Gaming & Virtual Worlds

So, we’ve been playing with the print-on-order platform Blurb - and we’d like to create a series of books with your help. There’s a good few of you out there - let’s do something together.

Book 1: At Play - Images from around the world

Publish a collection of photographs of people At Play. These photos have been taken by PSFK readers and should be added by either:
a) Adding them to this Blurb Project group
b) Submitting them to the Flickr group ‘At Play’ : http://flickr.com/groups/at_play/

We want pictures of others At Play (sorry - not of you, the photographer) - and a small commentary about it with tags to know where the shots were taken.

Please add YOUR original high quality images. If this works, we’ll choose the photos on May 30 and the book should be ready for everyone to buy mid-June.

If we use your shot (and commentary), we will reference you and add a link to your site, if you provide it. PSFK may feature the shot on this site also. If we sell more that 30 copies of At Play, we’ll send you a free copy of the book too. Sound ok?

And what is ‘At Play’?

You show&tell us.

(and no, that’s not really going to be the cover)

A new game called Boom Blox has been created for the Wii by film maker Steven Spielberg. Created in collaboration with Electronic Arts, it’s a game of knocking blocks into each other and Wired says it’s rather good. In regards to Spielberg’s approach to the game, Wired says:

The man behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park is making not a photorealistic shooter but a cross between Tetris and Jenga. It all goes back to when he was a kid, Spielberg says. He’d spend hours setting up his electric trains so that the locomotives would crash into one another. Now, with the help of a design team at Electronic Arts, Spielberg hopes to recapture that spirit of creative destruction in Boom Blox, out in May.

Inspired by a Wii tennis session, the auteur got the idea of combining Nintendo’s innovative Wiimote motion-sensing controller with his youthful delight in mayhem…. Spielberg didn’t just hand off a high concept and then disengage. “He weighed in on everything from the look of the characters and environments to the way the balls move through the air to the different game modes,” [says Amir Rahimi, the game’s senior producer].

One of those modes challenges players to extract blocks from a complex tower without the whole thing collapsing. Basically, it’s Jenga — except that in this digitized version, the buildings are inhabited by cute little creatures. That detail was 100 percent Spielberg. “We were on the path of creating a very generic puzzle game,” Rahimi says. “He brought in the idea of having characters you interact with to give it an emotional wrapper.”

Boom Blox on Amazon

Wired: Steven Spielberg’s Wii-Inspired Videogame Is a Demolitious Block Party

Multitouch Environment Research Barcelona points us to a lovely new touchscreen application - “Multitouch Crayon Physics”, a table which users can ‘draw’ on with their fingers, creating multi-colored, movable objects. MERB reports that an open-source beta version will be released on May 18. Watch the video below to get a sense of how it works.

Multitouch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.

[via Multitouch Environment Research Barcelona]

We talked about this idea a year ago, and we’re happy to see it take off: Lego, Europe’s biggest toymaker, will soon be launching their newest foray into the digital world- Lego Universe, a massive multiplayer online game where players can create Lego versions of themselves and virtually socialize. The game, currently designed for PCs only, is a Lego/real-world hybrid, players using their virtual money to buy ‘bricks’ and build capital. Though the game requires pay-as-you-go subscription, the accumulation of virtual money isn’t based on real cash, but rather time spent and participation in Lego Universe. The game will be available for download or purchase through Lego stores. As Mark William Hansen, the head of the Lego Universe project, explained to Reuters: “The more a child plays, they collect more coins and more bricks. The more you play, the more you get to build things. We want kids to come and play together.”

[via The Next Web]

This week’s New Yorker features a nice bit on the cult board game Le Jeu de la Guerre, a copper- and silver-plated strategy game recently showcased at the “Form as Strategy” exhibit at Columbia University. The 30-year-old game was the brainchild of Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher and filmmaker probably best known for leading the situationist movement in the 1960s. The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath describes it as “a kind of modernist take on chess” - and evidently a very special one, as only a handful of them were produced.  Regardless, the game acquired underground fame among military strategy fanatics, socialists and history buffs alike and led to the creation of a digital version dubbed Kriegspiel (German for “war game”), a free computer game designed by a local programming collective called the Radical Software Group. Alexander Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at N.Y.U., is the founder of the collective and helped create the game with mostly scholarly intentions. The game, in both analog and digital forms, serves as an exploration of Debord’s philosophy and his conception of strategy in an increasingly networked (and refracted) society. Kriegspiel is more of an art/history project than anything commercial; Galloway explained that there are only a few hundred players of the computer game and they’re mostly “a smattering of, like, black-wearing English graduate students and sixty-year-old military-reënactment nerds”.

