A new episode of the legendary “Games Cuture Circle” taken from live-footage from Berlin. This show got the topic “Reality” and is all about games and the thing we call “Reality”. It’s about media theory, games, layers of gaming, augmented reality and stuff like that. Enjoy. Here is the permalink to the video-site.
Participants:
Dear Esther looks like a very interesting, upcoming gaming experience. That game has an interesting story in its creation. Originally started by Dan Pinchbeck in 2007 as a mod in the context of a research-project at the University of Portsmouth the game hit some serious audience. It also won the best world/story award at the IndieCade festival in 2009. So there was clear evidence, that Dear Esther got the potential, to become a successful title on the market. And that is how the game became the 4th funded title of the Indie Fund – a collective that funds and invests in unique indie games.
Indie Fund about titles like Dear Esther: “While Indie Fund is looking for unique gems that exemplify the indie spirit, it is not a charity, and the funding partners hope that they don’t lose their investments. (…) the time is right to find out just how commercially viable such offbeat titles really are.” (quoted from Gamasutra).
Creative Indiegames like Dear Esther are fundable, because there are small teams working on the title, not teams that are like 20 or 100 members big. Original indiegames can make enough money, to refund, but do not necessarily be real million sellers. This is why this could be the right time with the right opportunities for getting big in being indie. Let’s look forward to it! (via)
Parallel to the Gamescom 2011 and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Europe 2011, the Cologne Game Lab will host an event of the special kind: The Notgames Fest is an exhibition and a “play together” of so called “Notgames”. Games, that are more expressions by itself than systems of set rules. There is a call for submissions! You can submit your works until the 10. July 2011. The event is curated by Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn), who came up with the original Notgames Manifesto.
Event is on the 15. / 16 August 2011. Feel free to join the Notgames Expo Facebook-Group about this event.
What is art all about in the era of highly available access to information and cultural artifacts? How does the role of creation and artist will change? How is art integrated into culture in the future? Questions like this stand in the middle of this 22 minute documentary, including lots and lots of footage and interviews with some people from the present, taken during the Transmediale Berlin 2011. Find the list of the participants, including the links to the artists websites at the Vimeo-page. (via)
Finally here is a cut of the latest Amaze Games Culture Circle from Berlin. The topic is about Money and Games – and how they possibly can interact. A really interesting topic, in my opinion – not only because of the upcoming Gamification debate that is already happening. Have fun watching. If you have opinions on that, feel free to write a comment. Or to like it on Facebook or even Flattr.
I want to highlight the recent works from Ishac Bertran. It seems, that he wants to find new aspects in glitches, combining glitch with different materials. Lately he was experimenting with a damaged flatscreen from the trash. Now he jumped into “Generative Photography“. It’s a mixture of fast-paced animations, that create “glitches” by photographing them.
“Digital drawings are sequentially projected on to a screen in a dark room and photographed using long exposure times. As in generative art, this photography technique uses an algorithm that is polluted with a certain randomness. The randomness comes from rendering imperfections and the asynchrony between the frame rate of the video signal and the refresh rate of the projector.”
Interesting works! There is also a long picture-thread with explanations in Ishac’s blog.
Yes people, I did it! I finished a game for the Global Game Jam! It is a two-player-game and some sort of “space-fighting game”. (The topic of the game jame was “Extinction” by the way). Since I had extremely limited time at this weekend, I decided to make a game I can assemble in 30 minutes or so. In the end it took me about 8 hours.
This game reflects my growing interest in “fighting games“, that developed over the last 10 or so months. I like the idea of games, that do not have a “optimum strategy” to win the game, like “knowing and mastering all secret moves” or “pushing the button faster or harder“. The idea of having a game, where you can combine tactics to always make a turn on the game against your enemy was and still is of high interest. I am also thinking about stuff like the “All in” at a poker game: you can always be the matchmaker and win epic or fail miserably. Ok, enough of the theory.
“An Accident in Paradise” is a 2-player space-fighting game for iPod Touch and iPhone. You play with another human on the iPod as a playboard. The bullet strength is determined by the time-interval between the single shots. Stronger shots extinguish weaker shots. There is no optimal strategy to win, but you have to examine the enemies moves to decide, what works best for you to hit the enemy ship. Unfortunately there is nothing to play on the web right know, because I made this on the iPod Touch device only. I am heavily thinking about polishing the game a little bit and ship it with the Apple App Store. But this won’t be within the next 3 weeks.
Ah, I had a great inspiration this weekend by Sven Väth’s first album “An Accident in Paradise” from 1993. I can still recommend this 17 year old record much, much, much. Here is the title-track “An Accident in Paradise“, but for more popular I suppose is “L’Esperanza“.
Global Game Jam Link: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/accident-paradise
PS: Later this week I will post about other interesting submissions of the Global Game Jam Cologne. Thanks again to the Cologne Game Lab to make this great event happen once again!
