WiiHelm
October 18, 2007
January 16, 2007
Episodic storytelling in the Sims
EA press release from Digitalmediawire:
Electronic Arts on Tuesday announced the launch of "The Sims Stories," a new line of laptop-friendly games that feature evolving storylines. The episodic "Sims Life Stories" game includes 12 chapters, in which players follow the lives of one of two Sims characters. "The Sims Pet Stories" is also slated for release in mid-2007, while "The Sims Castaway Stories" will ship in late 2008.
The Sims Life Stories is the first release in an all-new product line called The Sims Stories. Play through all the great moments of your Sim's life in this easy-to-play, laptop-friendly version of The Sims. In the new and engaging directed Story mode, you take your Sims through a unique and entertaining storyline full of romance and dramatic twists. You even unlock cool rewards along the way as you achieve set goals. In open-ended Classic mode, you create Sims and then choose how they'll fulfill their dreams through life's biggest moments. Stay connected by using your own IM and email while playing.
Also of interest and SIMS related, a provocative article in " Grey Room" from MIT Press:
"Digital Allegories (on The Sims)" by McKenzie Wark
Fall 2006, No. 25, Pages 126-138
Posted Online November 8, 2006.
A PDF of the article should be accessible from the USC network.
November 11, 2006
Live Action Katamari
In the same vein as the Katamari ball at E3 and many other attempts, check out this commercial for Traveler's Insurance called "Snowball", ripped off from inspired by Katamari Damacy.
(via John U.)
September 21, 2006
Game Designer Game
MacArthur-funded research on game design as educational software by Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman and Peter Seung-Taek Lee:
You arrive at the Core, a desolate city cloaked in strange vaporous clouds that seem to rise up from underground. Your traveling companions, a ragtag band of half-organic, half-mechanical “Creatures,” recognize this place as their lost city, a once buzzing, whirring streetscape of mechanical games where they were gainfully employed as part of the urban machinery. Your mission, as an expert game mechanic, is to use your Creatures, which you picked up at an intergalactic labor-vending machine, to reinvent a game once played in this land—or build some kind of weird, new hybrid.
This scene, enacted with a little journalistic license from a grant proposal, describes a possible opening sequence for Game Designer, an educational software program currently under development that introduces junior high school kids to the craft of video-game design. Part of a three-year research and development project backed by a $1.2 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the program’s loftier goals are to help equip students with a foundation of technical, artistic, cognitive, and linguistic skills—which some educational researchers argue are neglected by current standardized test-based curricula. For teenagers it will be seen more as an opportunity to stop thumbing Game Boys surreptitiously under their desks and openly test their well-honed gaming skills in the classroom.
September 15, 2006
Hollywood and Games
GameDaily BIZ: Roundtable: Hollywood and Games
Roundtable: Hollywood and Games
The video game industry is finally syncing up with Hollywood. Activision's Robin Kaminsky, EA's Neil Young, Multiverse Network's Corey Bridges and UTA's Brent Weinstein speculate on what the future holds in this lengthy roundtable session.
September 9, 2006
Entertaible
News from PC Magazine: Philips Demos Digital Game Board
The new concept is that you combine the interaction that you normally have when you play a board game together with speeds and interactivity for electronic games," said Hans Driessen, a spokesperson for Philips. "We created the concept early this year and since then Philips has taken it into development."
The Entertaible has a 32-inch horizontal LCD, multi-touch and shape recognition technology, and PC-based control logic. It is a table-top unit that measures 10 centimeters in height with a platinum-colored border.
So Philips is following HP and Mitsubishi with smart table products. Also see there's a useful new blog on "The Future of Digital Tables".
May 28, 2006
Will Wright in WSJ
Nice article about WIll Wright in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
Islamic Militant Video Game "Mods"/UPDATED
UPDATE 5/28/06:
Video Game Touted as Muslim Militant Recruiting Tool Revealed as JokeThe Hague - A video game that the U.S. government said was a "modded" version of Electronic Arts' "Battlefield 2" created by Muslim militants as a recruitment tool has been exposed to be a joke created by a 25-year-old Dutch gamer, Reuters reported. At a May 4 Congressional hearing, a Defense Department contractor paid $7 million to monitor militant websites called the homemade game a terrorist recruitment tool. "Samir," the game's creator, told Reuters he altered the game as a joke and to show off his production skills. "Government agencies should do more research before coming to conclusions," Samir told Reuters. "The movie wasn't what they presented it to be." Samir added that part of the modded game's soundtrack was taken from the satiric film "Team America: World Police."
