Writing for Vice, Gabriel Soares takes a look at Civilization and why a standard playthrough tends to get more boring as the player reaches modern day technology: what is progress… Read the rest of the article: The Kinship Hybercube and the meaning of progress in Civilization games

The 2020 Game Developers Conference will include alt.ctrl.GDC, a showcase of video game using unconventional, accessible or alternative physical controls. The 20 finalists include Far Away Cage, an Alien-inspired game… Read the rest of the article: New experimental video games controlled by skate board, teeter totter, and a giraffe head

Becoming important enough to merit a "hedcut" stippled portrait from the Wall Street Journal used to a be a significant honor. But on Monday, the WSJ announced that all members… Read the rest of the article: The Wall Street Journal's new hedcut-generating AI created monstrous portraits

Writing for PCGamer, Alex Kane takes a long look at the creation of the video game Tie Fighter, where the player becomes an ace in the Imperial Navy between the… Read the rest of the article: A retrospective on the making of Tie Fighter

Writing for the Washington Post, Danielle Paquette tells the story of Monkey Island in Liberia. Beginning in 1974, American scientists hoping to develop vaccines experimented on chimpanzees in Liberia, infecting… Read the rest of the article: The island of infected chimpanzees, and the man who feeds them

Here's a clever update to the arcade classic Pop-A-Shot basketball. The really Big Crane Company has combined the basketball mechanic with Plants vs. Zombies to create Zombie Jam. Hit a… Read the rest of the article: Arcade game combines Pop-A-Shot basketball with fighting off zombies

Now you can add some Kojima flavor to selfies or news coverage of the impeachment hearings. Erop has created two different Instagram filters. TOMORROW IS IN YOUR HANDS #DeathStranding #TomorrowIsInYourHands@Kojima_Hideo@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN… Read the rest of the article: Death Stranding Instagram filters

There are 40 college football bowl games this season. Sporting News ranked each matchup (picking the Arizona Bowl as the worst), and also took a detailed look at all the… Read the rest of the article: Here are the freebies college football players will get for participating in bowl games this year

Converse's line of basketball shoes is the All Star Pro BB. The latest model is the "Nocturnal," available December 15 in North America. They glow in the dark, but will… Read the rest of the article: Glow-in-the-dark Converse All Stars

This article by Holly Gramazio suggests several ideas for games you can play alone or with friends while in public. My favorite of the lot was posted by a Redditor,… Read the rest of the article: Secret games to play when you're bored in public

Earlier this year, Vox looked at the popularity of female influencers showing off firearms on Instagram. Facebook/Instagram forbids advertisements promoting the sale or use firearms. So, marketers pay influencers to… Read the rest of the article: The Alpha Gun Angels are Israeli gun influencers

Writing for the New York Times, Heather Murphy has a fascinating story about the unexpected results of a bone marrow transplant. When a patient receives a bone marrow transplant, the… Read the rest of the article: The DNA in his semen was completely replaced with another man's DNA

Writing at Metropole, Sarah Balakrishnan describes the development of cemeteries in a city in Ghana. As of the 1800's, the general practice in the seaside city of Accra was to… Read the rest of the article: Public cemeteries as a precondition for the sale of land

Storyscape is a freemium mobile app that offers several choose your own adventure-style stories. The vast majority of choices are free, and the choices made don't seem to have a… Read the rest of the article: Check out the deliciously insidious first monetized choice in this freemium game

I haven't read the later books in the Southern Reach series, but I imagine if the phenomena had eventually extended past the swamp to interact with horses and wolves the… Read the rest of the article: Do you dare look upon this horse-wolfpack hybrid?

Matt Levine's consistently excellent newsletter for Bloomberg is called Money Stuff, and is typically focused on white collar crime and crime-adjacent behavior. Monday's edition looks at the New York Times'… Read the rest of the article: Newsletter detailing the world of white collar crime

Presumably coming soon to ESPN's "The Ocho" is some version of this 200-year old tradition in Malta held in honor of St Julian the Hospitaller: In the tournament, known as… Read the rest of the article: The devastating 200-year-old tradition of running along a greasy pole in Malta

I had hoped In the Valley of Gods, Campo Santo's follow up to Firewatch, was going to adapt some of the magic of the Indiana Jones and Brendan Fraser Mummy… Read the rest of the article: Modern archaeology is entering a paywalled Lovecraftian forum to access a 1929 edition of an Egypt travel guide

AI Dungeon 2 is designed by Nick Walton to achieve an ambitious goal: Imagine an infinitely generated world that you could explore endlessly, continually finding entirely new content and adventures.… Read the rest of the article: I played this AI-generated text adventure as the Mandalorian and here's what happened

"Nova Scopes" by David Sugich: My kaleidoscopes are not your typical everyday kaleidoscopes. I make a variety of 2-, 3-, and 4-mirror kaleidoscopes which are 2-, 2.5-, and 3-dimensional in… Read the rest of the article: These are very cool kaleidoscopes