Friday, October 08. 2010
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by rholmes
[Screenshot from "Magnasanti"]
Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” is a SimCity with six million inhabitants, which Ocasla argues represents the maximum possible stable population achievable within the game. A winning solution, he says, to a game without any programmed conditions for winning. Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, spent four years constructing the SimCity — building the SimCity itself, but also studying the game systems, wading through equations, and working out optimal spatial solutions on graph paper. I was reminded of Magnasanti by Super Colossal’s post on it today, which you should read:
This is the kind of archiporn that I am a sucker for; gamespace urbanism exploited to its extreme condition. Can you ‘win’ urbanism? Is this even urbanism? If not, can we take anything from its construction? The primary move that the city makes is to remove cars altogether and base transport purely on subways. I suspect this is a method to exploit the space otherwise taken up by roads for real estate allowing for an increased population per tile, however, it is a strategy that many cities—Sydney included—are seriously looking into. Remove motor vehicles, increase public transport. Seems like a sound idea. But ultimately, Magnasanti has little to do with urban design and everything to do with gaming systems for maximum reward.
This, of course, is exactly right — the construction strategy for Magnasanti tells us very little about how to construct a city, but a great deal about how to manipulate the internal logic of SimCity (and that is instructive as to the distance between the logic of the city and the logic of SimCity, which results from SimCity being the embodiment of a particular set of assumptions about how cities are planned). Having been reminded, though, I should also link to this interview with Ocasla at Vice. Fascinatingly, Ocasla argues that he constructed Magnasanti as a critique of urban conditions, inspired by Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Magnasanti, he says, is not a blueprint for how to build a city. It’s an intentionally hellish vision which exploits the game’s internal logic as commentary:
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Given mammoth’s professed interest in finding overlap between gameworlds and cities, it’s probably not surprising that this leads me to wonder: what other games might be used to produce critiques of cities, or buildings, or landscapes? I’m particularly interested in this question because of a minor pet theory, which is that one of the most important futures for video games — if they are to become as important a venue for cultural expression as they have the potential to be — is less about the design of spectacularly complex linear (or even branching) narratives for video games, and more about the sharing, re-telling, discussion, and celebration of emergent narratives and objects created by players. Pro Vericelli or Oil Furnace, in other words, not Mass Effect.
A little while ago I spat out a series of tweets for “#idiosyncraticallyarchitecturalvideogames”, some of which (Love, Detonate, Mirror’s Edge) would seem to be excellent fodder for this sort of thing. If, for instance, as Geoff Manaugh has argued, “the bank heist and the prison break together might form the architectural scenario par excellance“, then surely a game like Subversion — “a Mission Impossible-style spy thriller” set within an infinite array of procedurally-generated cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and bank vaults — could be played with the intent of exploring such scenarios (and, if the player is particularly clever, played with the intent of expressing a certain set architectural ideas). What happens, basically, when architects play video games as architects?
[Thanks to Tim Maly for the tip on Subversion.]
Personal comment:
This is extreme "Plan voisin"!
Monday, August 09. 2010
Via Mammoth
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Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2″ pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression. I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of the virtual world”, in particular.
Wednesday, July 14. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].
One of the most extraordinary—and timely—subcollections in the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture can be found resting on a few metal shelves in the basement, where you will discover stacks of old, oil exploration-themed board games.
Cartel: The International Oil Game.
La Conquête du Pétrole.
King Oil: Combine Luck and Strategy to Control the Oil Fields.
Oil: The Slickest Game in Town.
Total Depth: An Oil Man's Game.
There's even the confident one-word title of Gusher, with no description or subtitle needed—or, if none of those strikes your fancy, you can always play a few rounds of Gas Crisis. Its goals include an exhortation to "Master the Minicar" and "Shun the Sheikhs," showing that smaller cars (and better gas mileage) have been seen as tools of foreign policy since at least the 1970s, when many of these games were first released.
But the one game that seems particularly delirious, a kind of sad joke now, or unfortunate coincidence, is Offshore Oil Strike, "Designed and Manufactured by Printbox (Scotland) Limited in collaboration with The British Petroleum Company Limited." Offshore Oil Strike, brought to you by BP.
[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].
