Cooking Mama, PETA variant
A PETA Thanksgiving COOKING MAMA game!
It most certainly made me reflect on my planned celebratory meal. And I never quite felt so perplexed to be judged a saint...
November 17, 2008
November 9, 2006
Donkey Kong as/is high art
For France, Video Games Are as Artful as Cinema
PARIS, Nov. 5 — France is proud of its contribution to culture in such forms as existentialism, Impressionism and auteur films. Now the French culture minister wants to add Donkey Kong to his country’s pantheon of high art.
“Call me the minister of video games if you want — I am proud of this,” the minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said in an interview last month. “People have looked down on video games for far too long, overlooking their great creativity and cultural value.”
Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres is seeking to have video games recognized as a cultural industry eligible for tax breaks, similar to French cinema.
In March, he pinned medals from the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres — a prize awarded to acknowledge cultural accomplishments — on three prominent video game designers, including Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese creator of Donkey Kong. The game, popularized in the 1980s, stars an Italian plumber called Mario.
Video game creators should receive a tax break of 20 percent, up to a ceiling of 500,000 euros, Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres says.
“Video games are not a mere commercial product,” he insisted. “They are a form of artistic expression involving creation from script writers, designers and directors.”
... However:
The Interactive Software Federation of Europe, a group of international video game companies, however, is opposed to enshrining video games as a part of cultural heritage for fear of government interference, and has resisted the tax breaks.
“The French concept of culture is that the government knows better than consumers,” said Patrice Chazerand, secretary general of the group, based in Brussels. “It is unhealthy to have the French government using discriminatory subsidies to influence video games.”
April 26, 2006
COOKING GAME
September 21, 2005
screenshot of my Torque2D game assignment
babies throw (dirty) diapers at you & you at them! everyone cries, laughs...
October 14, 2004
ahh.... yes... THE question....
NYTimes article "What Do Women Game Designers Want?"
i particularly liked: "...Ms. Robinson also dislikes the atmosphere at some game companies. There are the constant sports metaphors she has heard used in the course of developing and shipping products, for instance. "Does everything need to be expressed in terms of 'fourth and goal?' " she asked. "How about a nice literary allusion"..."
May 6, 2004
my notes from Will Wright's talk at USC's Engineering School
"Throwing probes" around at the unexplored territories of game design - a way to explore inexpensively and highly creatively.
"Signal-to-noise" theory: get past/avoid the noise (hype, criticism) and
straight to the signal (the game, the experience).
"Algorithmic content": content development-to-player experience ratio; content algorithmically generated as opposed to "data drip" (go Todd!).
Goal: to match development time with player enjoyment.
Sources of inspiration: the Eames, biology, small online shareware games, Japanese garden design (this reminds me of Jenkins views on spatial stories: spatiality for an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.), etc.
Fitness landscapes model from biology as a means to brainstorm possible new "crossovers" and "mutations" of games.
April 30, 2004
antiwar simulation
Play this antiwar game/simulation
- For some twenty minutes, it kept me very curious because i was still learning how to play it and i was still being shown new elements and new mechanics. it was slow though, even with broadband, and this considerably degraded its potential. you start by making decisions about how much money you, as either uncle Sam or aunt Samantha, will spend on the military, on foreign aid and on social spending. This, among other things, affects your popularity. you send little green people to war and over there they either fight for you or against you they can take a liking to 'smoking' and thus to deserting the cause; they then require motivation from higher-ranked officers only sometimes, they get fed up with a it all and even kill their superiors! these murders are quite shocking. meanwhile, at home, if your budget for social spending dwindles and/or youre getting bad press from the war (because you havent managed to control the media) more and more antiwar little people grow and less and less are willing to be sent abroad to fight if you send these less-than-enthusiastic little people to war, they are less likely to kill the enemy and more likely to make things worse for you. i enjoyed it a lot and, like 'September 12th', it encourages critical thinking about the circumstances we all find ourselves in the midst of.
euro may day parade simulation
Include yourself in this parade - express your "i'm mad as hell and i'm not gonna take it anymore!" sentiments.
March 10, 2004
I LIKE FRANK IN ADELAIDE by Blast Theory
2-13 MARCH 2004
The world's first 3G mixed reality game by award-winning artists' group
Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab, University of
Nottingham is starting today and runs for the next two weeks.
Online players coordinate their gameplay efforts with real players in the streets of Adelaine (South Australia). I've never played any of Blast Theory's games but I'd like to try and play this one before it ends on the 13th of March. Other games/projects by the group:
Uncle Roy All Around You
Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK
28 April - 8 May 2004
http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk
Uncle /Roy All Around You
The pUBLIC and Fierce Festival, West Bromwich, UK
27 May - 5 June 2004
http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk
TRUCOLD and Other Works
'Navigator - Digital Art in the Making',
Taiwan Museum of Art, Taichung, Taiwan
3 July - 5 Sept 2004
http://www.tmoa.gov.tw
March 4, 2004
ICO - by Sony Computer Entertainment America, 2001: Adventure.
