Category: Links

“The play factor as driver to achieve another purpose was shared in all presentations in a way, but to declare a theme for this edition I think we need more poetic stuff.” Spot on.

“Homesense will bring the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Over the course of several months, selected households across Europe (UK, France and Italy initially) will have access to the latest in open source hardware and software tools, decide what they want to do with them in the context of their home and share the results with the world.” Really proud of Tinker for getting this off the ground. Can’t wait to see what comes of it.

“PLAY is a short film […] created with filmmaker David Kaplan. The 18-minute film takes place in a future where the lines between games and reality have become blurred[. It] unfolds as a series of videogames, nested inside each other like a set of Russian Dolls.” Can’t wait for this to appear online.

“BackChatter is a game about predicting Twitter trends. […] Each round, you pick three words that you think will be popular in tweets about the conference during the next game round. You send in your votes with a direct message to the game consisting of the three words you want to pick.” A clever social game running on top of Twitter. I like how it plays with the sometimes annoying behavior on Twitter during conferences, of people just namedropping stuff or tweeting things verbatim.

“The Facadeprinter is a simple, software controlled robot. It consists of a two axis turn table and an airpressure printhead. The printer shoots the artwork from a distanced position dot by dot onto the chosen area.” Crazy stuff, the things it ‘prints’ have a very distinct esthetic.

“GameCamp is a gathering for the people who are building that world [a world with ubiquitous video gaming]. It’s for the designers, coders, artists, writers, thinkers and players who are making the 21st century the century of the game. GameCamp is about more than making games: it’s about playing them, thinking about them and how they affect our lives for good or for ill.” Sounds like an event I’d like to see happen in NL some time.

“I’m not saying games necessarily need narratives, but they need something to structure them as more than an almost featureless expanse of repeating interactions. Games should be exceptional experiences, not an addictive layer of weaponised mundanity.”

“Whatever we wind up creating, though, will be inherently networked, in a deep sense of that word. Organizationally and practically, we’ve tried to imagine Do as a weave tight enough to enable effective execution, yet open enough to capture unexpected influences and energies beyond those we generate ourselves.” A lovely way of putting what I have been aspiring to with Hubbub. Can’t say I’ve completely figured out the organizational intricacies though.

“Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.”

An interesting discussion of parkour and video games, with more than a few insights into how an illusion of fluid movement isn’t nceserily dependent on a realistic simulation or first person perspective.

“a multi-player spell dueling game designed for the physical game controllers. The game lets players sling spells at one another in a game of dexterity and strategy. Using their controller as a wand, players draw fluid, emergent gestures – in their own personal style – to charge up spells of different magic types. But unlike many other gestural console games, Tryl pushes players to look at each other, rather than at the screen. To succeed, players must “read” their opponent and time their spells carefully.” That sounds pretty rad.

“You might die as an infant, you might make it to old age. You might be able to marry the person of your dreams, and have a rewarding job, or you could be stuck in poverty.” Not sure what to think of this, but is sure is a curious example of a ‘serious game’.

More Pixelsumo goodness; this is an AR project worth saving that simulates weird floating slug-like creatures in a mirror world of our own.

A display that crawls around your living room in small bits and pieces. Now that’s weird (but the production level is great).

“…we’re going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they’re going to be no fun.” I agree with Russell that the gamepocalypse runs the risk of being incredibly boring if people keep focusing on sticking a reward system on a mundane activities. At the core of any good game is an interesting activity, so we should be thinking about those, the many kinds of experiences people have and how those can be turned into games. Rewards are nothing more than feedback, and feedback can take on many forms, so let’s see if we can come up with things other than a score or a badge, shall we?

“If you’re running a city, though, there’s stuff here you probably ought to be paying attention to. The message is that in the long run you’re clearly better off underwriting a vibrant ecosystem of [coworking spaces] than shelling out one tax break after another in the hopes of enticing (or retaining) corporate headquarters.” However much I am a fan of coworking, it does not work well for many creative activities which require a proper studio space where one can physically engage with materials.

Good stuff on ways a city can be understood.

Dan Hill on what football can tell us about the role of improvisation in design and architecture.

Incredibly thought-provoking talk by Lanier that challenges many of the assumptions underlying current technoculture. If you’re a geek, please watch this and give it some thought.

“The part that I worry about the most is sort of the perverse incentives that these systems are going to try to create.” More Jesse Schell, this time on a more critical note, which is good. On CNN no less!