With this "exciting board game for all the family," released in 1970, BP delivered all "the thrills of drilling, the hazards and rewards as you bring in your own..."
Bring in your own "Offshore Petro-Dollars," that is.
[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].
The game's internal monetary supply comes in denominations of $200,000, $500,000, $1,000,000, $2,000,000, $10,000,000, and $20,000,000—which is good because you need to earn a lot of it: "The 1st player to make $120,000,000 cash is regarded as the winner."
After all, it's "a race to find and develop the riches 'neath the seabed," where no deepwater is beyond the horizon of possible drilling.
[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].
Accumulating this fortune, however, is not without its difficulties. Each player has "Hazard" cards to deal with; here are some of the risks BP thought to include:
—"Accident. Rig shuts down while replacement of key personnel takes place. Miss one turn."
—"Fire breaks out. Pay $2,500,000 for repairs."
—"Hit High-Pressure Gas—Rig Damaged. Specialists called in."
—"Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Repairs cost $2,000,000"
—"Drill pipe breaks. Pay $500,000 for replacement."
—"Strike High Pressure Gas. Platform Destroyed."
—"Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Oil Slick Clean-Up costs. Pay $1,000,000."
Players are assigned one of four competing oil company identities, each of which is associated with a specific urban headquarters: Chevron/Rotterdam, Mobil/Dieppe, Amoco/Bergen, and BP/Hull.
[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].
As the CCA wrote in their excellent book and exhibition catalog, Sorry, Out of Gas, "Historians and researchers often see games as a source of information about the customs and concerns of a given era. The way games work, their meanings and goals, are linked to the social context in which they are invented and popularized."
[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].
I've included several photos of BP's game here so that you can see the space of play for yourself. But perhaps it's time now for BP to release a new edition: Beyond Petroleum: Nightmare Well!, with whole new strategies for hazards and risks, with "Junk Shot" cards and "Top Kill" moves to deploy when needed. Perhaps they could even throw in a few special supplements for good measure: Perpetual Blow-Out! or It'll Take a Clean-Up of $6 Billion to Bring the Gulf Back!
[Images: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photos by BLDGBLOG].
Anderson Cooper and Joe Barton could play a few rounds on national TV.
Tuesday, June 01. 2010
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by Koert van Mensvoort
Hans Jørgen Olsen, a 12-year-old Norwegian boy, saved himself and his sister from a moose attack using skills he picked up playing the online role playing game World of Warcraft.
Hans and his sister got into trouble after they had trespassed the territory of the moose during a walk in the forest near their home. When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt’ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. ‘Taunting’ is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.
Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate boy and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.
Via Nettavisen.no.
Friday, May 28. 2010
Via Pasta & Vinegar
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by Nicolas Nova
Les Editions Volumiques finally launched their website showing plenty of curious and original products based on mixing paper and digital technologies:
“Here are the first pieces of les évolutions dynamiques following research on both volume and interactivity, playfully mixing paper and computation. By allowing interactivity and gameplay in the page (for example with the Duckette project) or between the pages (in The book that turns its own pages, or Labyrinthe), we try to bring new life to paper. We then pushed physical behavior to paper and ink (the book that disapears). There, the paper is no longer only the frame for representation, but at the same time the field of a real physical experience. We also played with the volume and perspective of book and content (paradoxales, Meeting-Zombies). And then, we tried to combine paper with this little computer-object almost of us all carry everywhere: our cell phone (the night of the living dead pixels, (i) pirates).“
Why do I blog this? I find these projects fascinating and love the idea of mixing digital tech with paper to create compelling user experiences. The examples showed on the picture (see more on their website) are stunning and show the future of books go far beyond boring reading machines. The use of playful metaphors and game mechanics in the work of Bertrand and Etienne are also highly intriguing for those interested in inspiring ways to renew the reading experience.
Besides, if you’re interested in this type of “paper computing”, be sure to check the Papercomp 2010 workshop at Ubicomp. Organized by friends from EPFL, it’s based on similar ideas:
“Paper is not dead. Books, magazines and other printed materials can now be connected to the digital world, enriched with additional content and even transformed into interactive interfaces. Conversely, some of the screen-based interfaces we currently use to interact with digital data could benefit from being paper-based or make use of specially designed material as light and flexible as paper. In a near future, printed documents could become new ubiquitous interfaces for our everyday interactions with digital information. This is the dawn of paper computing. “
Tuesday, May 18. 2010
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: From Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky].
[Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol].
During the period in which 3D videogames began to use textures imported from photography, rather than hand-drawn pixel tiles, it became common to hear game developers discuss their photo references.
Drew Markham, director of Return To Castle Wolfenstein, spent the 2001 pre-release press tour for his game talking about the time he had spent in Europe, sourcing textures from "real" locations that had played host to the war. Crumbling French flagstones, Teutonic concretes, and other useful built surfaces: these details would add a certain level of authenticity that other games lacked. When the Wolfenstein sequel finally arrived, British gaming journalists were amused to see the ubiquitous British "H" fire hydrant signs scattered deep within the occult bunkers of Himmler's SS Paranormal Division.
[Image: Photo by Jim Rossignol].
A few years later, another photo-reference tour was being cited for the gaming press, only this time it was not a cheery holiday in Europe, but a trip to the Zone Of Alienation. This 30km area of Ukraine and Belarus remains poisoned and largely off-limits to mankind, thanks to the radioactive caesium that dusted it after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986.
While it has remained quarantined and closed to (legal) habitation, it hasn't kept out sight-seers. The production team at GSC Gameworld, a games studio based in nearby Kiev, intended to use the derelict zone as the basis for environments in their action shooter, STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl. The team went into the zone and photographed urban dereliction: a snapshot of an abandoned Soviet Union. They would go on to fill their game world with the zone's rusting fences and collapsing grain silos, but that was not all that came with the material: the landscape and its decaying architecture was already charged with mythology—with narrative.
Creative director Anton Bolshakov explained this in an interview in 2007: "The Soviet system was sealed, many facts were kept secret. Even the most harmless objectives or events generated unbelievable rumours and legends." One example, he says, is
an existing gigantic antenna located within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. On some of our photos taken during the trip to Chernobyl the body of the antenna is seen on the horizon spanning several hundred meters across. So some unofficial sources claim, the waves emitted by the antenna were psychoactive. The antenna was directed onto Western Europe and preoccupied with a long-lasting military experiment on psychotropic influence onto human psyche.
[Images: The "steel giant" near Chernobyl; all photos via English Russia].
The antenna wall—actually an early-warning radar system developed for Cold War defense, which has been preserved thanks to being inside the zone—made it into the game as "the brain scorcher," a device that must be shut down before the player can progress into the abandoned city of Pripyat. The environment of Chernobyl not only provided the game with an authentic atmosphere, it was also to influence the events that players could experience.
[Image: The "brain scorcher," via Jim Rossignol].
However, the zone as an idea already existed before the explosion in 1986. It appeared, for instance, in a 1972 science fiction novel called Roadside Picnic. A mysterious, contaminated pocket of landscape, quarantined from the outside world, was the main theme of that book, which was written by two brothers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
In the Strugatsky's book, an alien visitation to the earth—an extra-terrestrial "roadside picnic"—has left dangerous and incomprehensible materials strewn across a zone of Northern Canada. Although sealed off for scientific research, this zone is raided by "Stalkers" who sell the unnatural trinkets for black-market cash. To do so, they brave bizarre dangers, because the zone has been transformed into a place that is utterly at odds with our own world. The alien is never seen or even described, and all the characters encounter is its terrible remainder: landscape made alien. Pools of jelly that will cripple a man lurk in basements, extra-terrestrial cobwebs that can stop a heart beating are strung across doorways, and gravitational mantraps will crush anyone who passes over the wrong patch of mud.
The zone of Roadside Picnic was seen by many as an allegory for the entire Soviet experiment: not simply in the literal sense of the poisoned landscapes created by the industrial excesses of the region, but the entire social order that was created by the Communist government. Polluted expanses, continually washed by acid rain, became shorthand for describing the bizarre political situation of a country in which Communism had failed, and yet robotically continued.
Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky shot a movie, called Stalker, which told a story based on that of Roadside Picnic. A glacially slow, almost event-free film about landscape and longing, it's a work that lingers for long minutes over broken wastelands of abandoned industry. It encapsulates Tarkovsky's style, as well as his interest in dereliction and decay—themes that would be revisited by the STALKER videogame, thirty years on.
