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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.
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After years of using videogames in training, the U.S Army has decided to set up a dedicated game development studio strictly for the purposes of military simulation and training. Looks like state-sanctioned violent videogames are coming to a disillusioned American kid near you..
Wired has the full report here.
For a thorough breakdown of this phenomenon and its origins, read Ed Halter's book From Sun Tzu to XBox: War and Videogames.
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archive: Bio-predictive game engine.
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A pair of sadistic researchers have devised a new application for bio-feedback in gameplay. By analysing pizeo-electic currents on the skin surface of the player they are able to best-guess the next move the player will make.
Coining the games that result from this interface "Frustration Games" they found that a player' intention to jump can be accurately predicted up to 2 seconds prior to the actual move.
Oh, the evil.
Via /. Related: Mindball and The Predictor.
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Chris O' Shea sent us through an article by Wired's Clive Thompson collecting his experiences making levels in Dungeon Maker for himself to play in.
In the wake of transformative titles like Little Big Planet this conversation of level design as an active function of play is timely.
Says Clive:
By the time I'd crafted my fourth level, I had the surreal experience of revisiting my first level and literally being unable to remember why the hell I made the creative decisions I'd made. Stupid, stupid: Putting the staircase in the far northeast passage? What was I thinking? "Man," I thought as I lumbered down yet another passageway, "this dungeon blows."
Read it here.
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Marketers pulling out of Second Life
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A vocal number of SL players consider themselves more citizens than users and they aren't at all pleased with the brave new-world of trans-corporeal capitalism.
"The LA Times is running a story today saying that marketers are pulling out of Second Life, primarily because — surprise, surprise — the 'more than 8 million residents' figure on the game's Web site is grossly inflated. Also, as it turns out, the virtual world's regular visitors — at most 40,000 of them online at any time — are not only disinterested in in-world marketing, but actively hostile to it, staging attacks on corporate presences such as the Reebok and American Apparel stores. The companies aren't giving up on virtual worlds altogether, though, but moving on to games like There, Gaia Online and Entropia Universe.
This does beg the question: if commercial interest continues to pull out of SL - and the real-estate market slumps as a result - will Linden Labs have to increase subscription costs to stay in business?
Thankfully the world my body is dependent on isn't supported by a subscription model! Oh, wait... nevermind..
Perhaps even more interesting is:
"The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.' What company wouldn't want to be in on that action?"
See, SL isn't just about flirting and real-estate. Who said that anyway?
via /.
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At the expense of sounding like an ad, this E3 trailer of Little Big Planet has me twitching in the direction of my wallet. Perhaps it's time to cave-in and buy that lounge-invader they call PS3 afterall.
I had no idea the collaborative level editing would be quite so loose.. I wonder if it's possible to distribute levels/maps?
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Gamasutra asks, Who Says Games have to be Fun?"
A good overview for those a little lost on so-called Serious Games. Alongside it offers a few healthy perspectives from the likes of Frasca, Bogost and Molleindustria.
Says Ian:
“For 30 years now we’ve focused on making games produce fun,” adds Bogost. “Isn’t it about time we started working toward other kinds of emotional responses?”
.. that and a broader scope for where we allow ourselves to have fun.. Why is it so often considered somehow wrong/evil to have fun engaging with a 'serious' topic?
The effect of having fun is often produced when we're taking risks and learning from those risks, with the reward of increased freedom of movement, control and/or understanding. Several 'serious games' I've played provide directly for this already..
I've archived this link in the Theory section for posterity.
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tech: Global DoD Sim puts you in the picture.
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"The US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality. Putting supercomputers to an innovative use, the military is simulating our planet in an effort to predict the outcome of different scenarios. They might run tests to see how long 'you' can go without food or water, or how 'you' will respond to televised propaganda. Billions of nodes are created in the system, intended to reflect every man, woman, and child.
'Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. Simulex is the company developing these systems, and they list pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among their private sector clients.
The U.S. military is their biggest customer, apparently now running the most complex version of the system. JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence."
Via /.
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Teenager suspended for making map of schoolgrounds.
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An interesting chapter in the people-don't-kill-people-games-do-witch-hunt..
A Clements school, Fort Bend, teenager was removed from campus for making a map (think level) of the school ground so that his friends could play on it. Parents complained to administrators, investigators were brought in, and the boy was suspended from school. He's now detained elsewhere while they get to the bottom of his sprawling plot.
“They decided he was a terroristic threat,” said one source close to the district’s investigation.
In his room they found a hammer, which he had used previously to fix his bed. The hammer is now being retained as evidence on the basis of it being a potential weapon. If it was a crowbar, then they'd have this case sewed up. Kids these days, sheesh!
