthetic theory? In one sense, post-digital(1) refers to…

Link

Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense…

Link

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist…

Link

There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting…

Link

"Exposition is a dirty word," was one of Kasavin's top points. Too many developers front- or back-load games with heavy exposition to create the game world instead of smartly weaving…

Link

Video games are worth loving, but loving them comes with shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at…

Link

In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the…

Link

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the…

Link

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

Link

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly…

Link

A head spinning new take on the classic videogame. Play it until your sense of direction explodes.

Link

A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements.

Link

Gamasutra is teaming up with game criticism weblog Critical Distance to present Christopher Hyde's round-up of the wealth of excellent games being produced outside the realm of 'AAA' titles in…