http://tinyurl.com/etoxj (Reuters)
From digitalmediawire:
Defense Dept: Islamic Militant Video Game "Mods" Make U.S. Bad Guys
Washington - lThe U.S. Defense Department reports that it has discovered militant websites where popular combat video games have been modified so that young Muslim players can virtually take up arms against U.S. soldiers, Reuters reported. Electronic Arts' "Battlefield 2" is among the games for which tech-savvy militants have developed such "mods". "What we have seen is that any video game that comes out ... they'll modify it and change the game for their needs," said Defense Department public diplomacy specialist Dan Devlin. "I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters," a narrator's voice says in the modded version of "Battlefield 2," which also features an inserted recording of George W. Bush's statement from Sept. 16, 2001: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while."
http://tinyurl.com/gsuxw (Reuters)
April 27, 2006
Darfur Team Wins mtvU Competition!
Congratulations Susana Ruiz, Ashley York, Mike Stein, Noah Keating and Kellee Santiago !!
Wow...
mtvU to Launch Student-Developed "Darfur is Dying" Online Game
New York - MTV Networks' mtvU college TV network on Thursday announced plans to launch "Darfur is Dying," a Web-based game created by students at the University of Southern California. The game won the network's "Darfur Digital Activist" competition, aimed at halting the genocide taking place in Sudan. The free online game will be launched on Sunday during an mtvU event in Washington called "Save Darfur: Rally to Stop Genocide".
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060427/nyth141.html?.v=47
http://www.mtvu.com
http://www.darfurisdying.com
April 25, 2006
Lost ARG
From Digitalmediawire:
ABC's "Lost" to Debut Alternate Reality Game in Show's Off-Season
New York - ABC plans to debut an "alternate reality game" for fans of its TV series "Lost" on May 3, shortly before the second season of the series concludes, The New York Times reported. "The Lost Experience" is being created by the show's writers and producers, unlike other alternate reality games -- such as those for the Steven Spielberg movie "A.I.", and Microsoft's "Halo" video game -- which were designed by outside marketing firms. The game will introduce new characters and feature a plot that intertwines with that of the TV show. However, players will have to collaborate to track clues dispersed widely across media including fake websites, billboards, e-mails and phone calls. "We wanted to tell stories in a nontraditional way, and there were certain stories that [series co-creator Damon Lindelof] and I were interested in telling that don't exactly fit into the television show," Carlton Cuse, a writer and executive producer on "Lost," told The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/business/media/24lost.html
http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost
April 18, 2006
MASSIVE: The Future of Networked Multiplayer Games 4/20/06
MASSIVE: The Future of Networked Multiplayer Games
Calit2 Building, University of California, Irvine
April 20, 2006
Keynote: Jack Emmert, Lead Designer, City of Heroes
http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/massive/
Presented by the University of California Irvine
Institute for Software Research
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
UC Game Culture & Technology Lab
with support from UC Discovery Grants
Also see related events taking place April 21:
http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/massive/other_events/
Register early as seating is limited!
Late Registration
General Public: $125
UC Faculty & Staff and ISR Sponsors: $100
Students: $25 (No meals included)
Parking: $7
April 17, 2006
xBlocks MR Video Game
photo by Tristam Sparks
You probably saw this already on Regine's WMMNA site (if not you should have) but worth repeating here: a Mixed Reality Game from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan:
"xBlocks is a convergence between video games & sculpture — liberating play from the screen. It is a mixed reality installation inspired by traditional platform games of the late 1980s such as Super Mario Brothers or Pitfall. Using standard game controllers, two opposing players must help their characters navigate in and around a three dimensional maze. The real challenge comes, not from traditional game mechanics but rather from moving with your character as he sprints around corners and jumps between the installation’s two play surfaces."
and video here.
Sandbox: ACM Video Game Symposium
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Sandbox: an ACM Video Game Symposium
Collocated with SIGGRAPH 06
29 July & 30 July, 2006, Boston, MA, USA
http://sandboxsymposium.org/
ACM is hosting a two-day video game symposium on 29 July and 30 July in 2006, co-located with SIGGRAPH 06 in Boston, MA, USA. The symposium will consist of keynotes, panels and papers. In addition, a "Hot Games" session will preview unreleased titles from major game companies and indie developers.
Submission of full paper (long or short): 1 May 2006
Submission of camera-ready papers: 1 July 2006
March 23, 2006
JSB on WOW
Wired 14.04: You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!
Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.
via joi.
March 1, 2006
La Fuga - real-life role-playing game
March issue of Wired has an article about another location based entertanment venue in Madrid called " La Fuga" similar to the "TOMB: interactive, walk-through adventure experience" I posted in December.
"You're trapped in a high tech Spanish slammer, crawling through real tunnels, behind real bars. First-person gameplay breaks out of the box...Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison".
