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The number of this kind of pieces keeps growing, which can only be considered a good thing. This particular one goes into the complex social interactions happening in MMOs in some detail.
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
links for 2010-02-15
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At its best, this whole slow thing is a useful frame for thinking about things differently. As this article points out though, there is a risk of it coming across as elitist.
links for 2010-02-14
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Apparently, pigs are about as clever as chimps when it comes to playing games. Another infobit of interest for an upcoming project.
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The more exposure given to this kind of game design (the kind that is praxis based) in the media, the better. It is the way, as far as I am concerned.
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A discussion of a book by Foer on the consumption of meat. Since I might get involved with a project dealing with pigs, this is of some interest of me.
links for 2010-02-13
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“game developers should have some kind of pro bono allocation for games for good” have yet to watch Jane’s TED performance but this piece sounds like the usual pitch, slightly evolved. Which is nothing to complain about, because it is such a worthy cause. Curious about Evoke, too.
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“Any business or industry can learn something from Foursquare’s effort to make the discovery of the permutations of a commercial ecosystem the point of an experience, rather than the obstacles that stand in its way.” Ian Bogost deconstructs Foursquare and offers some interesting insights in the process.
links for 2010-02-12
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A stylistically interesting animated short. I like the twist half way through but the ending left me a bit unsatisfied.
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James Wallis on what makes a game a game, in the hopes of offering a critical tool. Ticks all the boxes, great writing along the way.
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Well, the cat’s out of the bag it seems. Fellow Dutch Game Garden Xform are working on an AR game for a line of Adidas shoes. I’ve played early demos and am particularly impressed with the graphic polish of the whole thing.
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This gives a whole new meaning to the term rephotography. Both expertly executed and sensitive to the social codes of Flickr. I want to play with this live.
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“Hoe meer persoonsgegevens je opslaat, hoe groter het risico ze misbruikt worden of op straat terechtkomen. Dat gaat gebeuren.” Dat, en het simpele feit dat er bitter weinig bewijs is voor toegenomen veiligheid door surveillance is genoeg reden om weerstand te blijven bieden. Via Alper.
Week 137
I was out of the game for a day this week due to a cold. Back in the saddle now, off to Amsterdam for more work at Layar. I’m going to pick up where we left off last week when the workshop with BERG finished.
It’s less than two weeks to the next This happened – Utrecht. On monday we opened the registration and even though we had twice as many spots than last time, we ‘sold out’ in half the time. One minute. Crazy. I met up with Alexander and Ianus on monday evening to go over the last things that need to be done. We had a look at our new venue too, the HKU Academy Theatre, which I think is real nice.
On tuesday I went over to Codarts to give a lecture on games to music students (producers, composers and songwriters, mostly). I was invited by Daniël Hamburger, whom I collaborated with on the Monster game opera. I wanted to provide the students with starting points for collaboration with game designers. So I decided to focus mostly on the notion of player experience, and how game designers contribute to this, and how music and sound can. It went OK. I started by chatting with them about the games they play, so that I could use those as examples in the rest of my talk. That’s a trick that works well, I’ll be sure to use it again.
There’s some more speaking on the horizon. On monday I booked my train to Hamburg, for a talk at RaumschiffEr.de; a sort of mini-Reboot taking place on february 21. Read a bit more on that at the Hubbub blog. Perhaps I’ll see you there?
links for 2010-02-10
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Anything Mr. Butterfield is involved with is worth keeping an eye on, although I am kind of disappointed about the fact that most of Glitch’s innovation is on the visual aesthetic side, and not so much on the game mechanics, which sound kind of formulaic.
links for 2010-02-08
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Since I’ll be making a brief trip to Hamburg soon, this is of some interest to me: apparently, Hamburg artists are trying to break the well-known cycle of gentrification they are typically part of. Will they be able to do so and in the process have others adopt their value model, in stead of the default economic one?
links for 2010-02-06
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Juha posts on a proposal for an open service layer in the Trouw building. I am so stealing the Constant Nieuwenhuys reference for future talks. Also, this sounds like a platform I would really like to build a Hubbub game for.
links for 2010-02-05
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“Sorry, folks. No steam-powered rockets to Mars in this episode.” Some interesting thoughts from Stowe about the need to ditch old computing paradigms to get to a better UX and how that might mean not being as open as some would like.