This showed up in my in-box today, and sounds very cool. So if by chance you’re going to be in Spain in July, I’d say it is work checking out. All the info you need should be here.

Modding, Reversing and Intervening in Today’s Gaming Worlds
02.07.07 – 27.07.07
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

In July LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries is organizing four workshops exploring the intersections between videogames, art and reality today. A different side of videogames will be revealed by creators who can uncover their codes, subvert the standards imposed by the industry and can even address social and political issues through them.

Game hardware and software will be used for performances, activism and critique and participants will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the language of videogames and create new meanings and results.

MODDING
An intense workshop tackling the basic notions about modding and editing of Quake III Arena levels with the aid of open source code elements. In order to create fully redistributable games, participants will learn to generate interactive 3D contents for Quake III and to engineer new game features in the game engine’s source code.

BORDERGAMES
The Fiambrera Obrera team will work with digital cameras and image editing, teaching basic levels of 3D modelling as well as some “tricks” and activities related with their software: narrative design and characters, modelling and remodelling of scripts and characters. Participants will be involved in field work in the area of Gijon.

ENTERING THE TERRITORIES OF SECOND LIFE
Second Life (SL) is an online virtual world currently inhabited by over six million “residents”. This workshop explores SL as a platform for art expression, activism and critique. It will be led by a machinima professional, two media artists and a programmer who work on SL on a practical and theoretical level using it as an ideal platform to share ideas and to perform. Participants will learn through collaborative work how to make machinimas, how to write basic scripts and how to use SL as a platform for social action and artistic expression.

CHIPTUNES – 8BIt MUSIC
8bit sound and music is a distinctive feature of early videogames, and has become a seminal contemporary music style utilized by artists and DJs in engaging live audiovisual performances and remixes. This workshop will bring together creators from US and Spain who will work with young people to create music using Gameboys. The workshop will close with an evening of Chiptunes performances with sounds by the artists, the workshop participants and visuals by media artists Entter.

Earlier this week Kotaku blogged on 1Up’s Platform Agnostics: The Most Whored Out Games In History. The reason that I mention the Kotaku post is because, for an image, their post used the Arcade: A Blinkenlight’s Installation version of Tetris.

Seeing this image got my mind back to Arcade making a perfect candidate to be re-entered into the Avant Game List.

The installation featured versions of 4 8-bit all-stars; Tetris, Pong, Breakout, and Pac-Man. Via a customized ISDN control system, individuals could dial in to Arcade with their cellphones and play these modest games on a truly grand scale.

Arcade: A Blinkenlight’s Installation has been added to the Avant Game List.

Btw. Tetris is the most whored out game of all time appearing on 39 separate platforms.

So I used to review games for Inside Mac Games. With due respect to that organization, the experience of being a commercial game reviewer led me to quit and start the first iteration of Avantgaming. I just wasn’t interested in writing in the language that the industry dictates.

So drawing on that experience, I greatly enjoyed listening to OXM’s podcast interview with Shadowrun Lead Developer Mitch Gitelman (FASA Studio Manager). The interview starts at 21:12.

I don’t know if it qualifies as the best developer rant ever, but Raph Koster has some serious competition here

• Not at all related to ruckus raising, but the New York Times has an interesting article today. Coaxing Out Stories From Relics of the Past is a profile piece for PBS’ History Detectives, but it speaks nicely to a project I’m developing which involves historic location-based appropriative games. The quote of the article comes from Wes Cowan, one of the show’s hosts:
  

  “I call history with a big H the history we get in school, with wars and dates,” he said. “It makes people’s eyes glaze over. But there’s another history, with a little h, that gets people really excited. People want to know whether their grandfather fought in the Civil War or World War II, they have a box of letters or a uniform connected to some important event. I don’t care who you are, every family has a story that connects them to history with a big H.”

