After exposing Angry Birds as a depressing tale of terrorism and genocide, I'm turning my attention to the next big iphone game sensation: Tiny Wings.

Click to view

Really, Tiny Wings is your life.  It's about using skill and intelligence to transcend your biological limitations, but still being hemmed in by constraints of reality.  You can choose how you move ( Read more... )

Angry Birds is an iphone game where you use a slingshot to propel exploding birds (yes, really) at various structures containing pigs, which you're trying to kill by hitting directly or by causing the structures to collapse on them.

The funny thing about Angry Birds is that it's actually not a great game in one sense -- while playing the game ( Read more... )

If there was a *book* about a blue hedgehog that spins himself into a featureless orb as he dashes through an island filled with strange and highly distinct biomes, each meticulously constructed to both let him both revel in the pleasure of moving as fast as possible yet threaten him with constant (but temporary and thus perhaps meaningless) death ( Read more... )

It's interesting cognitive science, and it's written up in a humor magazine, Cracked:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

Yup, I read Playboy Cracked for the articles.

While doing some web searching I ran across a fascinating little company called EmSense that creates a headset that tracks eye gaze and brain activity.  They're marketing it to product marketers, web designers, and video game designers as a way to track what attentional and emotional responses they have as they experience the product/website/game.

( Read more... )

It's an "artgame" with deliberately crappy graphics and sound.  The gameplay is awkward, very simple, and frustrating, but it's really well done, with subtle touches like the nonlinear distance metric.  Play the full 5 minutes.  (note that you can move up and down as well as left and right)

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/index.html

I just beat Portal.  It's a computer game where your only weapon is a device that lets you create a portal between two different locations. 
It's clever, funny, and well put together, although the first part was really a bit too easy.

I definitely recommend checking it out.

(video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb7aDZeO_MQ

The original concept came ( Read more... )

I took a while to do it, but here are the pictures from Matt's 28th, Julie's 27th birthday / housecooling / giant settlers of catan party.

I actually managed to clean all the playa dust off the game in only half a day.  Since everyone at the party wanted to play, people formed teams and made collective decisions.  The teams were just like real ( Read more... )

[edit: this page seems to be a favorite for Russian spammers because it's linked to from a lot of blogs, and lj does a terrible job of blocking spam comments these days.  I've turned commenting off.  If you wish to contact me, I'm mattbell(at)cs(dot)stanford(dot)edu or @thismattbell on twitter.  You can follow future game appearances at @ ( Read more... )

I lasercut 28 houses and all the signs over the last 2 days.  This represents about 9 hours of lasercutting.  We now have 24 hours to paint everything, package it, and get it out to burningman.

All spread out on my floor:

( Read more... )