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.
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.
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.
archive: 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..
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.
hello: 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.
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.
hello: 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..
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)..
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.
hello: Augmented Reality Games Prototyping Workshop.
Alongside Jonas Hielscher and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, I'll be teaching a 3 day intensive workshop at Mediamatic on rapidly prototyping Augmented Reality games, at Mediamatic, Amsterdam.
Beginning on June 2, participants will learn how AR works while building game designs that incorporate corporeal and social elements with that of digital content. They will walk away with a base of several skeleton applications with which to be able to create and continue developing projects on their own after the workshop.
Because I have a piece in Homo Ludens Ludens it's little difficult for me to play journalist. For this reason I'm posting here a bunch of links by others that will give you good coverage of what there. I will take the license to say it's a super show, if not a little gigantic (in typical LABoral fashion). Congrats to Laura, Erich and Daphne on the curatorial front. Given the breadth of the topic it can't have been easy..
There were several works there that I will put into the archives in the coming couple of weeks. In the meantime HLL will be on show until September, so.. why not spend some of your summer holidays in Gijon, swim in the Cantabrian Ocean and catch a killer show of game art while you're at it..
Curtis Johnson, student of game developer and theorist Celia Pearce, provides us with a few interesting thoughts on the popularly held diametric of Art and Entertainment.
His take on it is that Art itself is already a culturally rarefied form of entertainment and cannot be easily considered otherwise. As a result, this places games, as a self-confessed form of entertainment, well within the realm of art (or at least a little less conveniently separable). I've archived it here for posterity (all copyright belonging to Curtis).
hello: MMUVE IT! Australia Council InterArts Grant
The Australia Council has announced a $30,000 grant for artists working within MUVEs. I'm hoping the Babelswarm project been responsible (is some small way) for their recognition of virtual worlds as legitimate artistic locations.
The grant aims to give Australian artists the opportunity to creatively and critically explore interactive, virtual worlds, with a particular focus on the body and interfaces facilitating 'mixed realities'.
The grant allows for a collaborative team of up to three artists (including a digital visual media practitioner) to develop inter-disciplinary artwork in a MMUVE of their choice.
With more than 73 million participants in online games and social networking sites such as EverQuest, Legend of Zelda, Second Life and World of Warcraft (to name but a few), and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Wiimote, an opportunity exists to develop an innovative artwork engaging embodied users in a highly networked environment.
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial presents HOMO LUDENS LUDENS, an international exhibition and symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives and a speculation on the emergence of the “Homo Ludens Ludens”: the contemporary playing man. What does it mean “to play” and to be “a player”?
The goal of this Symposium, organised jointly with The Planetary Collegium, is to provide the framework for contemporary play, to highlight its interdisciplinary nature, and to show the multifaceted reality of our present-day entertainment society.
ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN THE EXHIBITION: John Paul Bichard, France Cadet, Derivart, Devart, Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi, Ge Jin, Vladan Joler, Radwan Kasmiya, John Klima, La Fiambrera Obrera & Mar de Niebla, Danny Ledonne, Valeriano López, Ludic Society, Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand, Martin Pichlmair & Fares Kayali, Brian Mackern, Larry Miller, MIT Lab - Drew Harry & Dietmar Offenhuber & Orkan Telhan, Molleindustria, Julian Oliver, Orna Portugaly & Daphna Talithman & Sharon Younger, Personal Cinema & the Erasers, Rolando Sánchez, Alex Sanjurjo, Gordan Savicic, Axel Stockburger, Silver & True, Román Torre, David Valentine/MediaShed (ft. Methods of Movement), Volker Morawe & Tilman Reiff, William Wegman.
I'll be exhibiting my own levelHead there (it's first public appearance, gulp). It'll be on show with other work by artists above for 5 months.