• The popular reaction to Manhunt 2 getting the big”AO” rating has been interesting to follow. The most entertaining take I’ve read on it came from the MediaPost Publication’s blog Gaming Insider. Blogger Shankar Gupta argues that the AO rating should just be abolished essentially because it causes the game industry to lose revenue and the ESRB has allowed from some subjective ambiguity between what gets a M rating and what gets an AO rating. My comments are all over the post. Honestly, I was hoping that Mr. Gupta was willing to defend his claim a little more.
• Molleindustria has published a new game, and this one is sure to cause a ruckus. OPERATION: PEDOPRIEST is described on their site as:
  

  Once again the Church is in the midst of controversies for the sexual abuses committed by the priests. The Vatican created a task force to prevent sinners from being captured and put on trial according to the secular states’ laws. You have to control the operations: establish a code of silence and hide the scandal until the media attention moves elsewhere!

  Ian @ Water Cooler Games has already said everything that I might say (but better), so here’s a quip of his analysis:

  Paolo tells us that the game is based loosely on the BBC documentary Sex Crimes and the Vatican, which you can watch on YouTube if you want the backgrounder. The documentary is about a secret procedure for dealing with child sex abuse.

  Of course, the idea of a “secret procedure” is perfect fodder for a videogame. The game itself doesn’t so much operationalize the reported Vatican strategy as render it absurd and psychotic. The player musters eunuchs to intercept parents, priests, and police to disrupt the priest’s progress. There is a rhetoric of failure at work here, of course, because infinite attention would be required to succeed at preventing all abuse.

  You can play the game online at Molleindustria’s site. Don’t let the characteristic cartoonishness fool you though, this is a game — perhaps the only game — with an explicit representation of child sex abuse.

The greatest contribution that the first iteration of Avant Gaming made to the gaming community was the Avant Game List. It was a list of games that “that in a certain time and place, by design, modification or accident, offer a unique experience of play through the subversion of mainstream conventions.”

As I have had more than a few emails asking what happened to it, I apologize for the time it is taking to reconstruct this resource. My goal is to repopulate the list with its old entries, as well as, add new titles. Personally, it is turning out to be an interesting experience. In revisiting this old content, I’m forced to reconsider the validity of my previous arguments. There have been a couple “What the hell was I thinking”’s.

The first entry on the new list is an oldie but goodie, Jim Andrew’s Arteroids. In revisiting the material, I was pleased to learn that Jim has continued development on the piece and the game is progressing nicely.

So without further adieu, Arteroids has been added to the Avant Game List.

Via Cool Hunting, Sotheby’s has listed a variable treasure trove of consisting of over 2000 pieces of vintage Atari history.

Sotheby’s Lot Description:

An extensive archive of original marketing materials (as detailed below) from the “Golden Age” of Atari, ca. 1981 to 1983, comprising more than 2,000 items of widely varying sizes and formats, including manuscript memorandum, internal specification guidelines, original sketches, blue lines, mechanicals, proofs, color separations (including acetates), and screen diagrams; the archive is mostly related to marketing materials for Atari games and game consoles, especially boxes and manuals, but includes some early design and graphic work for specific game characters and components; the archive contains mostly English-language materials, but proofs and mechanicals for cartons and manuals in French, German, Spanish, and Italian are also present. The whole archive organized into approximately 135 large file folders for graphic materials.

The auction began today at 10 am. You can view the lot here (registration required).

Full catalog notes have been archived below…

(more…)

I don’t have a source to attribute this to, but to whoever did this:

I like your style.

So even though I employed the term “big games” in my Masters project, I’m not a fan of it- especially when it is used to describe an entire genre (which I call appropriative games). In order to illustrate my hesitance with this term, I thought it best to examine a fairly composite definition of “big games.”

The particular definition I am using is from New Media Literacies Media Producer Profile Series. The 7th edition of the series”Learn About Big Games!,” includes interviews with appropriative gaming luminaries Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal and Mattia Romeo. The definition itself, is found in a linked Word document.

Big Games:
Games for big groups of people in real world spaces (such as a park or the
streets) that use mobile communication technologies like cell phones to link
people together in gameplay.

