jill/txt

[alter ego]

Have a look at portraits from an exhibition in London: online gamers and their avatars.

[barcode battlers]

At a very pleasant dinner last Tuesday with Matt Locke, Tim Wright and Martin Trickey, someone mentioned Barcode Battlers, handheld games with barcode scanners. You collect monsters by scanning groceries - real groceries, see Campbell’s soup might be the coolest monster - and then you can battle your friends’ scanned barcodes. Isn’t that weird? I actually thought it sounded kind of cool in a surreal way, but this merciless sendup of the packaging, backstory, and well, everything about the game, set me straight. It seemed someone (unsuccessfully?) tried to revive the Battlers with a copycat game called Scannerz - which in fact, was reported on Boing Boing just two weeks ago. Circles, circles, circles.

[painstation]

While I’ve heard of No Pain No Game, or The Artwork Formerly Known as PainStation (did PlayStation sue them?), I hadn’t realise how much it hurts. That looks really painful. The game’s kind of like Pong, except played on a tabletop that gives your hand electrical shocks. And gets really hot when the game heats up. If you lift your hand to escape the burns and electrical shocks, you automatically lose.

No, I don’t think I’d do well at all.

[writing for games]

Noah’s written a useful post showing the development of the writing for the soon-to-be-released game Fable. It’s interesting seeing examples of what bits of dialogue looked like as the writers wrote it, as it was sent back by coders and rewritten by writers again.

[games to get girls programming]

Mary Flanagan and Ken Perlin are presenting Rapunsel, a project where they’re getting 11-13 year old girls keen on computers by - with the girls - designing a system where the kids program animated characters to choreograph a dance. From the website:

If you’re a kid, showing and telling things to the smart pets that you share with your friends is very different from writing Java, Python or Logo. It is much more powerful, because it builds on innate social and perceptual skills. It is programming as a first language.

(more…)

[location]

List of 25 location-based, pervasive, mobile games around the world.

[Uncle Roy All Around You]

Tomorrow a mixed reality game/performance will be mixing on-the-street players in West Bromwich in the UK and online players like yourself, with the aim to find objects in a virtual yet real city. It’s called Uncle Roy All Around You and is produced by the London-based artists’ group Blast Theory. You can play on Macs and PCs and even with a dialup connection, you just need Shockwave and you need to click the PLAY button between noon and 6 pm British time tomorrow or Friday or Saturday - or

Berlin: 13:00 - 19:00
Tokyo: 20:00 - 01:00
Sydney: 21:00 - 02:00
New York: 07:00 - 12:00

Actually those times don’t all make sense, I think the last three should get an extra hour on the end - but they’re off the site, so maybe something mysteriously stops non-European players playing an hour before the rest of us.

Will you give it a go?

[plan a presidential campaign]

Magic Lantern games has just released their presidential campaign game, Frontrunner. There’s a story about it in USA Today, and more information at their website. I wonder how people are going to like pitting Kerry and Bush against each other - fictionally…?

A few months back I noted the use of the Howard Dean campaign game. If you’re interested in political games you should read my summary post on the Bin Laden games and look up Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost’s Watercooler Games weblog, check out Newsgaming and also Gonzalo’s articles about how games could, perhaps, make real changes - Ideological Videogames/a>, Videogames of the Oppressed and Ephemeral Games.

[pervasive Swedes]

A new EU program on mobile and pervasive gaming is going to be led by Swedish Annika Waern, and fully half the 92m SEK (more than €10m) is going to Swedish researchers. Good on those Swedes! Here’s a Swedish article about it, and an abbreviated English one.

[blog on women and games]

Vesterblog is Tore Vesterby’s “thoughts on his Master’s Degree thesis project at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He will try to focus on what, how and which women play digital games.”

[mogi]

Justin Hall describes Mogi, a fascinating sounding GPS-enabled mobile phone game running in Tokyo where you collect stuff by actually going to places near where you happen to be in the city. He also links to slides from a presentation by Amy Jo Kim on social trends in mobile entertainment

[agoraexchange]

From Rhizome’s net art news (subscription, free on Fridays):

[homage]

Newsgaming has posted a game that’s a homage to the victims in Madrid. And elsewhere.

[low-end gaming]

Play choose-your-own-adventure games on your iPod.

[documentary on computer games]

At the end of last year, Halvard Jakobsen made a half-hour radio documentary about video game research that was broadcast on NRK over Christmas. He’s talked with Jørgen Kirksæther, who’s working on a PhD on computer game history and works with games for Statens Filmtilsyn; Espen Aarseth, the nestor of Scandinavian game studies, on the phone from Copenhagen, and me - I talked about how you enter into the fictional world (starting about 12 minutes in) and about games and art and grass root game development around 23-24 minutes.

I used to work in radio and I think I actually prefer interviewing than being interviewed. The uneditability of it is strange - though Halvard’s done a great job of making my sentences sound fairly whole. I love how radio doesn’t need to disappear anymore.

