When you play the game Peggle, do you think everything is left up to luck, or skill? As it turns out, the answer to this question might say a lot about the nature of gamers -- and what makes someone a casual or hard-core player. In case you haven't heard of Peggle, it's a title that came out from Po...

A few weeks ago I had an exchange on Twitter with John Magee about music. He Tweeted "music is the least representative art. or is it? could it abstractly represent the noise of consciousness?", which led us to talk about the relationship between music and math/geometry. I pointed out that when Howa...

#nbTable {width:200px;float:right;margin:0px 0px 12px 12px;} #nbTable td {padding:4px;color:#757575;} #nbTable .nbHD {font-weight:bold;color:#000;} #nbTable .nbBest {background-color:#0c9ac1;color:#fff;} Top 5 laptop makers: 1. Hewlett-Packard 2. Acer 3. Dell 4. Toshiba 5. Asustek Top 5 netbook make...

Spoiler warning: This blog posting contains a lot of spoilers about the video game Flower! In recent years there's been a heartening surge in "art" video games -- games that use play mechanics to explore an idea or evoke a mood. The creators use gameplay as a rhetorical technique: They use physics, ...

Spoiler alert: There are many, many very big spoilers for the videogame Flower in this column. Don't read it if you haven't played it all the way through. Or unless you — y'know — want to have it spoiled for you! Your life; your call. What the hell is Flower about? People have been argui...

This morning, I was reading the print version of The New York Times when a thin, one-column story in the city section caught my eye: "When Panhandlers Need a Wordsmith's Touch". In the story, the writer uses a first-person voice to describe how he was walking to the bank and wound up talking to panh...

See that skeleton above? It's a display at the Natural History Museum in Oulu, Finland, and it shows a domestic dog in mid-stride. The only problem? That's not how dogs walk. If you actually closely observe a dog -- or any other quadruped -- while it's walking slowly, you see that they step with the...

: These miniature videogame marvels sprang from the frantic minds of developers during last week's Global Game Jam. The international exercise in lightning-fast game design challenged creative types to crank out fully functional (and fully fun) videogames in just one weekend. These screenshots show ...

NEW YORK — Team A-to-Z was in trouble. The four-person, game-design group had a great concept: They were crafting a zombie-fighting strategy title that would unfold entirely in text, like Zork . Players would type commands to peer into different rooms, get back text descriptions ("3 zombies ar...

Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian? Is evolution a well-supported theory? You might think these questions have been incontrovertibly answered in the affirmative, proven by settled facts. But for a lot of Americans, they haven't. Among Republicans, belief in anthropogenic...