Japanese Go prints

Thought I'd also post a link to the site where I got the Go prints that I used in my presentation. It's a very poor website: frames, links opening in new windows, the quality of the images isn't always great... but there's plenty of info about the prints, the story behing them etc...

More Wii links

Just to follow up on the Wii discussion yesterday, and Gareth's post, here are some interesting Wii-related links. I haven't yet got the Wiimote working with my Windoze laptop - there are some issues with Bluetooth drivers which I hope to resolve next week - but all the info needed to do this can be found at this first link:

• WiiLi - A project to produce a version of Linux that will run on the Wii. At the moment more interesting because of the information available about the technology, and in particular the 'Wiimote'.

• LiveMove - A video demo of software designed to record Wiimote 'gestures' that can then be used in games...
  
  
• People playing Wii - IMHO a superb piece of publicity - footage showing 'normal' people playing the Wii...
  
  
• Iwata Asks - Obviously this is to some extent intended as publicity for the Wii but it gives a little insight into the reasoning behind the Wii design.
  
  
• Wii radio control car - The WiiBot is interesting, but it seems to me that the input is basically acting as a switch to set off pre-recorded movements. If genuine this clip shows some Wiimote control without latency...
  
  
• Cooking Mama - Just for fun... a trailer for a rather amusing looking game, which for some obscure reason reminds me of the utterly bizarre fish chopping game :)
  

Wiimote

During our meeting today we mentioned software which can read the Wii controller's data. I use DarwiinRemote on OSX and I guess you Windows people would use WiinRemote? Post a comment if you try it out or have a better suggestion.

Also mentioned was this sword-wielding, Wiimote contwolled wobot (or Wiibot if you will):

Baudrillard GTA Mashup

Here's the footage of GTA dubbed with Baudrillard that Helen mentioned on Tuesday,

PS3 Cures Cancer, Alzheimer's, World Conflict, etc...

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project from Stanford University using home computers all over the world to help research cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's amongst others.
You can install it on your own computer, but it looks like PS3s are considerably more powerful and are revolutionising this project.

Burning Man

A few years ago I went to a festival in the Nevada desert, called Burning Man.

I've just come across a paper entitled Burningman and the Ritual Aspects of Play which cites Huizinga and Turner. This paper appears to be a prelude to the author's PhD dissertation “Reckoning Ritual and Counterculture in The Burning Man Community: Communication, Ethnography and the Self in Reflexive Modernism." which also sounds very interesting.

I haven't read these yet but I'm going to leave them here as a bookmark for myself and any others who might be interested in reading it for me and commenting on their thoughts about it :)

Television -> Pong -> T-shirt

While Jason Wilson has been rethinking the relationship between television and Pong, the crew at ThinkGeek have been rethinking the relationship between t-shirt and Pong.

Machinima

I've just added a new link to The Machinima Archive (more of which can also be found at Select Parks on their Machinima section), and while I was doing that I also went and found the original Top Gear footage which was then made into machinima that I posted about earlier. That post now has both the original and the machinima interpretations so you can compare and contrast.

I really like the way the machinima one is shot, and the intro sequence is very nice in particular.

I also used to read Concerned a lot. I followed the whole run actually. It's a web comic made with Gary's Mod in Half Life 2 and is pretty funny if you've played the game. If not then I imagine it wouldn't be terribly interesting for you.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

"If anything, the constant cycle of playing the game versus thinking about playing the game - the association, then dissociation - helped to sharpen the line between game and reality, not blur it."

Gamasutra are running an article about Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. You might have heard of this game as it's been quite controversial. The article reviews the reaction from press, developers and players and discussing serious games in general and why the industry, academia and government should be supporting them.

It's a good read.

Game Focus

A good friend of mine and ex-Rockstar colleague, Thad Frogley, has written up his notes from the recent Game Focus Germany event in Hannover.

There's a movie which features footage of another friend of mine, Babsi Lippe.
Don't worry, there's only a little bit of German at the start and end:



In the text, Thad covers amongst others, Babsi's talk about gender, games and Japan, and Richard Bartle's talk about games, art and culture.

Nice.

Music and Games

After the last Mario flute / beatbox extravaganza, I offer you "Super Mario Medley",

Baudrillard's Reality

On Tuesday, the 6th of March, Jean Baudrillard, the famous contemporary French philosopher, died.
Terranova has a discussion about reality and hyper-reality in his memory.

Homebrew Games

An article from December 2006 discussing Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express project with which home, amateur developers can make their own XBox Live games.

Console manufacturers normally keep a stranglehold on the games that are developed on "their" machines, and also because they always have final say over whether a professionally finished game can even be released to market. This case is particularly interesting because of the reference to YouTube in this quote,

"It is about sharing games and is envisioned as a YouTube for games," said Andrew Sithers, the academic lead at Microsoft UK.

Perhaps they've finally realised that there are ways to make money from developers without maintaining such a strong grip on authorisation: allow anyone to develop, but ensure that the means of distribution (which they own) still directs revenue to the publisher. I'm still sceptical about how ideologically close their implemention will be to YouTube community model, and I imagine there will be restrictions to what is made available. There are regulatory legal concerns with allowing the public to release content through a commercial channel, as the commercial entity then becomes responsible for that content.

On the other hand it sounds like fun and Microsoft game development tools are generally excellent. I'd be interested in buying an XBox 360 (and a PC to develop on). One concern that I have which is shared by other industry people is with getting new people into the industry. Making games now is much more complicated than when I was a kid in the 80's. You turned the machine on and it just begged to be programmed. You had everything you needed to make games on your own. There wasn't really any difference between amateur and professional developers. My concern is that because there's no imperative for kids to make their own games that will negatively affect potential industry recruits. On the other hand, there's a much greater number of computer owners and users now, we have internet access, the games industry is mainstream, etc.

Swings and roundabouts.

Interdisciplinary game studies

"The researcher needs to get online and get her hands dirty interacting with 733t d00ds forthwith"

I've just been reading a thought-provoking article by Dmitri Williams about interdisciplinarity (or the lack thereof) in game studies with regards to humanities and social science research, Bridging the methodological divide in game research

Lego MMO

NetDevil and Lego have announced that a Massively Multiplayer Online game is in the works.

Imagine a combination of Lego Racers/Starwars and Second Life. I can think of a couple of games researchers who might be interested in that.

In the mean time, I recently heard about people playing WoW for free on pirate servers such as MaNGOS.

Video games are bad II

I shouldn't think that BSM have an anti-gaming agenda, so these results are interesting - though I'd question the accuracy of their survey, given the narrow and targeted sample group. Still, perhaps this is an example of the idea of play as having no consequences being carried over into everyday life? Perhaps simulation games are problematic because they're close enough to reality, whilst at the same time allowing you to do things without consequences, or that you wouldn't normally be able to do?