Jørgen Kirksæther has an interesting comment (around 16-17 minutes in) about Space Invaders. Talking about Space Invaders, he says that it took the Japanese to figure out how to make a satisfying single-player game. The key is that you should never be able to win. The Americans could never have created that game, he says, because the idea of a game that can’t be won is inconceivable within the American culture. The Samurai codex of the Japanese, on the other hand, allows for the idea of losing with honour, Jørgen says. After Space Invaders, which was a huge success, both the Americans and the Japanese made and are still making popular, unwinnable games.

[walkthrough life]

Don’t worry, even IKEA has a walkthrough. (Via GTxA, and noted by many at Delicious)

[election games]

News from Magic Lantern that there’s now a blog tracking their presidential election game Frontrunner as it progresses towards release in March. Screenshots show you can pick your candidate - Gore or Bush, from the looks of it. I suppose playing this year’s election might be a bit much…

[games course]

Rune Klevjer’s running an interesting course on computer games this semester. I’m giving a couple of lectures into it, on hypertext and digital narrative. I think.

[recruitment games]

Games are not just being used for making political statements, they’re also being used quite deliberately in recruiting. America’s Army has been around for a while, and now Nick at Grandtextauto notes that there are lots of sites devoted to Special Force, a game recruiting would be anti-Israeli suicide bombers. The Howard Dean game, thankfully, is an example of a game recruiting for non-violent though (of course) political purposes.

[presidential campaign games]

Last week Steven Johnson wondered why there are no videogames that simulate the 2004 US presidential campaigns. The idea must have been floating around the zeitgeist, because Howard Dean’s campaign has actually commissioned a game, just released today I think, where you canvas houses, hand out leaflets (it’s fun trying to catch passers by!) and wave a sign in order to win more supporters. It was made by Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost, also writers of a blog about games with an agenda at watercoolergames.org. They say it’s the first time a videogame has been used as an official part of a presidential campaign - that certainly says something about the way we’re starting to view games as an important form of expression.

There are other games dealing with elections, too. Over at Grandtextauto Andrew mentioned a conversational simulation of Bush (not sponsored by Bush) called AI Bush. AI Bush comes with the possibility not only to converse and play games with the presidential simulation but also to play the election game Reelect Bush. In the comments to Steven Johnson’s post several older games are mentioned, with President Elect from 1988 getting most praise. There are at least two simulations planned for the 2004 elections, but they’re not out yet. Lantern Games promise that their Frontrunner will be available for PC in the next couple of months, while Randy Chase is releasing a new version of Power Politics that will allow online collaborative play. There’s also an online a game about the French 2002 presidential elections.

I found the Howard Dean game pretty good fun for a short play, and it’s not meant to take forever to play. Catching people to give them brochures was fun - it reminded me of my enthusiastic teens when, for a while, I found real life leaflet distribution wonderful fun, mostly because my friends were doing it too. And I believed in our causes. The gameplay’s simple and the message is very clear: small actions can make big changes. It fits perfectly into the Dean strategy of involving regular people and their friends and their friends’ friends and helping them make more friends on the campaign - and using the internet to do it.

[mood-altering]

Forget dance mats and joysticks, even trance vibrators: biofeedback is the cool interface on my Christmas wishlist. Slide three rings on your finger, pay $150 (or a little less) and play The Journey to Wild Divine, Steven Johnson writes in his December column on emerging technology. Wilde Divine is a game where you aim an arrow by altering your mood - and thereby the electrical impulses those rings measure on your finger. Or breathe in time with bellows to light a fire. To succeed you need to reach a state of meditative calm quite opposite to the cramped anxiety I experience when I try to play shooters. And do you know, one of the aims of the game developers is “teaching the user to regulate internal systems without going on a Transcendental Meditation retreat or signing up for a yoga class.” Intriguing, no?

[gameness]

Second Life, There, and other non-game virtual worlds are going to fail because there’s nothing to do there except have sex, writes Greg Costikyan. More or less. This is part of the Great Discussion of what really constitutes a game, which Jesper also gets into.

[game thesis]

Kristine Jørgensen’s MA thesis, Aporia & epiphany in context : computer game agency in “Baldur`s Gate II” and “Heroes of Might and Magic IV”, is likely to interest some of you.

[tobakkbaronen]

Solveig pointed to the stop smoking game at tobakkdreper.no, and after a quick play I have to say it’s pretty cool, as political or argumentative web games go. It’s a strategy game, done in Flash, where you play a tobacco baron and win the game by choosing how to develop and market your cigarettes. Target children, poor people or stupid people? How much nicotine, how many other awful substances? What do you want your ads to look like? How many lobbyists will you buy to convince the WHO not to ban smoking? It looks attractive too. After a very quick play (I’m busy!) my only criticism would be that it appears to be very easy to win - I made heaps of money with little work or effort. But that, of course, may be part of the message they want me to take home.

