The Graveyard: a new art game

 Posted by (Visited 4990 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Apr 022008
 

 Second in my spate of backlogged posts here, I wanted to call attention to The Graveyard.

 The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.

Buying the full version of The Graveyard adds only one feature, the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.

VWs go to Congress

 Posted by (Visited 8374 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Apr 022008
 

As has been reported in several places, there was a Congressional hearing on virtual worlds — or more specifically, mostly on Second Life. There’s a good sort of “landing page” to go explore this from source materials on Terra Nova, including links to an MP3 of the hearings.

Virtually Blind has what seems to be an eyewitness account that I enjoyed as well: Congress Holds First Hearing on Virtual Worlds; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale Testifies.

And naturally, it also hit Reuters.

Common to all the reports is commentary on the occasionally off-target opening remarks of the committee members, some of whom referenced MMORPGs rather than VWs, and some of whom were concerned about terrorism (of course). This has led to some sarcasm in some quarters.

It is going to be important to get deep understanding of virtual worlds of all stripes into the various governmental organizations — and for what it’s worth, I think quite a lot of policymakers are quite a ways along on that understanding. So I wouldn’t be making fun of them just yet.

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