(Thanks to Steve Mayer for the pointer.)
February 6, 2006
Cameron Film With Multiplayer Game Tie-In
From Digitalmediawire:
Director James Cameron ("Titanic," "The Terminator") plans to produce a sci-fi film that will first be introduced to consumers through an online multiplayer game before it debuts in theaters, BusinessWeek Online reported. "So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level," Cameron told BusinessWeek Online. "We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world." Cameron is reportedly already at work on the screenplay for "Project 880," which he said is still at least two years off.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_07/b3971073.htm
December 23, 2005
"TOMB: interactive, walk-through adventure experience"
A new take on the "location-based" entertainment genre that adds puzzles imbedded in the sets:
You're standing in a tent. The phone rings: An archaeology professor needs you to explore a mysterious Egyptian tomb. A stone door rumbles open. For the next 45 minutes you will solve puzzles to determine your fate. Fail and you will "die." (Not to worry—you're really inside a storefront in Boston.) Dreamed up by Matthew DuPlessie, 28, an MBA who has built attractions for Disney, the new creation called Tomb combines a theme-park ride, haunted house, videogame, and live theater. Ticket sales have brought in $600,000 since October 2004. When demand tapers off in Beantown, the portable $1 million Tomb set will be off to terrify a new city. DuPlessie has signed a deal to open his second attraction in 2007 at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
Via Small Business - Sales From the Crypt - FORTUNE SMALL BUSINESS - Page
and cinematical blog
and review at about.com
November 7, 2005
IMD Forum Speakers for 11/9/05: Michael Mateas & Andrew Stern
Title: Creating the Interactive Drama Façade
Speakers: Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern
Procedural Arts and The Georgia Institute of Technology
Time: Wednesday, November 9, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Abstract: High-agency interactive story, in which the player can have a real and complex effect on both the inner lives of autonomous characters and the evolution of the plot, is one of the holy grails of interactive art and entertainment. Unfortunately, attempts to create interactive stories have primarily involved design-only solutions using standard technologies such as finite-state-machines and simple story graphs, resulting in experiences that inevitably trade-off agency and story structure. The consistent failure to combine agency and story has even prompted some designers and theorists to conclude that interactivity and story are fundamentally opposed. Façade, a first-person, real-time, one-act interactive drama (available for free download at www.interactivestory.net), is our attempt to constructively explore the design space of high-agency interactive story.
In this talk we describe the process of building Façade, a process that combined three simultaneous and related research and design thrusts: designing ways to deconstruct a dramatic narrative into a hierarchy of story and behavior pieces; engineering an AI system that responds to and integrates the player's moment-by-moment interactions to reconstruct a real-time dramatic performance from those pieces; and understanding how to write an engaging, compelling story within this new organizational framework. We provide an overview of the process of bringing our interactive drama to life as a coherent, engaging, high agency experience, including the design and programming of thousands of joint dialog behaviors in the reactive planning language ABL, and their higher-level organization into a collection of story beats sequenced by a drama manager. We describe the iterative development of the architecture, its languages, authorial idioms, and varieties of story content structures, and how these content structures are designed to intermix to offer players a high-degree of responsiveness and narrative agency. We conclude with design and implementation lessons learned as well as describe current and future research and commercial directions.
October 17, 2005
Costikyan on the need to create new game styles
A recent presentation by Greg Costikyan on the "need to create new game styles" given at the Future Play conference at Michigan State Univ. is available on his Games * Design * Art * Culture site here.
(Thanks to Jim Rowson for the BoingBoing pointer)
October 7, 2005
Independent Games Festival 2006
:: Last Call for 2006 Independent Games Festival Submissions
Deadlines are drawing to a close for submissions to the 2006 Independent Games Festival (IGF), held in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Honoring innovation in videogames created by independent game developers and students, the event continues to grow and prosper--and the prizes just keep getting bigger. The event, which is slated for March 20-24, 2006 in San Jose, CA, is offering a $20,000 Grand Prize for the best game. As proof that there's no slowing down in the game development industry, the event has added a new modding competition, and mods can now be submitted for Valve's Half Life 2, BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, Epic Games's Unreal Tournament 2004, and id Software's Doom 3. The extra incentive is that there's a total of $10,000 in prize money for the best original modifications.
This year, more than $45,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to IGF competition winners for innovation in five areas: Visual Arts, Audio, Game Design, Technical Excellence, and Best Web Browser Game. Main competition finalists are eligible for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and Audience Award. The IGF also plans to recognize 10 games for Student Showcase, including a new category for games created using middleware.
Deadlines for submissions to the modding competition are October 10, 2005; student submissions are due November 15, 2005. Visit www.igf.com for rules, deadlines and entry forms.