The original article is here.
You might want to check out the comments, they reveal plenty more than the article will. Of significance is the timing of the investigation (the kids map was being played for two months before the Virginia Tech tragedy) and that he's of Chinese blood. Perhaps a little first-glance racial profiling going on there..
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theory: Nationality: Pirate Bay
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The Pirate Bay wants to buy Sealand to ensure the ability to define it's own laws regarding freedom of information.
Julian, you might get your open source island after all!
http://www.buysealand.com/
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Sleeping Beauty is an interactive installation by Claudia Hart and Michael Ferraro (2005) offering an alternate approach to virtual, sexual corporeality.
From the artists: Sleeping Beauty is an interactive odalisque, using a projected 3D animation that responds to a viewer's presence. Portraying the compressed time and space of painting, Sleeping Beauty shows a dreaming character whose slow, drowsy movements articulate all of the minutia of a single moment. This “painting” is life-sized in scale, constructing a representation that is more personae, penetrating a viewer's space whose actions may awaken her. When awakened, Beauty opens her eyes to gaze at the viewer, in a moment of transformation, allowing the object of our gaze to subject us to hers.
Based loosely on works such as Titian's Venus and paintings by the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, Sleeping Beauty is meant to introduce direct sensuality into the virtual realm, but employing an idea of beauty defined by a woman rather than men in which the subject does not express conventional canons of body and facial type. In so doing Sleeping Beauty inverts the typical 3D character-based animations of interactive gaming, not just through its visual language buy by also rejecting their violence and aggressive speed. By implicating viewers through involving them in the interactive process, Sleeping Beauty rejects the voyeurism of the historical odalisque and is sensual rather than pornographic. The agenda of Sleeping Beauty therefore, is to intentionally redefine the cliché, misogynist representations such as commercial gaming characters like Blood Rayne and Lara Croft.
Link via Sex & Blogs
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archive: Columbine Massacre Game pulled from Slamdance Festival
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Kotaku reports:
Slamdance finalist Super Columbine Massacre RPG has been officially kicked from the festival due to mounting pressure from protesters and the loss of sponsorship, the game's creator told Kotaku Thursday night. This is the first time in the Slamdance Festival's 13-year history that a game or film has been removed from the festival due to criticism or outside pressure. In a last minute phone call Thursday evening, Slamdance president and co-founder Peter Baxter, told game developer Danny Ledonne that he regards his decision to remove the game from the festival as "deeply flawed," but necessary to the festival's survival. He went on to say, according to Ledonne, that the festival's initial decision to select the game was "consistent with Slamdance's philosophy but somewhat naive," and apologized profusely for pulling the entry. Ledonne said that he bears no ill will toward the festival, but that the decision to pull the game does raise concerns about freedom of speech and video game development.
While comparisons between film and games are tenuous at the best of times, it's hard not to ask whether a fictional film about Columbine should be any more or less acceptable in a film festival like Sundance or say.. Cannes. It is also worth asking: should the same censorship apply if the player can explore being both the victim and the perpetrator in a tragic historical event? Does censorship of this kind rule out distribution of games that genuinely use the medium to better understand the conditions that produce events of this kind?
Even if it were possible (or interesting) for the developer to handle such subject matter with neutrality - in the sense of a 'documentary game' - the populist fear of games quickly drives to the conclusion that the player is always morally implicated as a result of their actions; that to make a choice in a game is to act with intention and, by corollary, the choices he/she's presented with directly transpire as a kind of ludic instruction. Various extreme Judeo-Christian groups in America configure this process as a spiritual corruption of some sort.. and so this metaphysical, expensive and very boring witch-hunt goes on.
Perhaps someone should make a game whereby the player constructs a little voodoo-doll of Jack Thompson under candle-light while Dark Throne chugs away in the background. When he gets upset, ask him if it's because the game makes him feel weird..
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hello: Happy New Year (and stuff)!
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Yikes, doppler effect, a year rushing past our heads - our 8th year tracking the phenomenon of artistic game development.
What next you ask? Selectparks has seen an enormous growth in visits this past 365 days, particularly from universities and arts organisations. This tells us that more and more we should operate as a resource to help you realise your own projects, whether that be developing work on a technical level or writing a research paper about the scene in general.
First we'll introduce an active tutorial and tools repository - something we've promised in the past but failed to get up and running. Second is a complete overhaul of the archives to the point where it will become an easily searchable database of artistic game development projects; by year, artist or 'genre'. Finally we'll hopefully see a full migration to a content management system Rebecca has been writing in Ruby so we can rely less on externally developed code on which to run the site.
From all the team, thanks for your support in 2006. We look forward to both helping you create new work and tracking what you make in 2007!
