It's been in stores for only one week, but Mirror's Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts, Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games without Frontiers."

Mirror's Edge, available for Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (a PC version of Mirror’s Edgewill ship in North America in January 2009), is set in a police state in the near future. The game has its players assume the persona of Faith, a courier whose mission is to deliver sensitive information, which requires a lot of leaping between rooftops to elude agents of the totalitarian government. Whereas many other first-person shooter games stabilize a player's vision as their characters perform, in Mirror's Edge, players can see their arms and legs pumping as they run, and their perspective is jostled when they jump, slide, fight or climb over obstacles. The action is reminiscent of Parkour, which involves a lot of running, hopping fences, climbing parking garages—anything to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. (Several examples are can be seen at the Parkour.tv Web site.)

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Blast Theory are presenting Can You See Me Now? as part of the Arte.Mov festival in Belo Horizonte along with TRUCOLD & Other Works in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Can You See Me Now? is a chase game played online and on the streets. Players are dropped at random locations into a virtual map of Belo Horizonte. Tracked by satellites, Blast Theory's runners appear online next to your player. The runners use handheld computers showing the positions of online players to guide them in the chase. Can You See Me Now? won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Prix Ars Electronica and was nominated for a BAFTA Award.

Belo Horizonte Performance Dates: November 20th and 21st 4pm - 7pm (BRST) and 22nd 11am - 2pm (BRST)
Artist Talk: Blast Theory artist Ju Row Farr will give an artist talk on November 23rd, 4pm at Palácio das Artes.
Arte.Mov then moves on to Sao Paulo where Blast Theory will be presenting TRUCOLD & Other Works. Blast Theory artist Nick Tandavanitj will also be presenting a discussion on Blast Theory's work on November 27th from 7pm - 10 pm (BRST).
Location: LAB-MIS, AV, Europa, 158, Jardim Europa, Sao Paulo.

For more details:
www.artemov.net
www.canyouseemenow.co.uk
www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_trucold.html

Posted in Location-based |

by Jonathan Follett

There is a world of information that we can't immediately see in the streets we walk and drive in, and in the buildings in which we work, play and live. The great potential of the mobile web – whether it is delivered by smart phone, automobile navigation system, or other device – is to reveal this hidden world to us, by adding geospatial and timing data to the user experience. In this way, the mobile web is poised to become the delivery mechanism for a new generation of location-aware applications.

Geo-specific information will enable real connections between the digital world and the physical one, so that people can freely interact with virtual data in real spaces. An old friend from out of town is at the restaurant down the block right now; your dry cleaner is closing early due to the holiday, but he has your suit ready; and an apartment in the building you're passing by just went on the market. As location-based mobile products and services increase in popularity, all these pieces of data become immediately knowable and useable in real time.

Location-based data has the ability to not only enhance the communication, productivity, and entertainment applications for which we regularly use mobile devices, but also to create a new hybrid experience at the intersection of real and virtual worlds. This mobile geospatial web will allow the information and imagination that runs freely in cyberspace, to become increasingly available and integrated in our physical space – and with that comes both possibilities and problems.

Read more at the Vodafone Receiver Magazine.

Posted in Location-based |

Luci Gutiérrez
By RANDALL STROSS

Justine Cassell, director of Northwestern University?s Center for Technology & Social Behavior, has written about the efforts in the 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately, increase the representation of women in computer science. In commenting as a co-contributor in a new book, ?Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming,? Ms. Cassell writes of the failure of these efforts, ?The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were ?boys? toys? and that true girls didn?t play with computers.? She said last week that some people in the field still believed that the answer to reversing declining enrollment was building the right game.

More at the NYT.

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By BRUCE LAMBERT

Maxine Hicks for The New York Times

I BRAG to people that I was probably the first kid to play a video game,” said Robert Dvorak Jr. That happened half a century ago here at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Mr. Dvorak’s father had assembled what was arguably the first video game, called Tennis for Two.

The game, primitive by modern standards, featured two control boxes whose buttons prompted a bright green ball of streaking light to bounce back and forth over a symbolic net. The action took place on a round oscilloscope screen that measured all of five inches across. “It was very simple to operate,” said Mr. Dvorak, now 57 and an electrical engineer in Saugerties.

More at the NYT.

