Author: RafaelFajardo

I am a designer, researcher, and educator. I am the founder and director of SWEAT, a loose collaborative dedicated to the creation of socially conscious videogames. I am a co-principle investigator for the P4 Games project and a co-investigator with the Institute for the Digital Humanities at the University of Denver. I am Associate Professor at the University of Denver where I am tenured in the School of Art and Art History. I teach in the Emergent Digital Practices program and in the Game Development program.

US watchdog questions billions spent on ending Afghan poppy production | Circa News

A recent news item on Circa follows up on the (in)effectiveness of spending to eradicate poppy agriculture in Aphganistan. Billions spent and growth has expanded. “In past years, surges in opium poppy cultivation have been met by a coordinated response from the U.S. government and coalition partners… The recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness… Read more →

The New Heroin Epidemic – The Atlantic

Special report from The Atlantic: More recently, heroin has taken root here after authorities cracked down on unscrupulous doctors who were overprescribing pain meds, sending addicts searching elsewhere for a similar high. In West Virginia, heroin-overdose deaths have tripled over the past five years, while prescription-painkiller deaths have dipped slightly. There were many contributing factors, not the least of which… Read more →

US heroin overdose deaths more than double in two years | The Rundown | PBS NewsHour

keeping an eye on statistics, and potential popular understanding of the metaphor we are using in Sow/Reap: Deaths caused by heroin overdoses more than doubled between 2010 to 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. In a report released Friday, a study conducted in 28 states across the U.S. showed heroin overdoses increasing from 1,779 in 2010 to… Read more →

Art and Museum Attention Span

Theres no right answer; but there is some evidence of what most people do in practice, much of it quoted by Elkins in a 2010 essay on the Huffington Post. In summary, if museum-goers are eating oranges, theyre eating them bloody fast. The Louvre says that the average visitor looks at the Mona Lisa for 15 seconds. New Yorks Metropolitan… Read more →

An Unreal Decision

But really, that was just one symptom of a larger problem. The real issue was that Unity seems to have been built for very small development teams. While Republic Sniper isn’t a huge project, we have seven regular project members and a number of other contributors. There are upsides to Unity’s approach: It allows tiny teams to create things that… Read more →

Inst-Inst adds a workshop on Kinect2

After yesterday’s announcements from GamesCon in Europe that led reporters to believe that the Kinect2 is being abandoned by Microsoft, the organizers of Inst-Inst today announced the addition of a workshop for installation artists covering the Kinect2 to be led by MS insiders. Hey Folks, We’re pleased to let you know we’ve added another workshop to INST-INT. This is a… Read more →

Kinect is dead via Polygon

via Polygon, news that Microsoft is unbundling the Kinect2 from the XBoxOne, and the projection that the device is dead in the marketplace. I surmise that the device died when MS announced it would be a mandatory, always on, always online device. It has been rumored to have the capacity to track our bloodflow and so it felt engineered for… Read more →