[DiGRA reports]

Gonzalo’s posted a great trip report from DiGRA, last week’s games research conference which had 500 attendees! Interesting reading, and obviously a conference that it would have been fun to have attended. [update Monday: Andrew’s posted a report on the conference on Grandtextauto, too]

[productive]

Play computer games at work and become a more productive worker.

[toilets]

An index of toilets in videogames. It’s in Russian, but non-Russian-speakers can scroll down to a nice list of game titles, neatly linked to screenshots of their toilets. Few of which actually virtually work, but at least you can look at them. (via Frank)

[citing games]

Towards a standard for referencing video games in academic papers. Based on a DiGRA discussion.

[political computer games]

On Rhizome a few days ago there was an announcement of a new exhibition of political computer games, based in South Africa, called <re:Play>. Haven’t had a spare moment to look at it yet, but it’s reported to be rather fascinating, and makes for an interesting comparison with Newsgaming and September 12.

[newsgaming]

Gonzalo Frasca and friends have released Newsgaming, a site where political cartoons and games meet. The first game up is called September 12th, and is a simulation where killing terrorists spawns new terrorists. I like how after you fired a rocket you’re forced to wait for your rockets to reload, and during that wait you hear the wails of mourning women crying for the dead. The mourner stands up and hesitates, changing into a terrorist outfit, then back to her blue, civilian dress, and to and fro until always settling with the terrorist’s black and white. One of the FAQs is:

A chapter in my thesis is about political web games, and when a lot were being published, after September 11, I blogged a lot about it too. Gonzalo has always been at the forefront of political gaming, and anyone interested in it should look at his MA thesis and his other publications, which are listed in the sidebar of his blog, ludology.org.

Gamegirladvance also has a post on newsgaming, with a nice photo of Gonzalo showing the game.

[prinsessen i berget det blå]

There is a Norwegian work of interactive fiction: Prinsessen i berget det blå. You need a nice old Spectrum computer to play it on, or an emulator, and the review says it’s kind of boring, but hey, it’s Norwegian!

[enacting horror]

Gonzalo writes about a 911 survivor mod for Unreal, and Jesper writes about the beauty of the crash mode in Burnout 2. Interesting juxtaposition of the ethics and perhaps aesthetics of enacting a horrific and probably doomed role. (Still assessing, still busy)

[blindness required]

Ah, this is a good one from Mark:

There’s a bit more in a blog post, and lots more in My Friend Hamlet, subscription only)

[video game theory]

Video Game Theory Reader is a book I’ll be aiming to get hold of when it’s published in August. Lots of intriguingly titled articles, including one by Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad - they’re independently very interesting people, thinkers and writers, I’m so curious as to how they think and write together!

[the game industry]

Greg Costikyan runs through the commercial gaming industry, which is apparently dying or at least stuck, and through independent and online gaming ventures and festivals, with lots of links, information, wringing of hands and comments.

[Game Developers’ Conference]

Jane Pinckard has a report from the Academic Summit at the Game Developers’ Conference that’s on right now. (via ludology.org)

[political games]

I’m working on a thesis chapter about those Flash games that popped up after September 11, the ones where you maim Bin Laden or attempt to rescue the WTC from terrorists. I presented a short piece on this in October 2001 (my weblog posts in mid-October discuss it) I’m interested in how they use interactivity to make an argument. In most of the games, the argument is extremely crude - remember the bloodlust and the anger right after the attacks on the WTC? So there are dozens and dozens of games where the sole point is to beat the shit out of Bin Laden. Newgrounds has a long list.

Other games are more ambiguous. New York Defender is a simple game where you shoot down planes before they crash into the towers. The objective is to “Utilisez votre souris pour combattre le sentiment d’impuissance.” (Use your mouse to combat the feeling of powerlessness.) This game has a strong ironical force, though, and demonstrates the futility of the exercise, as did its possible ancestor Missile Command (1980) Though you may shoot down some planes, more and more and more will come, and the ending is always your complete annihilation. The game was criticised for being insensitive when it first arrived, in part because of this critique. Gonzalo Frasca, who wrote his MA thesis on political games, designed his own game in response to these others: Kabul Kaboom! It combines images from Guernica and CNN, situating the player as a Afghan woman trying to catch the hamburgers thrown down among the bombs. At the same time, skins were created for Quake, The Sims and other games so you could insert Bin Laden, Bush and other characters into your game - and frag em.

As the political situation has changed, other games have appeared. When people complained at the US governments’ violation of the human rights of prisoners suspected of terrorism, Al Quaidamon was released where you could play with your own pet desktop terrorist prisoner and see how the game reacted when you treated him well or poorly. The same interactive rhetoric was used for an more or less opposing viewpoint in Ascroft Online 1.0. Both these games are simulations where your actions affect a rating scale. In Ascroft Online the ratings are from Republican to Barbra Streisand, with Book reader as the penultimate horror. In Al Quaidamon it’s the treatment rather than you which is rated, from Human Rights Activisists Approval to Hitler’s Approval, of course with loaded in between possibilities.