During the E3 2009 expo, which was held from the 2nd to the 5th of June, Microsoft presented Project Natal. The project brings human-computer interaction without an electronic input device to the masses. By capturing your full body movement and your voice (and being able of doing this for several people at the same time) it brings gameplay to an entirely new level.
Here is the video:
Interesting to see is that again activities within games which up till now didn’t seem fun enough for the player to be involved in, are suddenly becoming much more interesting simply because the type of interaction has changed (the video shows an example of changing the tires during a race). The same thing happened when the Nintendo Wii was introduced. By adding more physical engagement, the fun-factor of certain activities is increased.
Could this be a general rule within gaming and other activities which involve play? More physical engagement equals more fun? Off course it’s not applicable to every type of game, and the amount of fun or ’satisfaction’ one gets from playing a game isn’t only determined by the degree of physical engagement (think of puzzle or strategy games where this is achieved on a more reflective level), but it certainly proves to be quite a big factor.
This technology will soon find it’s way out of the gaming industry and into other industries, as Steven Spielberg already indicated at the E3. The question now is how big it’s impact will be.
This is a pivotal moment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games - Steven Spielberg
Un pas plus loin que la Wii? Pas certain que ce principe d'interaction "sans rien" fonctionne avec tous les jeux ou tous les contenus, mais pour de l'"air guitar", ça ira très bien!
Prévoir un grand salon, des meubles solides et pas trop dommages en cas de casse (adieu le beau canapé, les vases de designers, tableaux, beaux tapis, luminaires, etc.), une pièce bien éclairée et certainement un sol ainsi que des murs clairs!
Yesterday in the architecture galleries of the V&A, I found myself looking at a painting by Charles Robert Cockerell called A Tribute to Christopher Wren, from 1838.
The image is a spatially overwhelming lamination of various buildings all designed by the legendary English architect; in a way, it's an early predecessor of today's total city renderings by firms like Foster & Partners and OMA: a complete metropolis designed in one fell swoop by a master architect.
What first came to mind, though, when seeing Cockerell's image, was something that I've mentioned on the blog before – as recently as in the interview with Jim Rossignol – which is that the era of the architectural monograph is over: perhaps we will soon enter the age of the architectural videogame.
In other words, what if Charles Robert Cockerell had not been a painter at all, but a senior games designer at Electronic Arts? His "tribute to Christopher Wren" would thus have looked quite different.
The architect's buildings would still be visually represented, all standing in the same place, but thanks to the effects of immersive digital media and not the intensely beautiful but nonetheless materially obsolete techniques of a different phase of art history.
Might we yet see, for instance, A Tribute to Sir John Soane, complete with scenes of zombie warfare beneath the arches of ruined bank halls, released by Joseph Gandy Designs Corporation™?
When it comes time to release a major monograph, MVRDV instead releases a videogame. Bjarke Ingels has already released a comic book – the game, as another narrative medium, as simply another option for architectural publishing, can't be far off.
Learning about the buildings of Erich Mendelsohn... by hurling virtual grenades at them.
[Image: The Professor's Dream (1848) by Charles Robert Cockerell, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts].
Until then, here are some more or less unrelated close-up views of another of Cockerell's works, the otherworldly pyramids, domes, and steeples from The Professor's Dream (1848), courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts.
[Images: The Professor's Dream (1848), and several details thereof, by Charles Robert Cockerell, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts; say what you like about pastiche, but a part of me wishes that all cities looked like this].
Gaming our way through the future of architectural history.
Jim Rossignol's recent guest post about the architecture of "evil lairs" reminded me of a brilliant vignette from Deyan Sudjic's 2005 book The Edifice Complex.
In a chapter called "The Long March to the Leader's Desk" – a virtuoso example of architectural writing, and easily the best chapter in the book – Sudjic describes how Emil Hácha, Prime Minister of what was then Czechoslovakia, came to visit Adolf Hitler in his Albert Speer-designed Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
The Chancellery – Hitler's "evil lair," if you will – proved so psychologically overpowering that Hácha, "a short man in his late sixties with thinning and receding hair," according to Sudjic, suffered a heart attack and very nearly died after walking through it.
Hácha was white faced, anxious, and dizzy as he made his way across the entrance lobby, completed just eight weeks earlier. He was exactly the kind of visitor the Chancellery was designed for. If ever architecture had been intended for use as a weapon of war, it was here. The grandeur of the Chancellery was an essential part of Hitler's campaign to browbeat Hácha into surrender. Beyond the courtyard, itself a kind of summation of the Nazi state, was an elaborate sequence of spaces inside the Chancellery, carefully orchestrated to deliver official visitors to Hitler's presence in a suitably intimidated frame of mind. After a quarter-mile walk, visitors were left in no doubt of the power of the new Germany.
Indeed, Sudjic suggests that Hácha experienced the building "like a spelunker, moving from one giant underground cavern to another, never sure exactly where he would find himself, or what he would have to confront next, as an intimidating and bewildering sequence of spaces unfolded in front of him."
Past the chancellery guards and out of the way of the floodlights, [Hácha was led] across the porch and into a windowless hall beyond, its wall inlaid with the pagan imagery of mosaic eagles grasping burning torches garlanded with oak leaves, its floors slippery with marble. There was no furniture, nor even a trace of carpet to soften the severity of the hall. (...) Under the hovering glass and the massive marble walls, the bronze doors at the far end of the hall shimmered and beckoned and threatened. Visitors were propelled down its length as if being whirled through a wind tunnel. As Hácha walked, he was aware of his heart accelerating in rapid fluctuating beats.