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Mobile games - they're an ongoing problem. I've been writing about them for ten years; longer, perhaps, than any other UK technology journalist. There have been some wonderful examples, up there with the better DS titles. But there has also been a lot of unforgivable s**t, contributing to a customer churn rate that would have a console games publishers in floods of uncontrollable tears. According to Nokia, 78% more phone users are downloading games than they were three years ago. But we're still looking at a tiny fraction of the Java phone userbase.

So anyway, I was at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome last week, and here's some of what I took away about the future of this much-maligned sector. (The joke around the summit was, if videogames are the new Hollywood, mobile games are the new porn industry - the slightly shadier, muckier step-brother to the real glamour player...)

Read more here.

Posted in Location-based |

By Tim Scannell

Just as in real estate, the mobile world is increasingly realizing the value of location, location, location. But while the housing market wrestles with woes stemming from the subprime mortgage implosion, vendors of location-based services (LBS) for messaging, marketing and advertising are struggling to overcome their own obstacles.

Chief among these is consumer privacy in a highly connected and always-available mobile environment. Wireless carriers already know, more or less, where their subscribers are. Now advertisers are getting the tools to easily piece together a profile based on mobile Web surfing and online activities from increasingly powerful Web-based phones. Not surprisingly, many consumers aren't thrilled at the prospect.

Read more here.

Posted in Location-based |

by Andrew Gil

Location in a mobile context is the Holy Grail for many people. The one item we carry with us almost all the time is uniquely positioned (pun intended) to be able to add location information to everything we do whilst mobile.

In theory, getting the current location of a mobile phone and working out an approximate location should not be that difficult. TV shows such as CSI and movies like Minority Report reflect an always-on society where information on a person’s whereabouts is instantly available. In practice however, location is quite difficult and expensive to deliver to a mass market audience.

From Vodafone Receiver Magazine.

Posted in Location-based |

Wednesday marks the release of the HTC Dream T-Mobile G1 featuring Google Android. If you're planning to pick one up, you're probably going to want to do something other than make calls and send texts. I mean it is a phone, for crying out loud.

On the same day, Zelfi will release a new software development and gaming platform for Google Android, called Joyity.

Once you have it installed, you'll be able to play a number of games designed for the platform. Joyity games are unique in that they are physically interactive and some require you to actually walk or run around your city in order to play.

more...

Posted in Location-based |

December 1-2, 2008

Georgia Tech Technology Square Research Building

85 5th Street, Atlanta, GA

Step in to the vanguard of digital gaming at Georgia Tech?s 4th annual Living Game Worlds symposium to be held December 1-2, 2008.   Raph Koster and Chris Klaus headline this year?s conference which will showcase ?InterPlay,? networked online play and the rapidly-growing domains of multiplayer games and virtual worlds.  The symposium will also feature a pioneers panel including luminaries Richard Bartle, Brian Green, Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer and Pavel Curtis.  Early registration ends October 31. Register now at http://gameworlds.gatech.edu

Media Inquiries: gameworlds-media@lists.gatech.edu
All other Inquiries: gameworlds@lists.gatech.edu

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The videos of the presentations from the last three speakers in the Future of Games speaker series are now available online at the DGRC website. You can see the index of videos here or view the series main page (for details on the last four semesters' worth of talks) here:

All future talks will be recorded and will be available via on-line video.

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New media encompass both new opportunities and new dilemmas for scholars. This ICA pre-conference invites participants to reflect on ways to analyze, preserve , and understand new media in a manner that is both sensitive to the past and to future needs of historical research. The history of new media is a burgeoning new subfield, but one aspect that often goes overlooked is how new media involve new ways of doing history. The purpose of this pre-conference is to focus attention on the shifting needs of historical scholarship about new media. It will include a demonstration of new technologies for collaboration and visualization under development at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago.

We welcome papers on a wide array of historically-grounded themes. The following illustrations of topics suggest ? but are not intended to limit ? topics suitable for paper submissions:

* The idea of ?storage? as it relates to new media and historiography.

* The contextualization of historical problems in a new media milieu.

* The changing meanings and implications of inscription as the internet more fully embraces a range of audio-visual forms of communication.

* Ideological implications of speculations regarding the future.

* The changing place of ?the virtual? in new media studies.

* Digital history.

The reputed move away from print media to new media.

* Changing meanings of the ?global? in relation to new media.

* Ubiquity, indexing, correlation and access.

* New media and transformations in the scholarly enterprise.

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted no later than November 1, 2008. Send abstracts to: David Park, Chair of the ICA Communication History Interest Group, at park@lakeforest.edu.

