Last night, Vice's sub-site Motherboard celebrated its official relaunching the best way possible: by throwing a giant party, having Rza play and getting everyone drunk. Indie arcade-makers Babycastles were also there to bring their own brand of gaming weirdness along with the whole gang behind Sportsfriends.

Proof that video games are art isn't just on the screen. Sometimes it can be right in front of you, in the form of an arcade classic that swallows a whole room or tricked-out gloves that let you throw a Street Fighter fireball.

Babycastles, the video games arts collective, is back in New York, teaming with Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi to deliver interpretations of Mario Bros., Ms. Pac-Man and a Defender-style side-scrolling shooter. Here's their latest concept, which brings hadoukens to real-life, sort of. Watch this video of…

More weird riffs on classic video games from the New York City gaming collective Babycastles and Katamari Damacy dreamer Keita Takahashi. We showed you their unusual takes on Ms. Pac-Man and an old-school shmup. Here's Mario Bros.

Imagine a Defender-style video game where you had to jog across the entire floor of a building to play it. No, wait; don't imagine that. One Japanese-born game designer already did. And it's pretty great.

It's one thing for a video game to be called immersive when you're staring at a single screen in one direction. But when you're sitting in a room surrounded by power pellets and aggressive ghosts of Ms. Pac-Man, you feel like you're living inside a game of the arcade classic.

Keita Takahashi, the free-thinking creator of Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy is teaming up with Babycastles, the free-thinking New York City-based video game art curators for a most wonderful exhibition. They're turning several of Takahashi's brainstorms into real-world, physical games for an exhibition premiering…

Check out this test run of Space Cruiser, a video game that will be played by some 200 people on Thursday evening at New York City's American Museum of Natural History. (Event details here. But it's now sold out.) Video by Ida Benedetto.

What are you doing on Thursday evening? If you're in New York City or the surrounding area, consider going to Cosmic Cocktails and Space Arcade, an event at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space.

For a relaxing time, sit back and watch this terrific PBS short documentary on the artistic merits of video games. The video runs only about 7 minutes, and features NYU's Eric Zimmerman, game designer and researcher Jesper Juul, Kotaku contributor and secret nerdcore superstar Leigh Alexander, and Babycastles…

Recently, I curated an exhibit at Brooklyn's Babycastles arcade, currently housed in a Williamsburg show space where indie games are on display in hand-made cabinets, alongside a lineup of bands.

While debate persists over the merit of video games an art form, the medium has reached an undeniable milestone: the emergence of an active counter-culture.

Blip Festival 2011 starts... tonight! Never mind that it's almost tonight. If you like chiptunes, if you want to hear music that bleeps and bloops rather than hums and sings, if you like lo-fi electronica, or if you just want to increase your odds of bumping into Kotaku columnist Leigh Alexander, go to the festival.

Is it art, or is at an arcade? Kunal Gupta, the co-creator of New York City's underground indie games exhibition explains why Babycastles is more arcade than art.

Some people say there are no wood Pokémon. Not true. There are woodcut Pokémon.

In Manhattan, there is this place where you are supposed to hug an arcade machine, where there's one arcade cabinet made of wood, another made of Papier-mâché and where you can play games you may have heard of but probably never played.

Los Angeles people get Indiecade this weekend. New Yorkers get Babycastles, the upstart art arcade group that kicks off its biggest event tonight.