At this point, Hitler's Chancellery begins to sound like the boss level of a particularly unnerving videogame:
The hall that they walked through was thirty feet high. On the left a parade of windows looked out over Voss Strasse, and on the right were five giant doorways, each seventeen feet high. They stopped at the central pair of double doors, guarded by two more SS men in steel helmets. On a bronze scroll above the door case were the initials AH.
Even here, at the very door to Hitler's study, Speer's spatial theatrics weren't finished.
Passing through those gigantic doors, Hácha found himself standing at one end of a 4000-square-foot room, surrounded by "blood-red marble walls." At the other end, in front of a fireplace, was "a sofa as big as a lifeboat, occupied by Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring" – and nearby was Hitler, seated at his desk.
Incredibly, "To walk from the door to the desk took a nerve-wracking full minute."
By that point, though, Czechoslovakia's fate was sealed: Hácha's will collapsed as soon as Göring began to describe the Nazis' military capabilities, and he suffered a heart attack.
Not before signing his country over to Hitler, of course – "a humiliation that he had ample time to reflect on," Sudjic writes, "during his endless walk back through the marble and mosaic halls of the Chancellery."
“Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games provide a worldwide network of potential play spaces. Now games can be designed to be played in public spaces like streets, conferences, museums and other non-traditional game venues – and game designers need to understand the world as a medium—both its challenges and its advantages.“
This book shows how to change the face of play—who plays, when and where they play and what that play means to all involved. The authors explore aspects of pervasive games that concern game designers: what makes these games compelling, what makes them possible today, how they are made and by whom. For theorists, it provides a solidtheoretical, philosophical and aesthetic grounding of their designs.
Pervasive Games covers everything from theory and design to history and marketing. Designers will find 13 detailed game descriptions, a wealth of design theory, examples from dozens of games and a thorough discussion of past inspirations—directly from the game designers themselves.
Why do I blog this? just saw this on, need to get it and peruse this interesting compendium of case-studies (Killer, Insectopia, Botfighters, Uncle Roy, etc.). People interested can also listen to the podcast by the editors.
Bordeaux-based science center Cap Sciences puts French 'internauts' in charge of an urgent energy redesign
Friday, January 09, 2009
By Peter Fairley
Clim' City confronts players with an energy dilemma. Source: Cap Sciences (Bordeaux)
French science center Cap Sciences takes flash-based learning to new heights in a free online game launched this week: Clim' City (click Le Jeu to play).
At present this climate change adventure is for those of you who read French but here's to hoping that Bordeaux-based Cap Sciences gets an English version out quick because the game is a beautifully crafted and an ingeniously programmed device for learning the contingencies and costs that lie on the road to a low-carbon energy future.
The action in Clim' City takes place on a small map of an imaginary town animated by commuters driving here and there, and all manner of agricultural, industrial and even entertainment operations (including a ski hill) energetically going about their business. The goal is to reduce the "Clim's" carbon footprint and thus avert the town's demise by tweaking the way its actors produce and consume energy.
Playing such games turns information into knowledge. In my first stab at Clim' City I have converted the town's carbon-belching coal-fired power plant to biomass. To do so I was forced to first launch a forest management program, which really brought home the fact that collecting biomass to generate a meaningful amount of energy is, in itself, a substantial and complex task.
My powerplant conversion also came with an opportunity cost, drawing down my limited supply of government, corporate, and individual action points. In the words of the international Association of Science-Technology Centers'International Action on Global Warming, this was a powerful reminder of the "sociopolitical constraints" facing decisionmakers today.
I'm not deep enough in to Clim' City to know whether mine is going to make it. But if accounts in the French press and across the blogosphere are to believed there's a good chance it won't. This is a tough game and failure appears likely--at least early on--which imparts a healthy dose of realism.
And even if the Clim's get cooked under my leadership, I can't help learning.
Les jeux servant des "tests" ou d'environnements d'apprentissage (év. aussi d'approche prospective) se mulitiplient. Il est évident qu'en dehors de l'expérience du jeu lui-même, de son caractère éducatif, expérimental, etc., cela permet de collecter quantité de données puis d'étudier les comportements relatifs à certains problèmes.
An intriguing use of the positioning system of Nintendo DS wifi is described on Gamasutra. Creative director and lead designer Justin Leingang (at Aspyr) is working on an original Nintendo DS title that uses each player’s DS to create “a real-life treasure hunt,”:
“The project, which bears the working title Treasure Troves, (…) One of Treasure Troves’ main input mechanics operates by scanning for nearby wi-fi networks and generating items based on each network’s unique frequency. (The game continues to uncover items and and optionally emit aural feedback even when the DS is closed, allowing players to “play” in public without needing to actively monitor the system.) These items can then be managed and traded with other players to create special item sets, and can be used for a variety of player-customized in-game functions.
(…)
For example, each item emits a distinct sound, which include musical notes and phonetic noises; the items can then be replicated and arranged on a Mario Paint-like musical grid. Like items and other custom creations, these resultant compositions can be traded with other players.“
Why do I blog this? what an awesome game idea and of course the point here is not to position the Nintendo DS in an accurate way. Instead, it’s simply about using existing Wifi networks to create specific items. Surely an intriguing way to tie in the physical and the digital.
Another interesting element here is that it’s highly uncommon to see this sort of development on a platform such as the Nintendo DS. Although it’s doable to hack the thing for this sort of purpose, it’s generally more difficult for game studio to make it acceptable for Nintendo. Perhaps I should re-read the TRC.
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