I’ve noticed that my del.icio.us’ing has minimized my blogging immensley! And I have way too many posts that I haven’t finished yet! Sometimes I just don’t post stuff because I’m sure EVERYONE’S informed from somewhere else, which is the case with this lovely coke ad! I didn’t want to like it, but I think it’s just beautiful!!!! I’m gonna see if I can tidy things up this week and get some of these unfinished posts out, blog the stuff tagged ‘toblog’ – and then there’s THE WORK!
Category Archives: Art
"What if life were more like a videogame"
I love Futurama!!! This was full of chuckling satisfaction!!! Enjoy! (via Wonderland)
Yay!!!! Machinima!!!!
I was honoured by receiving this link to a really unique Machinima film yesterday that basically challenged my definition of Machinima! Don’t you just love definition challenges?! Anyways…it’s really cool and the effects are astounding!
It’s by Anders Adler Simonsen (why yes! That is a Norwegian name – wooo hooo!!) who writes:
“Machinima made with the modified video of the Playstation1 game Driver2. The game had an in-game editor where camera angles could be adjusted on the previously recorded game play.
The video signal has later been put through a fuzzbox originally used for guitars and synchronized with a feedbacked organ. Music made in collaboration with Ola Andersbakken.”
What an unique, experimental and adventurous mind! So please enjoy, Fuzz!
Battleship:GoogleEarth
This is a very novel and great idea! Julian Bleecker, a Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication has come up with this game by using Google Earth as “a platform for realtime mobile gaming”:
“The mechanic I’m experimenting with is simpler. One person places their ships
using Google Earth and the other person goes out in the normal world with a
mobile phone, a GPS connected to the mobile phone. The phone has a small Python
script on it that reads the GPS and sends the data to the game engine, which
then updates the Google Earth KML model showing the current state of the game
grid. When the player who’s trying to sink the ships wants to try for a hit,
they call into the game engine and say “drop”. The game reads back the
coordinates at which the “peg” was dropped and shortly thereafter, the other
player will see the peg appear at the coordinate it was dropped. If the peg hits
one of the ships, it’s a Hit, otherwise it’s a miss. ”
I don’t see myself putting up the effort, though. But I have to say…the ideas are just blossoming in my head on something I might actually want to do! I’m thinking games that may take a while though!
Yeah…I would know absolutely nothing interesting if it wasn’t for Mark Wallace.
Oooh…and this might not be the right place to write about this – but you REALLY should check out the Project Good Luck blog! It’s a bunch of MIT students who are on a trip to explore “social networks and their intersection with mobile media” in CHINA(I’m so freakin envious)!! I emphasise ‘really’ because I haven’t been in for a look since Henry Jenkins mentioned it (trying to be selective on my subscription feeds)….and they’ve really done a lot of cool stuff since then!!! Very enjoyable and EXTREMELY interesting!!!
The Sultan’s Elephant
Just look at this magnificent beast in the streets of London!!!! The Sultan’s Elephant!!! The Sultan’s Elephant, you ask? Well…first off, it’s a story by Jules Verne – which I know you’ll enjoy!!!
“The belly of the elephant and the engine room now more closely resembled a
psychiatric hospital. This hampered their progress enormously. Addressing the
sultan, the captain said the protentous word: ‘Ballast’.As a capable Time traveller, he had understood that the unconscious or
delirious passengers would gradually slow the machine to a stop. The outlandish
vessel depended on practical theory: in short they must divest themselves of the
sleep-walkers.”
I don’t want to give away too much of the story – it will be worth your while! So anyways…yeah…the elephant is the Sultan’s time machine and they’re trying to catch another timetraveller, ‘this little girl’!
I don’t know if we can even call these enormous things puppets – but I guess that’s what they are. They were made to comemorate the centenary of Jules Verne’s death by Royal De Luxe, an’ extraordinary’ European street theatre company. On May 4th they were in London and the event lasted for 3 days – for….that’s how long it takes to tell the story!
Maybe I’ve been too enthralled by narratology lately and I just get way too emotional when such a lovely spirit of adventure, fantasy and
imagination is made available for ALL people to enjoy – inclusive art, if you will. I mean…can you imagine this story being told in magnificant LONDON?!!
I don’t know how this passed me by, because I truely would have loved to see this in London! It’s just sooooo beautiful!!! But they’re doing Calais on September 28th and I’ve already been in touch with my favourite travel agent! Let me know if you’re tempted to come along!
Oooh…and look…it’s now been in Belgium according to Dagens Næringsliv! I wonder….they’re too big for Bergen aren’t they?
