Seduce a Suicide Girl is the latest app from the popular alt-erotic website. Following the success of their previous Flip Strip application, the new offering is based on the classic choose your own adventure stories.

Obscura Digital’s CueLight Pool Table uses motion tracking software and an overhead projector to layer animation on top of a standard pool table.

We’ve recently wrote about LEGO being used as tools to inspire creative thinking and solutions to various societal or business challenges. Christopher W. Totten’s thesis proposes that playing (not necessarily of the Lego kind) can also be used to influence the architectural design process. Ultimately, Totten created a design method for architects based on game design.
The highlights of his method are:

Creating a “core mechanic”, the basic action a player takes within a game, as the design generator for an architectural space (the basic action someone takes within the building.)
Using game engines to playtest building designs with clients and other designers [...]

YouTube War is a conceptual augmented reality game created by Aaron Meyers and Jeff Crouse. Combining the intensity of a high-stakes poker tournament with the bizarre world of sensational online video, the competition consists of two players trying to out-do each other by presenting a series of videos (rendered as an augmented reality layer on top of a real card) to an audience. The crowd decides which video/card wins, and the winner takes both cards. The process repeats until the deck is gone, and whoever has the most cards at the end, wins.
[via Eyebeam]

Virgin is teaming up with Google to promote cloud computing. On June 24th, the Day in the Cloud Challenge, lets players compete versus others either on the ground or while flying in one of Virgin’s flights through WiFi. If you’re flying Virgin that day, you’ll receive free WiFi to join the challenge. But if you have work to do, you can opt to share documents, email, browse websites or anything you normally do back at the office.
Whether you can teleconference is not clear, though it might be fun to collaborate on solving a puzzle while flying.

Clive Thompson at Wired reports on how the competitive nature of games can be injected into everyday mundane tasks making them more fun and more interesting. You are probably already familiar with the way Nike Plus injects game-like qualities into your everyday cardiovascular workout, but Thompson highlights some other examples including; digital gas mileage readouts in hybrid cars being used for hypermiling games, Dennis Crowley’s pub-crawling based Foursquare, and, get this – a “game” built into corporate email aiming to reward a reduction in email volume.
Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can [...]

The NY Times takes a look at the curious marriage of performance art and athletics, introducing us to newly invented sports with names like Circle Rules Football and VikingBall where simply playing seems to be the whole point. Unless as the article suggests, you create a website or post videos of your activities online, in which case you’re suddenly granted membership into a cultural movement. An assumption that seems to forget that making up games is something little kids in backyards and dirt lots have been doing since time immemorial without so much as a mention in any larger societal context. [...]

Frantz Lasome is working on an augmented reality toy concept that takes make-believe and lays it out in front of your eyes. His project lets kids use their old toys as game pieces and controls in an virtual world. Players battle it out, assigning weapon functions to their real world toys, and can watch the virtual action through special glasses. Though it seems like a fantastic toy, you have to wonder how immersion in an augmented world will effect kid’s developing minds.
Augmented Reality Toys (Work in progress) from Frantz Lasorne on Vimeo.
Like the “is Google making us stupid argument”, [...]

Is there a way to harness the popularity of multiplayer online gamers to save energy in the real world ?  Professor Byron Reeves, a media expert at Stanford University, thinks there is.  The scenario that Reeves imagines is that a player would get in-game feedback from a smart meter which tracks energy usage throughout the player’s house in order to reward the player online.  For example, if you turn off a light in an unused room, your house’s smart meter recognizes this and your online player is rewarded accordingly.
The trick is making sure that the game designers find a fun [...]

Mattel have just introduced a new game requiring an unprecedented amount concentration. Recently unveiled at CES, Mind Flex requires players to wear a headset equipped with sensors that measure brainwave activity in order to levitate a ball and move it through hoops.
In this video, a representative explains that the sensors detect and measure theta wave output, which as you concentrate, your brain creates more of.  After measuring those waves, it then converts them into a signal and sends it to the game unit, which in turn powers tiny little fans.  The harder you concentrate, the faster they spin and the [...]