selectparks

levelHead source code released.

After many requests and a heap of delays the levelHead source code is now publically available under the General Public License V3.0. All art assets are provided under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. See this install page for full instructions.

This is a release intended for developers and those comfortable with the compiling software on Linux systems. As yet there is no binary executable of levelHead.

More about that soon..

Vimeo moves to ban Machinima, Game footage

Let's hope this isn't a trend. From the article..

The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute 'creative expression.' Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these... Gaming videos are by nature significantly larger and longer than any other genre on Vimeo ...

It would seem the Vimeo team isn't familiar with the now-venerable of appropriation as applied to creative practice.. The more likely explanation of course is simply that they are feeling the chill of a lawsuit.

If YouTube was to follow suit what are the feasible options for distributing Machinima, speedruns and other clips employing commercial games as a function of creation? Perhaps The Internet Archive will remain our bastion of sanity here..

I'll make a post about a great initiative by The Internet Archive soon, as relating to documenting experimental/artistic game development practices.

Call for Work: ''It's all in the game''.

Tanja writes in to let us know of a game related call for submissions..
AveCom "It's all in the game"

October 3rd - 26th 2008, Arnhem - Nijmegen, The Netherlands

'Interactivity' is a word that seems to gain more importance and magic everyday. In 2008 AveCom focuses on an audiovisual phenomenon that is indisputable connected to interactivity: games.

AveCom and Square Eyes Festival are organizing an event based on the interactivity between art and games entitled: "It's all in the game..."

A 3-day festival, October 3rd - 5th, consists of digital movies, installations, performances and live-cinema. This festival will kick off a 4-week exhibition in which all imaginable fields of art that were inspired by the game-world and vice versa, will be shown. For information, deadlines and entry form: www.avecom.nl and www.square-eyes.org

AveCom is an activity of the CBKGelderland and is funded by the Province Gelderland.

levelHead v1.0 first footage (speedrun/spoiler!)

This, the first footage of the first stable version of levelHead, was documented yesterday with a speed-run of 227 seconds through the first 3 cubes. This is a spoiler! Don't watch this clip if you want to solve those levels yourself..

Aside from the above Vimeo documentation, you can download the 65M OGG/Theora file here. It will play in VLC.

This video was made thanks to Blender 2.46's great new video sequence editor (finally a fast and stable Free video editor for Linux) and captured using the strangely performant 3d desktop video capture solution Bugle.

For those of you keen to get your hands on the code: it's coming soon! I still need to tidy up the literature before it ships..

Mellifera wins $30k OzCo MMUVE IT! grant

Andrew Burrell and Trish Adams are winners of the Australia Council's latest virtual worlds arts initiative – MMUVE IT! Their Mellifera project is "an inter-disciplinary artwork exploring cognitive processes and bodily interaction and its relationship to virtual environments". Burrell and Adams will co-develop a neuro-interface to enable inter-world interactions through sensor-based inputs such as gesture, breath, heartbeats, electrical brain and nervous system activity.

Their progress can be followed via the Mellifera project site, and an OzCo announcement can be found here.

Neural #30: 'Dangerous Games' now available.

Sporting a brand new design, the new printed Neural issue #30, Dangerous Games is available.

The issue includes a Ludic Society/Margarete Jahrmann interview, Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition report, Play Cultures, the world of digital games report, an article on games of control and human avatars (by moi), news about Emotoscope, Modi 2.0, Rom Check Fail, Amalgus Cycle Process1, HAI and a swathe of awesome reviews.

It's a super mag so I'll give it a shameless plug: you can subscribe to Neural here or find it at a local bookstore.

Passage

This Sunday's game has 100x16 pixels and an aspect ratio of 25:4. It's called Passage. Give it 5 minutes of playtime and you'll get the hang of what's happening. Great work Jason and thanks for supporting Linux and OS X.

Cheers to pix for the link.

Game Controller->Arduino->PD workshop @ Hangar, BCN

This looks to be a great workshop. It covers methods for interfacing game controllers with Arduino such that they can be used to drive audiovisual instruments built in the powerful and popular graphical development environment PureData.

The workshop will be led by PD luminary and active developer Hans-Cristoph Steiner, at Barcelona's infamous Hangar. All that learning will set you back a cool EUR20.00..

Read all about it here..

Camspace: Markerless Tracking that's Free (as-in-beer)

A small team in Tel Aviv, Israel has been working on what they describe as a paradigm shift in gaming: rather than using an input device like a WiiMote or mouse+keyboard (almost) any object in the room can be trained to be tracked by a standard webcam and their software.

Check out their impressive demo here. They just pick up a brightly coloured object, train and then track.

To be fair, this technology has been around for quite a while in computer vision, popularised most of all by Intel's OpenCV library which allows for defining and tracking many different Regions Of Interest (to unpack a geeky acronym).

Read on for more about this great technology (and why it won't displace the WiiMote any time soon)..

ASIA-EUROPE Art Camp: The Art of Gaming

Pavel Sedlak writes to us about this interesting Call for Applications..

6TH ASIA-EUROPE ART CAMP: Ludic Times | The Art of Gaming
22 29 July 2008
Singapore

The Asia-Europe Art Camp project is an initiative set up by Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) in 2003 focusing on New Media Art. The project aims at developing a platform to promote dialogue between art students from Asia and Europe, to learn more about each other¹s contexts, cultures and be inspired
during a week of lectures, workshops and public events. Focusing more on the creative process than on the 'artistic product', the Art Camp has been designed as a learning experience and an opportunity for professional development.

Built upon the achievements of the previous five Art Camps, the 6th Art Camp will gather 20 young artists or students, usually in their final year of study, from ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) countries for an intensive week of workshops, lectures and meetings as well as artistic and collaborative work.
A team of Asia-Europe artistic advisors and resource persons specialised in art and technology will lead and facilitate the workshops during the Art Camp.

On the sidelines of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2008 and the Asia-Europe New Media Arts Policy and Practice Meeting, the 6th Asia-Europe Art Camp to be held in Singapore is conceptualised around the theme of gaming and will focus on the nature of our contemporary ludic
culture while taking into account psychology of gaming and theories of gaming (as tools for social development and awareness, real-life situation simulations, artificial and augmented realities, serious games for education and games as an art form). Electronic, internet-based and pervasive games
and their roles in urban society will be discussed as well as the possibilities for Asia-Europe game development collaborations and industry-artist-researcher partnerships.

Read on for more..