ICOs initial cinematics really put me in its world. Granted, I come to digital games as a beginner and chances are that the flashy animation and dramatics would probably impress me no matter what. That said, I think that the oppressively lonely surroundings and plot itself, seen through the eyes of a little well-intentioned boy, succeeded in creating a deep sense of loneliness inside of me. The controller shaking at the instances it does brought me closer into the worlds reality a simple and even trite technique I may have thought earlier, but you know what? Its successful, at least in ICO. I played past a couple of challenges (that is, I moved on to a couple of different spaces which I had to explore thoroughly) before I found the little frail girl, terribly hanging from a large cage in the middle of an open space, like a big but beaten bird. There was a sense of injustice I realized I was feeling, why portray this kind of Sadness? Why show this little girl in such a state? It seemed manipulative and I felt a little bit of anger. But, I also felt happy that, when (not if) I accomplish this next challenge, I would have her company.
Well, I tried and tried but couldnt figure it out and I simply got tired of the repetition and the frustration. I quit. I didnt liberate her and I didnt find companionship for my little boy agent. I might try again.
February 18, 2004
September 12th is a very interesting and simple little "game"/simulation from the producers of newsgaming.com. it clearly demonstrates, with emotion, how you may shoot your missile at the bad 'guy' based on current intelligence of her/his/their whereabouts, but by the time your weapon hits, it may or may not hit your target, and, it may or may not hit other non-targets as well. this was for me a very succinct example of 'meaninful play' in that the action i decided to take created a direct and immediate system-response loaded with meaning. "The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome" ("Rules of Play" by Salen and Zimmerman, pg. 34). the player-action to system-response relationship in this game is not at all complex, that is, there is no question about your action's consequence - it is a simple design. yet, the choice to outcome relationship is a meaningful one beacause the complexity is on entirely another plane, one dealing with culture and the state of the world. it made me feel like i made a terrible mistake when non-targets fell dead to the floor and homes were destroyed. this concept was no longer, for an instant at least, something outside of myself, something i would never deal with personally, something i would never have to decide and be responsible for, and the point was emotionally learned. if there is one inadequacy to the simulation that i felt, is that i inevitably felt like i just shouldn't do anything - don't disturb this world at all. the terrorists don't seem to do much, if left alone all they do is walk around town like the civilians do. why hurt them (and risk hurting others) if they clearly present no threat? would the simulation be a more engaging/meaningful one if your choice to kill COULD prevent some 'worse' or further evil, if your choice to kill was a decision you REALLY had to weigh seriously because not only would the result be uncertain (as it is now), but also because inherent to the game would be diverse definitions of 'success'?
February 17, 2004
From the new Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech (first open house later this month). Projects such as:
Drama Management - A central problem in creating video games with engaging stories is balancing interactivity and authorial control. While the author of a book or a movie can control the sequence and timing of events which the viewer experiences, a video game author does not have such control. While such control may be necessary to create an artistic experience, it competes with one of the strengths of the medium - the ability of a user to do what they like, when they like. I envision the creation of a new component to interactive stories, called a Drama Manager, which is responsible for balancing interactivity and authorial control. I am considering this problem from an Artificial Intelligence standpoint. [uhmm... "Drama Manager"... sounds like the perfect position for me.]
GameLog - GameLog is a website where gamers can keep track of the games that they are playing. In addition, they can maintain a GameLog (or diary) of their game playing experience. This repository of experiential information helps augment the power of word of mouth by providing instant access the thoughts, feelings and overall experience that someone has had with a game.
Triad - The American game industry has been searching recently for ways to engage women and casual gamers more fully in the game market. One of the reasons women and casual gamers cite for not taking to mainstream games is the focus many games place on violent action and an absence of games that focus on building relationships. Triad addresses this perception by providing a gameplay experience that focuses on the interpersonal relationships of the game characters, building upon the models of currently successful relationship-based games.
To do this, Triad provides an interactive environment for the creation of short love stories. Love stories are created in Triad through collaboration between the user and a story scenario made of a number of plot fragments, thus the user joins the system in a game of creating romantic stories in the style of Japanese popular romances as they appear in comic books, animated television shows, and interactive games.
And more.
The 400 So Far is an in-progress list of "The 400 Rules of Game Design". This week's CTCS 564 readings dealing primarily with rules, I thought these were quite interesting to look at, though they strictly speak to the designers of games and not the players. Practical advice such as: Concretize Ideas, Make Subgames, Add a Small Amount of Randomness to AI Calculations, Make the Game Fun for the Player, not the Designer or Computer, etc. - but also not so obvious, more esoteric ideas such as: Begin at the Middle, Creat AI in the Mind of the Player, Maintain Level of Abstraction, Use Real-World Formulas and Minimize Cheating with Simulations, etc.
