Geeks and games
Gaming the System is an article from Rands describing the relationship between geeks and their games.
It’s also why we love games — they’re just dolled up systems — and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you’ll be at managing us.
In a nutshell, geeks love to figure out how things work, improve anything they can and be the best at what they’re doing.
Mario couldn’t jump
Satoru Iwata discusses the Mario brothers with Shigeru Miyamoto. The interview is quite revealing — many of Mario’s trademark characteristics were due to design and programming restraints at the time, including the moustache, the hat and the overalls.
Tetris on the brain
The girls who practiced showed greater brain efficiency, consistent with earlier studies. Compared to controls, the girls that practiced also had a thicker cortex, but not in the same brain areas where efficiency occurred.
I think it’s time to dust-off my old Game Boy and increase the girth of my cortex.
8-bit trip
An awesome stop-motion Lego homage to 8-bit video games. It took more than fifteen hundred hours of moving bricks around and photographing them.
Control
Periodic table of controllers. An interesting infographic of video game controllers, would be bit cooler if it mimicked the structure of the periodic table a bit better.
How videogames blind us with science
How videogames blind us with science or how kids are using the scientific method to learn a game’s world mechanics.
