Art History of Games event in Atlanta

 Posted by (Visited 7838 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jan 282010
 

Got an email today from Jason Rohrer, asking if I was going. Alas no — not only did my son have surgery yesterday, but I have jury duty on Monday. 🙁 But the event looks very cool:

The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form.

Also featured in the conference is the premiere of commissioned art games by Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales and Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman. The three commissioned games will be on display at Kai Lin Art (800 Peachtree St. N.E.) from Thursday, February 4 through Tuesday, March 2. The opening reception will take place Friday, February 5 from 8:00 pm until 10:00 pm.

Read on for more details:

The symposium will be held Feb. 4-6 in the High Museum of Art’s Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., in midtown Atlanta.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

— ARTHISTORYOFGAMES.COM.

Brenda Brathwaite’s game Train will be on display as well, and Eric & Nathalie’s game is non-digital, so this looks to cover both the videogame and boardgame side of things.

There’s an afterparty too:

just finalized the details of the Art History of Games After Party; Sat Feb 6th. 7-10pm @ W Atlanta Midtown sponsored by Indiecade and IGDA Atlanta.

It’s an Indie Game Slam Open Mic where you can sign-up to give a 3 minute overview of your game.

Here is the Facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=261265599581&ref=mf

lose/lose

 Posted by (Visited 9785 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Sep 252009
 

Here’s an interesting game experiment — shades of Ender’s Game, in a way!

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

via lose/lose and @mrseb

Video is below. I am amused that the top player blew away thousands of files on their hard drive.

Continue reading »

Art game guy Jason Rohrer in Metaplace

 Posted by (Visited 7565 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Aug 182009
 

Jason Rohrer, known for games like Passage, will be on the Metaplace stage this Friday. I am sure that most of the readers of this blog know about him, but I will paste all this info in anyway! I’ll embed the actual event when it happens (and the link to The Stage is on the blog sidebar as well), so you can just come here to attend.

If you know indie game development or art game communities that might be interested, pass this along!

http://www.metaplace.com/calendar/event/4v7f3tndou1tkg18l0kvfsvfmk

Where: TheStage <http://www.metaplace.com/TheStage/play>
When: August 21
Duration: 12:00pm – 1:00pm PDT

Come chat in a Q&A Session with Indie Game Designer and programmer Jason Rohrer!

Please submit any questions ahead of time by sending a Metamail to Cuppycake!

In 2007, Rohrer created the free indie game Passage, which received mainstream media coverage for its depiction of mortality and the tradeoffs of married life in an interactive experience.

Rohrer releases all his software for free download under the GNU GPL or into the public domain and tries to earn his living via donations from the users of his software. However, he does charge for the iPhone ports of his games.

He creates a game a month for The Escapist. His fifth game, Between, is hosted by Esquire Magazine as an adjunct to Rohrer’s profile in the December 2008 issue.

Rohrer’s latest game, Primrose, was released on February 19, 2009. It is a departure from the art-game theme, and is a simple puzzle game. He is currently working on a game for the Nintendo DS to be published by Majesco in 2010. It is a strategy game “about diamond trading in Angola on the eve of the passage of the Kimberly Process.”

Previous Projects:
konspire2b: a pseudonymous channel-based file-distribution system
token word: a Xanadu-style text editing system
tangle: a proxy server which tries to find relationships between websites a user visits.
MUTE: a file sharing network with anonymity in mind.
Monolith: a thought experiment that might be relevant to digital copyright. This has expanded to a computer program implemented on his ideas.
seedBlogs: a modular building block that lets you add PHP and MySQL-backed dynamic content to any website.
silk: a web-based hypertext system to simplify web page linking. Similar to wiki markup.
hyperlit: a literary hypertext authoring system.
subreal: a distributed evolution system.

Read more here:
http://blogs.ign.com/citizenmike/2009/08/10/126533/

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/future-of-video-game-design-1208

Play This Thing on Brenda’s Train game

 Posted by (Visited 10527 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 122009
 

Play This Thing writes up Train, the controversial game that Brenda Brathwaite made that continues to stir discussion here on the blog.

She has sent me the rules to Train as well, but I don’t think I will write them up; my reaction is much like Greg Costikyan’s — the game is meant to be played, not the rules read with knowledge of the point. So discussing it solely from that point of view seems to undermine the actual work to some degree.

New art game: Today I Die

 Posted by (Visited 10530 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 062009
 

How can I resist a game that combines poetry and puzzle and art game? Here’s Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die. There are multiple endings, by the way.

The game is brief, but interesting and affecting. Worth checking out, and it runs in the browser, so no download required.

His donation model is interesting too. Custom work for people, for a price, akin to how some musicians are offering house concerts for people who buy ultra-fancy packages of their recordings.

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