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As you may have (errm) noticed we've been down for maintenance for the last 4 days. We didn't see this coming at but it had to be done. Sorry about dropping off the map all of a sudden. Thanks to the brilliant folk at Ljudmila for sorting it all out.
In other news I'll be posting some pics of the Art+Game exhibition soon..
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hello: Second Life under attack from self-replicating game-object
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In fine cyberpunk style the attacker apparently created an object in the form of a spinning gold ring that appeared above the ground. Loaded with a script it self-replicated when touched and, if I understand it correctly, chased players around. The social engineering was simple: all of a sudden parts of the SL world were populated with these tantalisingly shiny objects, who wouldn't want to take a closer look..
Half a million players experienced significant lag on hundreds of servers as a result of the object replicating out of control. This, apparently, is what they look like.
Thankfully, as one Slashdot reader points out, they've already identified the suspected mastermind . If sighted please notify the appropriate authorities.
Updates on the situation can be found here. We can only hope the marketing department at Linden Labs aren't quite so edgy..
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Valve 'Portal': Dynamically Linked Architecture.
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Valve has released an eye-opening trailer demonstrating their upcoming 'Portal' system, an addition to the existing Half Life 2 engine, whereby a portal creating 'gun' can be used to create wormhold like 'links' between surfaces of the game architecture; teleports are 'painted' onto walls and floors as a function of play.
This can be used to instantaneously transport yourself, other players and objects around the scene with often complex and hilarious results. As Joystiq writes, the possibilities for level design this offers are immense. I like to think of it as a dynamic hyperlinking system for first-person gameplay.
See the video here (not embedded to be kind to our low bandwidth readers). Big thanks to The Chad.
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theory: Conservation of 'Virtual Architecture'
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Terranova writes that an Italian group has come up with a convention that seeks to preserve, largely through archiving, the 'virtual architecture' of videogames so that it may be studied at ease in future.
The preservation convention is an important step, lighting fires that need to be lit - especially where intellectual property is concerned. Are the architectures of games public enough for them to be considered part of our 'digital heritage'? We spend countless hours in game environments, becoming local to these places. They are shared in memory from player to player and sometimes shared at the same time, but how 'public' are they really?
Their project is extremely ambitious, and perhaps entertaining madnesss at several points. It's no doubt that good will come of it however even in the case they have a few uphill battles. Read on to hear what I think they are ..
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theory: Skye Gellman on Indie Game Development in Australia
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Podcast of a radio interview with Skye Gellman, who discusses the state of indie game development in Australia, and outlines some concepts for his 'blind' aural-perception game.
http://www.tektime.com.au/podcast/index.php?id=45
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Nick Yee, aka The Daedalus Project – the Psychology of MMORPGs, has been collecting images from MMO players who stumble across the strange and interesting. My favourite (see above) evokes the fables of past where explorers encountered (and often fell off) the edge of a flat world. More to be found after the jump…
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Gonzalo Frasca lets us know that 'Amyris Fernandez is a PhD student who is currently visiting the Center for Computer Game Research. As part of her research project, she is looking for game designers willing to take part in a questionnaire. If you are a game designer and want to help, please click here. The test doesn't take more than 30 minutes and you can only do it once. Thanks!' - The survey appears to be for players as well.
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Ok that title is pretty misleading.
Nonetheless few remember the E.T game that essentially broke all consumer confidence in the company all those years ago; this includes those that actually played the game but have since had that part of their brain surgically removed.
You'd think that a game with impressive reputations such as "fantastically boring" and "astonishingly miserable", a game considered by many to be soley responsible for the supposed video-game crash of '83, would now be a precious commodity. Not true, unlike the artifacts of war, assassination and disaster we treasure in museums, the starting bid for E.T on eBay is about 1 US cent.
Rumour has it that Atari had no where to put all the returned cartridges sent back by disappointed buyers, so they buried them all somewhere in Mexico. Some cry urban legend, some say it's true.
Where's all this leading? To an interesting if not brief documentary on the history of videogames in those early years, covering the E.T story and more, uploaded to Google videos.
Watch it here. Thanks to Marta for the link!
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theory: Artificial Art Games Special
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 Artificial.dk has a special on Art Games, including an introduction to art games, an article by Mathias Fuchs, and interviews with Jakub Dvorsky - the creater of Samorost, Alison Mealey - the artist behind Unreal Art, and Steve Wilson.
http://www.artificial.dk/articles/artgamesspecial.htm
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Physics is the 'new black'. A couple of years ago, the new black was realistic water, and before that it was stencil shadows.
