Games and Movies

(via Ludology). From the British Film Institute:

"Presented by the NFT and RES, NTI* will place this amazing form at the heart of the creative life of the country. A unique and dynamic weekend of events, talks and activities includes exclusive previews of forthcoming titles, live cinematic-sized gameplay, machinima screenings, discussions with industry leaders, and a 'video arcade' with both 'retro' and contemporary arcade machines and home platforms. NTI* is accessible to anyone interested in seeing where these two forms are going. Think, talk and - most importantly - play."

The event will take place at the British Film Institute, 9-10/07/2005.

Book: Digital Art

From the Amazon.co.uk synopsis:

"Christiane Paul surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s right up to the present day, and looks ahead to what the future may hold. Drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art, she discusses all the key artists and works."

Digital art, relying on the spectator's interaction with the works of art, resemble non-games in several ways (not coincideltly, Toshio Iwai, creator of Elektroplankton, has one of his works cited).

Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Miyamoto interviewed by IGN

Our goal with Revolution is to appeal to all gamers -- the casual gamer and the hardcore gamer. On top of that, we really want to get non-gamers involved as well. So it's a console that we want people to feel comfortable with and happy that they have in their home.

Read the interview here.

DS Brain Training for Adults

(via water cooler games) Gaming-Age Foruns has a post on DS Brain Training for Adults, the forthcoming non-game for the DS. The screenshots are in japanese, but they give a good general impression of the product.

Maybe because it is "for Adults" (and maybe because it is brain training), it does not have distractive colourful game-like graphics (except for the polygonal doctor head) - a major difference from the PSP's Talkman, which is also more like an application than a game (Nintendo will also release a Japanese-English dictionary, so let's see how they compare).

Brain Training for Adults, as the name suggests, might be Nintendo's move over an older audience. Not only older than the average Mario and Zelda's fan base, but even more. Not young adult, but 'adult-adult'.

Apparently, Nintendo's approach to the market right now is trying to give make games for everyone (and not only games rated as "Everyone" by the ESRB), and the puzzle-magazine style of Brain Training might help.

More art on the DS

(via Avant Gaming) There is more DS art being posted on the web: the Elektroplankton Composition Database is an archive of music made on Elektroplankton.

A little bit more radical is The Mod go DS (or the mod gods?), a website dedicated to DS homebrew development. From their website you can see that there is some speculation on how open to independent developers will Nintendo become in the near future.

On that subject, there are lots of conflicted information, but I hope Nintendo open the doors for independent developers (the Revolution download system cold help a lot in that sense). That would not only please the homebrew enthusiasts, but maybe renew Nintendo's strenght amongst a great parcel of gamers.

Mafalda on game design and theory - Part 3

- Bang!Bang!Bang!
- Bang! Bang!
- PUM!
- No! No! "Pum" is not used anymore! Who is the outdated one who said "Pum"?

From "Toda mafalda", by Quino - All rights reserved

The 'Magic Circle' was already mentioned in this website, and the comic strip above shows how easily this circle can be breaken. It does not only relate directly to the noise that can affect the communication among players in MMOGs, but it more generaly demonstrates how a single piece can take out the stability of the whole game's world.

Llamasoft now and then

Llamasoft, Jeff Minter's studio, has a new website. There you can find information on their new light synthesiser, Neon, which will come built in the Xbox 360.

"Neon can run purely off audio input or from up to four joypads, each controlling a different display element with incredible ease and precision and generating hypnotic, multi-layered end results that are way ahead of every other piece of audio visualisation software available."

This is not Llamasoft's first non-game: Psychedelia was released in 1984, and according to Minter it was "a new, non-competitive form of entertainment... no enemies, no killing, just light and colour". Check the full story here.

Making art on the DS

From their website: "NDSart is an experimental community that focuses on artistic expression with the Nintendo DS." It includes drawings made on the DS's Picto-chat and has sections for music and animation. Interestingly, it all goes back to games, as it promotes competitions between the posted works.

Things like this reassure my preference for the DS over the PSP(and why I choose it as platform for my MA project).

'Let's not get hung up on silly technicalities'

Back in 2003, Scott Miller from 3D Realms wrote some good comments on the implications of calling some games 'games':

"Who cares!!! Seriously, it's not like we need to work out the definition of the word "game" to make 'em! And frankly, I prefer to think of what we do as making "entertainment." Not that it matters, though."

It is a good point. Of course, on the other hand, defining things can help us see how to make it better and different the next time.

Mafalda on game design and theory - Part 2

- My dad told me how chess works: the pawns go in the first row...
- um-hum.
- ... Then, in this row, you place the king and the queen...
- How come? It should be the other way around.
- First the king and the queen, and then the pawns.
- No, dad told me the pawns come first.
- Is your dad socialist? No? He's socialist,ain't he?

From "Toda Mafalda", by Quino - All rights reserved

Unlike Felipe, Mafalda seems much more interested in the symbolic aspects of chess than in its mechanics. It could be said that, if dealing with game studies, she would be a narratologist while he would be a ludologist.

Of course, the 'narrative' is much less important to chess than its mechanics, serving more as an illustration the rules. As Espen Aarseth argues in the book 'First Person : New Media as Story, Performance, and Game', Felipe can see 'beyond the avatars' that represent him in the game.

Mafalda, on the other hand, seems to enjoy another dimension of the game: the environment, the story being told. Also in videogames, those elements could contribute to meaningful play.