games

The Kinect can see, but the ability to see objects is different from the ability to recognize objects. You and I, with our eyes and brains that work so effectively, can see a water bottle of pretty much any size, shape, color, or material, and recognize what it's for. But a Kinect is not as smart as we are, and needs a hand to get to our level. That's where you come in.

We've said it before, but our favorite application for 3-D--really, the only venue in which we don't hate it--is gaming. Nintendo just released the 3DS XL, basically a bigger version of the glasses-free 3DS we reviewed here, and it's great. Here's why.

Here's a true story: a few years ago, given an Xbox 360 for testing purposes, I went to the Gamestop to get a new game. I like games, but I don't like games with guns or sports, because I don't particularly like guns or sports in real life, either. The guy at the Gamestop was absolutely flummoxed by my request for an Xbox game with neither. He ended up recommending the game version of the movie G-Force, which is a movie for children featuring talking CGI guinea pigs.

Violence in games is widespread, largely because violence triggers certain pleasure points in our brains. But what if we could study the brain to figure out exactly where and why--and what else could produce the same reaction?

Few video games are more basic than Pong, but Charles Moyes and Mengxiang Jiang’s version is incredibly complex. The two Cornell University students built a custom electroencephalography (EEG) device so they could control the game’s onscreen paddle with their minds.

The alpha waves that EEG machines read are faint electrical signals; Moyes and Jiang ran the EEG readings through an amplification circuit to filter and boost the signals. The amplified readings are then digitized and sent over USB to a computer running the game.

Internships more often than not are mindless, coffee-fetching black holes of boredom. But not at Syyn Labs, a Los Angeles collective that creates unusual interactive art and science projects for commercials and music videos. Last summer, student interns Hoon Oh, Robb Godshaw and Jisu Choi took it upon themselves to reinvent the sport of table tennis. Their project could pass for an extra in Transformers: It’s part ping-pong table, part machine, and so difficult to play that it reduces pros to the level of rank amateurs.

Yesterday at E3, the gaming industry's biggest American conference, Nintendo showed up with a 30-minute video updating their upcoming Wii U console--there have been some minor changes, like the move from touch-sensitive circle-pads to real joysticks, but the biggest change is that Nintendo seems to have finally heard of the internet.

The internet revolution has changed the way we create and showcase work. Amateur videos recorded on cellphones are getting more eyes than the latest ABC midseason replacement. The blog has brought democracy to the written word. Cheap technology and digital distribution make it easier than ever before for your little brother's band to be heard around the world. Why hasn't this populist revolution happened to video games?

In her new book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, Anna Anthropy looks at the daunting technological barrier to the medium's growth, and presents a solution.

The creators of Sniper Elite V2, a third-person World War II shooter released this week, know that the success of a modern video game comes down to the details. They worked closely with historians to nail the feel of 1945 Berlin, all the way down to the pattern of the wallpaper inside a typical German home. The typeface on the Nazi propaganda littering the crumbling virtual urban streets is Antiqua, the preferred font of the Reich.

But the primary subject of research for the team was more, shall we say, internal: what happens when a sniper's bullet enters a human body? They consulted medical experts, ex-military snipers, photography of real-life gunshot victims and x-rays of bone fractures, gathering a mountain of data and funneling it through the incredibly powerful software and hardware used to create today's videogames. The final result: a realistic simulation, rendered on the fly, that they call the "KillCam," in which the camera follows a bullet as it leaves the sniper's gun, flies through the air, hits its mark, and invades the body--with all the bone-crushing, organ-bursting, blood-spewing destruction that entails.

If you buy a cheapie laptop, you're going to get onboard graphics--historically underpowered, since they exist on the same die as the CPU, and thus historically crappy. To play serious games, or do any real video editing, you'd need to upgrade to a discrete graphics card.

The Louvre Museum in Paris overhauled their digital tour guide system last week, replacing it with, surprisingly, a stock of Nintendo 3DS consoles. Now you can browse the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa in...3-D! Or in real life, I guess, since you're already in the museum. (The resolution's better in real life.)