And yet, what has resulted is a drawn-out legal battle between Galloway (and NYU) and Alice Becker-Ho, the widow of Debord and rightsholder to the game, who claims Kriegspiel is IP infringement and must be taken off-line. While the fight between them continues, Becker-Ho’s threats successfully managed to get Kriegspiel moved from its original location in the exhibit (side-by-side with the original) to another room, where,  McGrath reports, “it played in a continuous loop, without sound.”

While a legal wrestling over a socialist boardgame from the 1970s might not seem like frontpage news, we were immediately reminded of the very public battle between Hasbro and the makers of Scrabulous and the can of worms that opened up. What are the parameters of intellectual property in a game? How much of a concept behind a game can be ‘owned’ and copyrighted? While it seem that in both cases the ‘copycat’ games actually brought more attention back to the originals to which they were paying homage, the legality of it all is still being worked out. Meanwhile, we’re guessing Debord is rolling in his grave, watching the squabble play out over the intellectual property rights to the free Marxist computer game he created. Or maybe he’s laughing at the post-modern absurdity of it all. Who knows.

[via The New Yorker]

A couple of retro games related news have recently caught our eye: while Ping Mag takes us out on a tour of vintage game culture in Tokyo, adidas have come up with a couple of nice games as part of their Originals campaign. Take a chance in Freestyle Hurdles or cruise around in Shopping Card Bob. The fold-it-yourself mini arcade from Suck UK is a small stand for your PSP to give you back the feeling of those old arcade machines. Munich has just seen the latest Vintage Computer Festival Europe, an event for retro computer enthusiasts with this year’s focus on game computers and computer games.

Tom Weber of the Buzzwatch blog over at the Wall Street Journal was one of those folks who went out and bought the GTA IV game yesterday. He’s written some of his key learnings from an afternoon of stealing cars and creating mayhem on the streets of Liberty City - we think the ‘complex games fuel the need for simple games’ is a cracker:

1. GAMES KEEP GETTING MORE LIKE THE MOVIES - GTA IV’s central character, an immigrant named Niko, isn’t in a life of crime for the fun of it. He has complex motivations, and even remorse.

2. VIRTUAL REALITIES ARE REACHING A NEW LEVEL OF IMMERSION. - a 52-inch flat screen TV and cutting-edge game adds up to a virtual world that’s captivating enough to block out real life for a while.

3. MUSIC STILL MATTERS - What’s a movie without a soundtrack? Just as with the earlier Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, music sets the mood with radio stations.

4. COMPLEX GAMES REINFORCE THE NEED FOR SIMPLE ONES - Games like this, which peg the far end of the spectrum for complexity and layered stories, only serve to emphasize why easy-to-play “casual” games have caught on.

5. THE CELLPHONE’S VICTORY OVER OUR CULTURE IS COMPLETE - In GTA IV, the cellphone is practically a character on its own.

Buzzwatch : Grand Theft Auto IV: What We Learned Playing the Hottest New Game

Wired points us to an interesting new first person 3D adventure that has been developed for the Nintendo DS in Japan by Square Enix, the makers of Final Fantasy. Nanashi No Game (The Game With No Name), immerses players into an original horror title with a meta twist.

Wired writes:

Nanashi introduces the idea of a cursed game, a la The Ring, that not only affects the in-game characters, but the player as well. You’ll also get to experience the game within the game (in the form of a retro RPG), and get haunted messages via an interface that looks just like the Nintendo DS’ front end.

The game is scheduled for its release in Japan this summer; no details on possible versions for other markets yet.

Wired: Square Enix Brings Creepy Horror to DS

Sega has developed a unique version of it’s “Super Monkey Ball” game for the iPhone. The action is controlled solely by the built in motion sensors. You tilt the device back and forth to move a ball through a series of obstacles. The beauty of this interface is in it’s simplicity. The use of physical motions as opposed to buttons, makes it so natural that anyone could pick up the game and know right away how to play it.