From iDrama:
"iDrama is a discussion list for concepts in Interactive Drama. We're a group of people who want to take computer games beyond the current trends towards hack and slash or "choose your own adventure" branching movies, and explore ways to improve storytelling and drama using the computer as a medium.
It grew out of a discussion group that wanted to build commercial technologies around interactive storytelling, but we eventually decided that those who'd been thinking about the problems longer than us had some neat technology, but still hadn't answered the questions of how adding interaction to a story was going to make it more compelling.
My personal attitudes about the subject change regularly, but as of this writing I'm convinced that interactive drama isn't about the players or audience being in direct control of the characters, but about helping the audience to better explore and under- stand the emotional states of the characters, and about tailoring the presentation of the story to the audience."
October 30, 2003
Jenova's post
"Game Makers Aren't Chasing Women"
asks a good question: what do girls want from games? i don't know myself really. i've been noticing pre-pubescent children in parks and school yards lately (with a new perspective so that i can try and have new insights into 'gaming') and it is the case that more often than not, the boys and the girls play seperately from one another - a kind of voluntary segragation. boys play rougher generally and take control of the ball or whatever else is the main object of power within the game. they enjoy it more. girls seem happier giving it up, not having to take the heat involved with the procurement of power (which of course lasts a fleeting moment anyway).
so, what do little girls, teenage girls, young women and mature woman enjoy?
surely, there are girls and women who enjoy the same thrills as gamer boys and men, this is true.
but for the millions of other girls, what can we offer them? do girls want to escape reality? do they enjoy power struggles? do they enjoy killing? do they enjoy driving cars fast? speaking personally, these activities bore me - sometimes i wish they didn't, it'd be fun to have fun, but it's not the case.
i think that games that foster collaboration can be intriguing - girls grow up in this world struggling to be equals to boys instead of realizing that they can be different because there is basically only one model of societal success - other possible models just aren't accepted as legitimate. it's hard and not fun trying to play someone else's game - you'll probably always lose.
i left yesterdays 511 forum curious about
There - i think Ill check it out - its true that TSO (The Sims Online) attracted "large" numbers of women.
October 2, 2003
"1-Up"
by way of Alice Gambrell: Ass Prof, English; Director, Center for Feminist Research -
On Thursday October 2 at noon, the Center for Feminist Research is delighted and proud to be sponsoring a public lecture by Raina Lee. Lee is the editor of the independent magazine "1-Up," which for the last eighteen months has gained an unusual amount of attention for its innovative writing on the subject of the politics of computer gaming.
"1-Up" has featured articles like "Jill Played Atari"; "Arcadeploitation Films of the 80s"; "How Tetris Saved My Mind"; and "Arcade Profile: The Reagan Years." The magazine has also featured artwork by noted comics artists Jordan Crane, John Pham, and Martin Cendreda.
Lee will be returning spring semester to conduct a zine-making workshop, so this week's visit will be a great opportunity to get acquainted with her and to hear about her own experiences in independent publishing.
Please join us. We will be serving lunch, and would appreciate an rsvp.(213-740-1739 or cfr@usc.edu)
May 20, 2003
Kurosawa / Seven Samurai Game
Sammy introduces "Seven Samurai" video game
Reuters
May 14 2003 10:19PM
LOS ANGELES, May 14 (Reuters) - In Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai," one of the most widely acclaimed films of all time, itinerant swordsmen defend an impoverished village from marauding bandits in feudal Japan.
In the futuristic video game sequel being developed with the blessing of Kurosawa's son, there is also a masterless samurai and six warrior companions -- but the parallels seem to screech to a halt there.
The plot revolves around a tribe of mechanical beasts that threaten the future of humanity, a darkening city at the center of the world -- not to mention a vanished Holy Child.
Hisao Kurosawa, 57, told Reuters that his biggest concern was ensuring that the game would capture as much as possible of the spirit of the 1954 film directed by his late father.
Japanese entertainment company Sammy Corp. <6426.T> on Wednesday announced plans for "Seven Samurai 20XX," which is scheduled to be released this fall exclusively on the Sony Corp.'s <6758.T> PlayStation 2 game console.
Sammy, which recently broke off merger plans with games publisher Sega Corp. <7964.T>, showed off the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the biggest trade show for the $30 billion video game industry.
The game's 100-plus characters in the game were designed by French comics artist Moebius, and Academy Award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the game's opening and closing theme music tracks.
"The idea is for people to have some feeling afterward," Hiroshi Matsumoto, a general manager for research and development at game designer Dimps Corp., told Reuters.
"Seven Samurai" was remade by Hollywood as "The Magnificent Seven."
Blast Theory's new game
UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU
http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk
Two years in the making, Uncle Roy All Around You is where espionage
movies become interactive; where the console game breaks onto the
streets of London. It is a game that pitches Online Players around the
world alongside players on the streets of London.
?The arts group Blast Theory has been taunting us with humour and
aggression for the last ten years. They fuse art with club culture and
technology to bring us heartfelt installations and performances.?
The Guardian