Read on for more about the accompaning symposium. Looking forward to seeing some of you there next week!
hello: Fine job for talented map builder with GTKRadiant skills
Kora, of Workspace Unlimited, writes: Workspace Unlimited is currently looking for a freelance map builder to create architectural models and 3D content with GTK Radiant for the Quake 3 game engine. One of the next ongoing projects will start in April-May 2008 and will be showed in a museum in June 2008.
Babelswarm is an inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life exploring the possibilities of literary, music/sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within virtual worlds. The installation is launching in sunny Lismore, NSW on April 11th, 2008. I'll be posting a SLurl to our work blog on the day so you can join us in first- or second-person mode.
Sometimes people come up with some idea that is so fucking excellent you wonder how on earth you survived without it. Dylan Fitterer's Audio Surf is one such game. Players set the background audio for the game by uploading music they actually like. Their favourite songs then determine the shape, speed and mood of the game. Surf Rock just reached a new level of insanity.
Audio Surf runs in Valve's Steam, a Win digital distro/management platform for games.
In his description"Reworked classic games to destroy original contexts or defy expectations, a bit of a coin-operated Negativland. Playing a reverse form of Breakout causes massive synaptic failure".
..andhe's right, playing the ghost in PacMan produced a new and disturbing kind of vertigo while simultaneously invoking total distrust of my hands..
I had to nick the title from the parent article, it was simply too good. Here's the background story the game Fuel of War is set:
Sometime in the near future, gas will cost about $20 a gallon. It gets worse: China and Russia will form a military alliance that threatens the security of the United States and Europe.
Amid hunger, water scarcity and power outages, the two sides will go to war. Soldiers will descend upon bombed-out cities and abandoned villages, where rusting appliances and old car engines litter the streets.
Games like this are disturbing yet somehow honest. They recycle existing fears instead of inventing new sources for them. The terrible awareness that the apetite of the modern world is out-of-control - the fear that the once infinite sphere we live on is drying up - points to a kind of panic that only needs a uniform and a sub machine-gun to feel right at home within a nationalist geo-strategic, island-mentality..
We might ask why the play isn't built around sustainably solving the problem of a lack of oil, looking at other fuel sources and/or coming up with infrastructural changes that privilege other modes of transport. Perhaps that'd be too abstract, it just wouldn't speak to the fear.
Thanks go out to pix for the link. Click here for reccommended reading on this topic.
We've written before about Wafaa Bilal's piece Domestic Tension. His new work, Night of Bush Hunting, has come under significant antagonism.
Tom Sherman, of Syracuse University writes:
Iraqi-born Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal interviewed after his show called Virtual Jihadi at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was "suspended" and he was shut out of the arts building. The art piece consists of a hacked video Al Qaeda video game called Night of Bush Hunting. The artist inserted himself as a virtual suicide bomber as a way of referencing his own anger and despair over his brother and father's death during the American occupation as well as the anger and despair of Iraqis who have lost control of their lives.
YouTube has a few interviews that will help get you up to speed on the issue.
It seems however that things have recently turned even worse for Wafaa. To cite an article at GamePolitics. "Following his RPI expulsion, Bilal's Virtual Jihadi exhibit was moved to the nearby Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy. On Monday night, a local Republican political figure, Robert Mirch, led a protest against Bilal's work outside the Sanctuary. Mirch, by the way, also happens to be the Public Works Commissioner for the city of Troy. In that capacity, he is responsible for enforcing building codes."
Many thanks to Tom and Christian McCrea for the updates, found on the Empyre list.
Rhizome writes to let us know of an upcoming deadline for their commissions program. Rhizome Commissions Program
Deadline for applications: midnight, March 31, 2008
We support: New Media Art, by which we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and also works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Commissioned projects can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, or the web.
Amount: 7 commissions in the amount of $3000-5000
Guidelines and application forms can be found here.
By using the scripting interface, math functions and text input fields, a clever person of questionable sanity repurposes MS Excel as a fairly capable 3D graphics engine. Read the full - and very detailed - article on Gamasutra.
Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, rolled his last d20 on Tuesday.
I'm sure a great many of you will agree (A)D&D was/is one of the richest interfaces to the engines of imagination. It certainly had my mind exploding for several years, leading to merry geekery such as Call of Cthulhu and a healthy dose of Paranoia.
hello: Brody Condon tonight at The Influencers, Barcelona.
Hmm, we're a bit late with this one..
Nonetheless, if you're in Barcelona (or know someone who is) tell them to head down to the CCCB tonight (!) to see Brody talk at this years edition of The Influencers.
IndieCade is a very open-minded festival of independently produced games. It's brought to you by people that believe in the medium at both a grassroots and academic level. As such, they've dedicated years to the study and promotion of it as a rich platform for creative investigation.
Below is a call for proposals for the next event in Seattle, America. Indiecade promises a well curated, well thought out festival program with a focus on truly divergent and experimental approaches to game development and play. Better still, your work may get to go on the road for a year, touring in some high-profile settings.. Call for submissions—IndieCade: International Festivals of Independent Games @ Open Satellite, July 10-13, 2008
Game artists and designers from around the world are invited to submit their work. IndieCade welcomes independent interactive media of all types, from art to commercial to academic, from ARG to abstract, from serious to shooter. Entrants will also be considered for year-round international showcase exhibitions.
Submissions Close Midnight April 11, 2008 PST. For more information and eligibility details, and to enter, visit www.IndieCade.com
It looks like the Nintendo Wii itself (ie not the WiiMote and a PC) is well on its way to becoming a platform for creative exploration. Here's a summary of recent events to this effect.
The GC Linux team have released a proof-of-concept distribution of Linux that will run on the Wii.
Here's a HOWTO for running hombrew code on the Wii using a GameCube SD card adapter.
A SNES emulator has been released for the Wii and runs in "pure 100% Native Wii mode" (!link may be suffering from heavy traffic and/or seems temporarily broken. I'll keep checking up on it)
If you hear of any strictly artistic or experimental applications being developed for the Wii using these new tools, be sure to let us know!
hello: Mysterious company seeks gamer brain donors
Please excuse the shamelessly misleading title. They just want to log your brain activity while you play games. It seems perfectly harmless and clearly points to some very scary interesting new technologies on the horizon.
Say them:
Emotiv’s world class team of brain research scientists is famous for their ground breaking discoveries and technology. They are currently research human emotions during multimedia interaction and are seeking volunteers to join them at their Pyrmont harbour side office to partake in this exciting project
Participating in Emotiv’s current experiment involves relaxing on a couch whilst playing a new video game and having electrical profile (EEG) of your brain taken to determine your brains activity during different emotional states and mental tasks
The recordings are taken using a 100% safe and pain free wireless headcap of sensors
Here's the company website. Originally found here.
Looks like a good year for indie developers at this year's GDC.
First up is a "free to use graphics engine" from Sony going by the name of PhyreEngine. Apparently they are releasing complete documentation, "70+ samples" and "full source code and artwork" of sample game templates. Games known to have already used this engine include flOw, GripShift and DiRT. It's for use on desktop computers with build the PS3 as a build target (it seems). We have no idea of what license this will come under but wow.. a big step by Sony. Read more about it here.
Insomniac have announced they're opening up a whole heap of 'utility code' to developers: things that cover "common chores with benefits like memory management templates, debugging utilities, and other basic functions that every developer has a need for when making a game" to quote the article. The project goes under the name Nocturnal Initiative and seems to be just one of several big pushes toward indie-loving this GDC.
Finally it seems Microsoft (in an attempt to outlove the competition?) has released XNA from the shackles of the exclusive club as part of their - a tad misleadingly dubbed - "Youtube for games" initiative. This means that from this Autumn any XBOX360 owner can play XNA games without needing a gold-card. There's more to it than this of course. Best you go RTA.
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