Authors will be informed whether abstracts have been accepted by 21 November 2008. Papers will be due by May 1, 2009. The program for this pre-conference will take place all day on May 21, 2009, the date established for ICA pre-conferences. The available time allows for three consecutive blocks of short presentations and roundtable-style discussions.

The pre-conference is a joint initiative by the Communication History Interest Group of the ICA, New Media & Society and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory and Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The pre-conference will be held at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and there will be transportation available for participants and attendees between the conference hotel and the UIC campus.

Organized by * Dave Park, Chair, Communication History Interest Group, http://www.icahdq.org/sections/secdetinfo.asp?SecCode=DIV23 * Nicholas Jankowski and Steve Jones, co-editors New Media & Society, http://newmediaandsociety.com Click here for more information: http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/2009/future.asp

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Budapest, Hungary 10 - 14 October 2008

Where: Gödör Klub, Budapest V. ker., Erzsébet tér

Times: 6pm - 10pm on Oct 10, 13, 14 and 4.30pm - 10pm on Oct 11 & 12

Take a cycle ride in the streets around Budapest. A games console mounted on your handlebars will guide you as you roll through the city. Slip down an alley and find yourself in a quiet corner. Make a recording, then move on glimpsing traces of other players, eavesdropping under a bridge or from the top of a multi storey car park.

Rider Spoke continues Blast Theory?s fascination with how games and new communication technologies are creating new social spaces.

Please note that Rider Spoke must be booked in advance, for full details contact Budapest Autumn Festival customer service H?1052 Budapest, Szervita tér 5. Tel. +36(0)61 486 3311 or email ticket@festivalcity.hu

"Rider Spoke consists of a highly original and exciting form of augmented travel...a delicate, almost intangible work. Like other Blast Theory performances, it combines elements of trust and risk, irony and politics, confession and exposure, orientation and disorientation, everyday life and digital worlds." - Realtime, Australia

"The show's greatest gift is that it manages to embrace the remorseless urban rush of the City while insisting on the individual's ability to pierce it with quiet reflection." - Metro, London

Rider Spoke in Budapest is co-organised by Artopolis Association and Budapest Autumn Festival. This presentation has been made possible by the generous support of the British Council.

Rider Spoke is available for touring in 2009 and 2010 for additional information: julianne@blasttheory.co.uk +44(0)1273 413 455 Rider Spoke will be presented in Brighton Oct/Nov 2008. More details to follow. Rider Spoke is sponsored by Trek Rider Spoke is a collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and Sony Net Services in Berlin under the auspices of the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming (IPerG). Blast Theory is supported by Arts Council England.

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By MOTOKO RICH

When PJ Haarsma wrote his first book, a science fiction novel for preteenagers, he didn't think just about how to describe Orbis, the planetary system where the story takes place. He also thought about how it should look and feel in a video game.

The online game that Mr. Haarsma designed not only extends the fictional world of the novel, it also allows readers to play in it. At the same time, Mr. Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel.

"You can't just make a book anymore," said Mr. Haarsma, a former advertising consultant. "Pairing a video game with a novel for young readers," he added, "brings the book into their world, as opposed to going the other way around?"

Read more here:

Posted in General |

October 8, 2008 -- With many people probably thinking that computer games are a sedentary enough pastime as it is - with the possible exception of the Wii - the prospect of games that don?t even require the lifting of a finger to operate a controller might not be great news for parents hoping to get their couch-bound prodigies moving. That hasn?t stopped ?wearable? consumer bio-sensors manufacturer, NeuroSky, Inc., demonstrating a brainwave-controlled video game At the Tokyo Game Show 2008 in Makuhari, Japan, on October 9 and 10. The technical demonstration based on a new game concept being jointly developed with Square Enix Co., Ltd. featured the NeuroSky commercial headset, dubbed the MindSet, operating in conjunction with Windows PC machines.

Like the Emotiv Systems interface we encountered earlier this year, the recently introduced MindSet resembles a pair of headphones. It incorporates a single electrode contacting the user?s forehead while reading the player?s brainwave information, or EEG data. The headset registers the current state of relaxation or concentration of players, allowing them to perform a variety of actions within the game. Although demonstration was carried out using Windows based PCs, the MindSet is also capable of interfacing to a variety of gaming platforms, including console and mobile platforms.

For further info visit NeuroSky

Full article

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