Archive for the 'Games' Category

Office Voodoo

Published on May 23, 2004 in Design, Film, Games, The role of the producer, The role of the user, Uncategorized and Video. Closed

Office Voodoo is a great example of an interactive video project that uses a cinematic/televisual aesthetic with real life actors whilst maintaining meaningful real time user interaction. It is rare to a project which achieves all these aims at once.

Office Voodoo features footage of two bored workers as they sit in an office. By physically manipulating ‘voodoo’ dolls with red flashing eyes, two users may control the characters’ emotional states. Depending on the combination of the two characters’ moods a real time editing engine cuts together shots which form a kind of ‘algorithmic sitcom’, as the site says. The editing engine respects the conventions of shot / reverse shot and continuity editing, making for a fairly seamless TV like program.

While I haven’t played with it myself, the About Office Voodoo movie on the site shows examples of people using the system and the effects of their actions on the characters. It reminds me of being a director holding casting auditions where I would get actors to act out a scene in a couple of different ways. My favourite was when I asked an actor to rap a David WIlliamson play.

From the site:

“With advances in compression standards and faster, larger hard disks, the film form is finally freeing itself from the inherent linearity of the celluloid or tape substrate, as it becomes chunks of data that can be retrieved instantaneously. This explosion of the film medium is redefining our approach to narrative filmmaking and over the viewer’s control of the time flow and the plot. In the attempt to carry on the tradition of mimetic storytelling with real actors, this piece brings together the craft of cinema with automated editing techniques, trying to replicate in new media semiotics what 1920s soviet filmmakers like Kuleshov did to film with montage. Here, the knowledge of the editor is represented in the machine, and the rules are scripted according to user interaction. As a filmmaker and a programmer, the author is telling a story not only with audiovisual media but also with computer code.” [my emphasis]

More Links:
Michael Lew
Media Lab Europe

The Getaway

Published on November 21, 2003 in Games and Hypertext literature. Closed

buzzcut.com – The Getaway

This review/discussion of the popular Playstation 2 game. I really enjoyed playing The Getaway despite its limitiations. The Buzzcut review likens the game to the platypus “both The Getaway and the platypus will remain cousins of the half-done hybrid, glorious in their jammed-together natures and doomed to the eternal status of curiosity.” The reviewer echoes Espen Aarseth’s concerns on narrative/interactive crossover works. As Aarseth wrote in Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock: The Temporality of Ergodic Art “? there seems to be a limit to the usefulness of these modal crossovers, in that an audience will want the work to perform as either one or the other, and their own role to be either that of the player or observer.” (Aarseth, 1999).

In my experience the game was much more engaging than many others which attempt such a crossover. In particular I find the similar Enter The Matrix to be almost unplayable. In some parts of the game your entire ‘mission’ seems to be to walk from one side of the screen to the other before waiting for the next room to load. The game asks you to be the player in some situations where a cutscene would suffice.

With other extremely popular and well designed games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City exploring this territory it looks like the slightly awkward platypus is becoming a successful genre in itself.

siggraph2001

Published on September 5, 2003 in Design, Games and Web. Closed

SIGGRAPH 2001 – Art and Design

Planet Jemma

Published on August 18, 2003 in Games and Web. Closed

Wright, T. and R. Bevan (2002). Planet Jemma, XPT. 2003. http://www.planetjemma.com/

Online Caroline

Published on August 18, 2003 in Games, Hypertext literature, Uncategorized and Web. Closed

Bevan, R. and T. Wright (2000). Online Caroline, XPT. 2003. http://www.onlinecaroline.com/

Aporia and Ephiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock

Published on August 18, 2003 in Bibliography, Games and Hypertext literature. Closed

Aarseth, E. J. (1999). Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock: The Temporality of Ergodic Art. Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. M.-L. Ryan. Indiana, Indiana University Press: 31-41.

Cloudmakers

Published on August 16, 2003 in Film, Games and Web. Closed

cloudmakers.org

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

Published on August 16, 2003 in Bibliography, Games, Hypertext literature and Uncategorized. Closed

1. Ergodic Literature
“The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organisation of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange” (Aarseth, 1997: 1)
“In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (Aarseth, 1997: 1)
Aarseth argues that while reader-resonse theorists would note that the reader/user/consumer is central to the exchange, the concepts of the cybertexts and ergodic literature take this idea further as the reader must assemble or negotiate the text in the physical space as well as the conceptual in order to create meaning.

The distinction between linear and nonlinear texts is an important one in the definition of the cybertext as distinct from regular texts. For Aarseth the difference lies in the text itself rather than its reading. It could be argued that any reading is linear since it takes place in a certain order in time but it is the text that is being read from which is crucial to Aarseth’s distinction. He writes that “A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression” and that “… when you read from a cybertext you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard.” (1997: 3).

“Why is the variable expression of the nonlinear text so easily mistaken for the semantic ambiguity of the linear text? The answer, or at least one answer, can be found in a certain rhetorical model used by literary theory. I refer to the idea of a narrative text as a labyrinth, a game, or an imaginary world, in which ther reader can explore at will, get lost, discover secret paths, play around, follow the rules, and so on. The problem with these powerful metaphors, when they begin to affect the critic’s perspective and judgement, is that they enable a systematic misrepresentation of the relationship between narrative text and reader; a spatiodynamic fallacy where the narrative is not perceived as a presentation of a world but rather as that world itself.”. “In other words, there is a short circuit between the signifier and the signified, a suspension of diff?rance that projects an objective layer beyond the text, a primary metaphysical structure that generates both textual sign and our understanding of it, rather than the other way around.” (1997:3-4)

Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Espen Aarseth’s Web site

On Julian Dibbell’s Tiny Life

Published on August 12, 2003 in Games and Web. Closed

[nettime] Memoir/Technology: On Julian Dibbell’s Tiny Life

Ergodic videogames?

Published on August 3, 2003 in Games, Hypertext literature and Web. Closed

Games Studies 0102: The myth of the ergodic videogame. By James Newman

Towards a philosophy of game design

Published on June 29, 2003 in Games and Web. Closed

Joystick101.org || getting in-depth, with games.

Interesting piece on art vs game which argues game as art

Alternate Reality

Published on March 25, 2003 in Games and Web. Closed

I found this New York Times article through slashdot.

It is about the phenomenon of Alternate Reality Gaming, a kind of online gaming in which clues are written into seemingly authentic constucted websites. The article notes that one of the most popular examples of AR gaming was associated with the promotion of the Spielberg/Kubrick film A.I.

To me the concept of AR seems much more appealing than Virtual Reality. It is definately more do-able in terms of production without a huge budget or access to ridiculous amounts of processing power. It seems to be capable of a different kind of immersion in a constructed gamespace, one which can be indistinguishable from reality. In many cases AR gaming only has to simulate ‘real’ websites since it is accessed through the web itself where VR often attempts photorealism and audiovisual immersion.

I definitly need to look into this more…