WTF!!
Umh…I don’t really know what to say, which is weird since I’m blogging about this, but I can’t figure out if I’m crying because I’m laughing or laughing because I’m crying! And what the hell is the message behind these lyrics? He knows this great bot named Anna who turns out to be a beautiful woman, but he doesn’t care because to him she will always be a bot? WTF? Anyways! This is a must see!!!
(Stolen from Wonderland)
Yay! Henry Jenkins is blogging!
What joy!!! Definitely a welcome presence!
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and just a MUST READ!
I’ve just read his post “Fun vs. Engagement: The Case of the Great Zoombinis” where I was introduced to Scott Osterweil’s at The Education Arcade and his captivating podcast.
It’s so good to see discussions and research about learning and games beyond ‘just’ simulations. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for simulation games, but I do believe there is a clearer learning power in actual gameplay. And ofcourse this has been a topic for a long time – I guess I just understand the language so much better!
“What we did when we started designing Zoobinis was to try to think about our own experience with the mathematics of the game and try to access our own learning of it — trying to remember what it was like to encounter the subject in school or thinking about how we’d use the subject in our daily lives and try to identify times when we had been playful with the concepts in the past. In fact, most of us when we are trying to master something we find ways to be playful to it and in accessing our own playful approach to the material what we were really doing was finding the game that was inherent in the mathematics. Instead of putting math in the game, we tried to find the game in the math” – Osterweil
McDonalds Interactive
I’m not completely certain of what to make of this. But there’s been a UK Serious Games event (link not working as I’m writing this – EXTREMELY annoying) and among the participants have been Nokia, BP and McDonalds Interactive – that turns out to be a hoax, which to be honest infuriorated me to begin with. I’m a believer of serious games and I didn’t like anyone taking the piss out of the event. But after further review, I have to say that I’m overwhelmingly impressed and I also can’t think of a better way to actually promote Serious Games.
Andrew Shimery-Wolf (ehm…), Director of McDonalds’s Interactive gave a presentation which he entitled “The Most Serious Game”. And I truely believe the clue lies in one of his opening remarks about what McDonalds was doing to improve:
“…we undertook to become a more visibly responsible company, and adopted a platform of Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR – just like Nokia and BP, who are also represented at this conference.
Much as Nokia have pledged not to exploit Far East workers, and BP are exploring alternative fuels, so we responded to various critics by looking “beyond beef” on our menus, trying new packaging, and even experimenting with environment-friendly refrigeration.” (links added by me)
So he ends up presenting a game which was a simulation of the fast-food marketplace.
“This is the game that resulted. Players adopt the avatar of a fast-food company, and make business decisions in highly accelerated time. The game calculates the effects of those decisions on the overall market, collates them with other players’ decisions and rewards the best players with profits.”
Controversy and drama
Super Columbine Massacre RPG
It’s caused a lot of controversy lately, which I suppose is only natural. It’s a game about the Columbine school shootings of 1999, and you know…it’s not pleasant. This ofcourse has raised havock! Ian Bogost at WaterCoolerGames, who is quite passionate about games with an agenda – wrote an interesting piece a few weeks ago, which has caused people like Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council to call for Bogost’s resignation from Georgia Tech.I suppose that’s what upset me the most really. Personally, I haven’t played the game because it just seemed too uncomfortable, for me – I’m such a wimp, I know.
Mr. Bogost has written yet another brilliant post on the media coverage, which really needs to be read in full – I’ll cut’n’paste the summary here though:
“Most of all, I am deeply worried by this culture of ineffability, a culture that would rather not talk about anything at all for fear that it might make someone uncomfortable. This trend descends from Theodor Adorno’s argument that the holocaust becomes “transformed, with something of the horror removed” when represented in art, thus his famous statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. These events are considered “ineffable” — unspeakable, unrepresentable. It is a tired sentiment that we must move beyond. Of course topics like 9/11 should make us uncomfortable. Of course Columbine should make us uncomfortable. But that is no excuse to put these issues away in a drawer, waiting for some miraculous solution to spring forth and resolve them for us. If we do so, history is much more likely to forget them. I don’t care if we make videogames, films, novels, poems, sidewalk art, cupcakes, or pelts as a way to interrogate our world. But we must not fear that world.”
The E3 thing Part 1
I’ve had a crazy weekend…so I’m trying to get caught up with work and all the wonderful news out there! Ofcourse there’s loads of E3 stuff that needs to be documented, so I’m just going to do some link zenning here as I read!
First up Robin Williams plays Spore! Hillarious!!! Enjoy!
Remember What The Dormouse Said 