The Holocaust and Pokémon are not words that are often used in the same sentence. And yet, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C has been forced to delve into the world of computer gaming when it issued a call for visitors to stop playing Pokémon Go there, reported the Washington Post. “Playing the…
Jewish inventor Ralph H. Baer’s workshop desk isn’t exactly messy, but the 180 items on it represent the sort of organized chaos that cliché prescribes for brilliant minds. On a shelf sits his 1978 invention Simon, the iconic game with red, yellow, blue and green buttons that calls upon players to follow increasingly difficult sound…
The man credited with inventing the first home video games, Ralph Baer, died on Saturday at age 92 at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire, a director at the Goodwin Funeral Home said on Monday. Baer, who fled his native Germany with his family in 1938 ahead of the Second World War, spent much of…
The developer of a Holocaust-themed game which was rejected by Nintendo has announced plans to release his work for smartphone users. British game developer Luc Bernard, 26, announced his plan on the website Indiegogo, a crowd-sourcing platform which helps developers and inventors find funding for their products. Bernard made headlines in 2008 with his game…
Remember “Wolfenstein”? Those of us who grew up playing computer games in the ‘90s certainly will. You know, the one where you ran around in a castle shooting Nazis. The first version, “Castle Wolfenstein,” was released in 1981, but for those of us a little bit younger, the main version was “Wolfenstein 3D,” from 1992….
In the past few weeks, I’ve become an expert at epidemiology. I didn’t watch a documentary or read a magazine article or take a class — I simply played a videogame called “Plague,” which requires players to pursue a single objective in order to win the game: Place a virus or bacteria somewhere in the…
Courtesy of Ignition Entertainment There remains significant scholarly debate about the exact process and dating of the canonization of the Tanach, but for most Jews, the Book of Enoch ended up on the cutting room floor. Takeyasu Sawaki, a Japanese game designer and the director of the recently released video game “El Shaddai,” would like…
Crossposted from Haaretz Computer games have been known for decades now as the bitterest enemies of efficiency; after all, when the icon for the World of Warcraft or Angry Birds is easily accessible on the screen, it’s tempting to ignore one’s daily work. But must the fun of virtual games stand in opposition to the…
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