But with all the fuss about dedicated physics cards, we have to start wondering what we're going to do with all this collision-detection, rigid-body dynamics and related technology. Up until now Physics has been far down the causal chain within the event continuum of videogames. Physical events in games typically occur after primary game events but rarely do they steer or drive gameplay itself; a symptom and not a cause for play. Pinball is an example of a game that reverses this priority as is the stupidly addictive classic Bridge Builder. As it stands Physics is the best supporting actor, or trusty bass-guitarist of the game experience, wheras it could play a lead role in the broader design itself.
The clip above (a series of Rube Goldberg experiments for a Japanese TV show) is loaded with material that could be re-purposed for a game design. Force, torque, mass, anistropic friction, collision etc are all key elements in an outcome.
Don't get me wrong, I love to throw a toilet every now and again, I'd just like more interesting reasons to do it.
More on the the Rube Goldberg Device here, including some Rube Goldberg HL2 experiments we've blogged about in the past.
Besos Marta for the linkto!
Update: Chris O'Shea from Pixelsumo just sent through this fine link to a site dedicated to the topic. Cheers!
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hello: The Joy of Painting
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When asked if the above image has anything to do with the console giant Nintendo, most would blink a couple of times and then go and do something else.
A new game by the AGFRAG Entertainment Group seeks to teach you how to paint the sort of paintings normally seen between a stuffed squirrel and an old silver ashtray - all on your TV and using the new Nintendo Revolution controller.
The game is based on the infamous Bob Ross painting method, who had a successful TV show on 'how to paint' late last century.
If games can teach us how to dance then perhaps they can teach us how to paint. That said it'd take the console equivalent of the I/OBrush before I'm sticking my tongue out in all the right ways.
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Pink Tentacle is the latest addition to our recommended reading list; covering robotics, architecture, impossible biology, things in danger of vanishing and other nourishment.
Speaking of tentacles, the Polybots are back.. Cheers to Chad for the tip.
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| Tuesday, April 04 | | · | Downtime |
| Wednesday, February 15 | | · | The Game of War |
| Monday, February 13 | | · | Gameplay = Mental Agility |
| Saturday, February 11 | | · | SecondLife Alpha Linux Client released |
| Tuesday, January 31 | | · | Worlds within worlds. |
| Monday, November 28 | | · | It's Blue Skies Ahead |
| Saturday, November 19 | | · | Bill Kills: What Do You Want to Execute Today? |
| Wednesday, November 16 | | · | Fahrenheit - Are videogames the future of storytelling? |
| Friday, November 11 | | · | A Selection of Very Awful Games |
| Thursday, November 10 | | · | Virtual Land Grab Gains Entropy |
| Wednesday, November 09 | | · | Andreas Lange talk on, “Computer Games as Digital Artefacts.†|
| Friday, October 21 | | · | Quake 4 Linux Client released |
| Sunday, October 16 | | · | An open spec game platform? |
| Monday, October 10 | | · | The Dot Eaters |
| Friday, September 30 | | · | Reflexes |
| Saturday, September 24 | | · | QUAKE-ING IN MY BOOTS: Clan Community Construction in an Online Gamer Population |
| · | Online games increasingly a place for protest, social activism |
| Friday, September 16 | | · | The Revolution revealed. |
| Monday, September 12 | | · | Spatialities of Gaming and Playing at Being Mobile |
| Friday, September 09 | | · | Fashion in Video Games |
| Wednesday, August 31 | | · | Patently Insane (was 'Patently Absurd') |
| Tuesday, August 30 | | · | Virtual Gaming's Elusive Exchange Rates |
| Saturday, August 27 | | · | If videogames were real |
| Thursday, July 28 | | · | We take great pleasure in Introducing.. |
| Wednesday, July 27 | | · | Machinima falls victim to Culture Mafia |
| Wednesday, July 06 | | · | EU Software Patent Directive Rejected.. |
| · | Games-Language: An Interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin'' by Cicero |
| Monday, July 04 | | · | JumpButton Out Now |
| Saturday, July 02 | | · | Patenting Play in the European Parliament. |
| Tuesday, June 28 | | · | Nero: Predatory Play |
| Friday, January 28 | | · | Gold, Lies and Ultima Online |
| Tuesday, December 28 | | · | The Economies of Hype |
| Tuesday, December 21 | | · | Strafe to the Spleen |
| Wednesday, October 06 | | · | 'Survival Games' announced.. |
| Wednesday, August 25 | | · | Viacom considers In-Game Advertising |
| Monday, August 23 | | · | Full Spectrum Propaganda |
| Thursday, August 12 | | · | Maze ---> Odd |
| Monday, August 09 | | · | five killed for xbox |
| Sunday, July 18 | | · | Washington's Violent Videogame Law Held Unconstitutional |
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