[Image: From Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky].
Tarkovsky's film manages to imbue derelict industrial landscapes with a terrible sense of threat. Largely unable to realize the alien properties of artifacts in Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky projected the danger into the architecture itself. Passive landscapes that could swallow a man. Tunnels which tear them to shreds. These effects were never demonstrated, but also never doubted, thanks to the tentative way the actors explored their surroundings.
In much the same way that the images of the real Chernobyl zone seem like lush vegetative scenes, despite being formidably radioactive, so Tarkovsky's zone is calm and invisibly dangerous.
Cinematic legend had it that the power station shown in the final background scenes of the film was in fact Chernobyl NPP, although the truth is the entire film was shot in Estonia. That's not to say that Stalker was without poisonous consequences of its own, however. The first version of the movie was shot entirely on corrupted film, which was unsalvageable when Tarkovsky's production team returned to their Russian studios. Worse, the second shooting took place down stream from a poorly regulated chemical works. The effluent from the plant was responsible for many of the astonishing visuals in the river scenes from the movie, but team members came to suffer serious side-effects from this exposure, including cancer. They had, it seems, suffered side-effects from their time in the zone: just like the fate of the fictional Stalkers in the Strugatsky books. It was as if the fiction and reality were blurring back through each other. As if—to quote Alan Moore—the written page was too fragile a boundary.
Or perhaps, as Steven Shaviro suggests in his book Connected, Roadside Picnic, like all science fiction, actually exists to cast a shadow over the present. "It shows us how profoundly haunted we are by what has not yet happened," says Shaviro of science fiction writing. In the specific case of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's film, what had not happened yet was the Chernobyl disaster.
After 1986, however, there were others for whom the ideas of Roadside Picnic were to be immediately accessible and useful in describing the world that they faced. People going into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, to loot buildings or show tourists around, began to call themselves "Stalkers." For them, the zone of the Strugatsky's vision was immediate and first-hand, a kind of fictional reference for the reality they were facing. They were living it—and it was strangely convenient to have the Stalker nomenclature to hand.
[Images: STALKER game images from this very extensive Flickr set].
As for Bolshakov and his creative team, borrowing from both the Strugatskys and the real world has proven fruitful. Real world ruins seem to connect with players far more readily than their fantasy counterparts. No one has been able to come away from STALKER without talking about the architectural waste that GSC borrowed from the zone. The game has now reached three iterations and supports an energetic fan community.
Bolshakov suggests that there is more to this than simply commerce or escapism, however: "The motif behind STALKER was to create a game which would remind people of the Chernobyl accident and at the same time warn mankind against any possible fatal mistakes in the future." The warning seems likely to go unheard, but perhaps it has another message: to tell game developers that the architecture of the real world comes prefixed with meaning. Even now, when cities can be raised procedurally from the blank canvas of a game engine, perhaps it's worth taking a look at the real world and the mythology that has been strewn around it. If borrowing architecture from the zone proves anything, it's that simulation should not exist in a vacuum.
• • •
Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, occasional guest writer on BLDGBLOG, and author of the excellent This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, published by the University of Michigan Press. He is @jimrossignol on Twitter.
Personal comment:
Amazing antennas! ...
Monday, January 11. 2010
Earlier this week the much-anticipated Foursquare everywhere release came to fruition, making the location-based mobile game available to all regardless of their physical location. Details behind the everywhere launch and how it affected the overall game experience, however, were sparse. Until now.
Foursquare everywhere changes the check-in game as we know it. So take what you know and throw it out the window. This just got more interesting.
The City Shake Up
The whole Foursquare experience used to be centered around your city, so badges and check-ins were city-specific, and anytime you’d find yourself in another city you’d essentially need to start over from scratch. Foursquare everywhere turns that model upside down, so now you can place yourself anywhere in the world (instead of Foursquare locking you down in the nearest city).