Big groups of people… I have yet to be presented with compelling reason as to why the participation “big groups” of people would be a defining characteristic of play. How many is big anyway? If big is 20 people and only 18 show up, do you lose your big game license? I understand that 100 or so people doing something “weird” in public adds to the spectacle, but spectacle isn’t gameplay. If spectacle is something you are concerned with, I might suggest that you are more interested in performance than play.

Additionally, I believe that there is largely unexplored potential for single-player and small group appropriative gaming experiences. Let’s face it when the big companies come along and want to market appropriative games, the single player experiences are going to be the moneymakers.

In real world spaces… I’ve heard often heard the appropriative gaming movement referred to a “return to playing in the real world!” …some of us never left. By simply defining this gaming movement by saying its games take place in the “real world,” the primary operational quality of this medium is ignored. These games appropriate space. They are played in environments not originally designed to accommodate them, and do so with significant alteration to that environment. Whether this happens in New York City or in World of Warcraft is of little consequence to gameplay.

use mobile communication technologies… I think computation (well, the designer’s use of technology/computation) is a key attribute of appropriative games. Particularly, there are non-computation appropriative games which I will call “big games” until I can come up with a better term. “Pervasive games” are appropriative games that employ technology and computation that individuals most likely carry with them or have access to on a day-to-day basis. Finally, “ubiquitous games” are appropriative games that make use of technology and computation that most people don’t have daily access to.

Ultimately I think that most definitions / frameworks that attempt to frame appropriative games make good sound bites, but fail when one attempts to do more specific work with them. Furthermore if appropriative games are to deliver on some of their immense potential, more specific theoretical and conceptual work definitely needs to be done.

Here’s a nice little bit of humor from the Onion that people should enjoy:

Second Life Makes Dream Of Owning Fictitious Coffee Shop Come True

HAILEY, ID—As a teenager, Kerry Jarrett never thought she would have the opportunity to own and operate a completely fabricated coffee shop and performance space. But thanks to Linden Lab’s popular Second Life digital world, Jarrett, 31, has turned her dream into a virtual reality.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve pictured myself owning a multipolygonal 3-D representation of what a coffee shop might be in the real world,” said Jarrett, who has invested hundreds of real dollars and thousands of actual hours in Never Bean, her digital pseudo-business in Second Life’s popular Scurfield district. “Since I’ve never been too interested in inventory tracking, accounting, or interacting with people except inside a complex computer simulation, running this simulated coffee shop has been the greatest experience of my life.”

Jarrett’s shop is popular among Second Life regulars for its atmosphere, its 24-hour availability, and its location between the T-Mobile dealership and the 10,000-foot glowing green penis.

My Masters project “Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.)” is now online. Falling somewhere in-between a thesis and design document, the project addresses the recent emergence of what has been called (among other things): Pervasive games, ubiquitous games, street games, big games, alternate reality games, mobile games, location-based games, total games, cross media games, augmented reality games, ambient games, location-aware games, mixed-reality games, etc. The primary failing of existing work done in this area is that it fails to identify and address the primary characteristic of this gaming genre: the appropriation of space for play.

As such, “Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.)” is an examination of the genre of appropriative games and its three sub-genres ubiquitous games, pervasive games, and non-computational big games.

Excerpt:

Appropriative gaming is a genre of games that are designed for environments not originally intended to accommodate them. Appropriative game designers study an environment (city streets, rural fields, virtual worlds, etc.) and create innovative methods by which to temporarily reallocate the environment’s natural affordances in the service of focused gameplay. The genre of appropriative gaming encompasses such works as Assassins, Pac-Manhattan, and ARQuake.

The frameworks that are developed to facilitate these gaming experiences are typically not permanent. An infrastructure for an appropriative game is often erected for a single game session and torn down as soon as play has concluded. It would be inappropriate to attempt to characterize this guerilla tendency as being either positive or negative for the genre. These flashpoints of activity may appear to inhibit the genre’s proliferation while posing a significant design challenge, but they remain principal to the genre’s aesthetic. Additionally, this pro tem inclination does not prevent the design of persistent appropriative games. However if the presence of an appropriative game significantly alters the permanent physicality of an environment, it ceases to be an appropriative game.