You’ll also notice that adding new venues is now address-optional. Instead, Foursquare finally got smart: If you opt to skip the physical address entry step when you check in at a new venue, they’ll automatically attach your GPS location — as pinpointed by your mobile device — to define the venue’s location. Given how tedious it is to manually enter the address of a new place, especially with the knowledge that your GPS-enabled phone knows where you are, we find this to be the most welcome development of all.
Badges of Honor
Duplicate badges are donzo, which means gone are the days when you could earn the Newbie badge for each new city you traveled to. When it comes to badges, think of them as no longer constrained to a particular city, but worldwide badges of honor you carry with you. In fact, you can earn badges anywhere in the world and take them with you as travel. So, if you’ve unlocked the School Night badge in San Diego, there’s no need to try to stay out all night in New York (on a week night) to repeat your previous coup.
For those of you who love a challenge, Foursquare everywhere now includes a whole new set of badges for you to try to unlock. There are a total of 10 new ones (three pictured above), but we also know that even more are on the way. Since there is such an allure around unlocking mystery badges, we won’t spoil the fun, but we know that some of you at CES have managed to unlock a few of these new treasures.
Who’s on Top?
I personally play the Foursquare check-in game for the mayorships, badges and tips from friends, but some of you take rising to the top of your city’s leaderboard very seriously. If that’s you, pay close attention, because the rules have changed slightly.
With the city-lockdown lifted, Foursquare now organizes local leaderboards by your proximity to other Foursquare users. Now you’ll be ranked against everyone who has accrued points within 25 miles (40 km) of your current location. You probably won’t notice the change too much, but we think it’s a smart play and opens up the competition elements to Foursquare users on the fringe of larger playing fields.
Coming Soon
With money in the bank, Foursquare is pushing out improvements at lightning speed. In the coming weeks you can expect a spiffy new version of the iPhone app — version 1.5 — to be released in the App Store. While there won’t be tons of cosmetic changes to this update, you can expect 1.5 to be more sophisticated when it comes to locating and serving up more accurate places nearby. Eventually the iPhone app will also support more “Trending Nearby” functionality to call out hot places. We also know that the team is working on drastic UX improvements to the iPhone app, so you can expect a major redesign in the coming months.
When it comes to other mobile devices, the beta BlackBerry app is being tested by 5,000 users and Foursquare plans to push this to the public in about a week. And of course, Palm Pre users can already get their hands on that app now.
[img credit: MariShelbley]
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
A new locative social game is coming to your neighbourhood!
Thursday, November 05. 2009
London based designer Marc Owens has recently created Avatar Machine. Explaing that “The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
Footage from the Avatar Machine can be seen on Vimeo here. Found via Designboom.
www.marcowens.co.uk
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Via It's Nice That
Personal comment:
Voir la vidéo sur Vimeo où la vue de l'utilisateur dans le casque est "grand angle" mais aussi placée derrière lui, à la manière dont on voit les avatars. C'est le point le plus intéressant du projet il me semble. Cela revient à se piloter soi-même comme un avatar dans l'environnement.
Monday, September 14. 2009
You know what's absolutely useless? A video of Wipeout HD being played in 3D, with some schmuck wearing 3D glasses and babbling on about how much fun he's having. Well, that schmuck is this Engadget editor, the video can be found after the break, and we've gotta say: we loved it. Especially for something like Wipeout HD, whose neon-infused tracks make for an almost too convenient example of rapidly approaching vanishing points, we'd say 3D could really be a quasi-"killer app" for consoles going forward -- especially if those fancy new motion controllers don't catch on for Microsoft and Sony. In many ways, 3D just seems to make more sense in a video game than for a movie, and the whole problem of finding content to deliver in the format has already been solved: a software update for the PS3 sometime in 2010 will enable it to provide a 3D viewing experience to "all" existing games on the system. We're sure there will be some exceptions, but it sounds very promising. The console itself pumps out a quite regular signal over HDMI, which the TV syncs up with your 3D glasses. A 200Hz TV, for instance, alternates 1080p frames, with 100Hz for each eye. Of course, you'll need a brand new TV, but at least it won't be restricted to just Sony televisions.
Via Engadget
Personal comment:
If content producers start using new 3D screens (which are existing since several years now without that much success), it may make 3D technologies used in TV converging to a common standard that will be reliable for games... but also for 3D movies... unless it makes emerging a new standard war...
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