Tardigotchi is an artwork featuring two pets: a living organism and an alife avatar. These two disparate beings find themselves the unlikely denizens of a portable computing enclosure. The main body for this enclosure is a brass sphere, housing the alife avatar in an LED screen and the tardigrade within a prepared slide. A tardigrade is a common microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length. The alife avatar is a caricature of this tardigrade, its behaviour is partially autonomous, but it also reflects a considerable amount of expression directly from the tardigrade’s activities (like eating).

http://www.tardigotchi.com

Inside a Dead Skyscraper is the newest project by Molleindustria, a music video game for the song “The building” by Jesse Stiles.

“The game and the song are based on Jesse’s brief tenure as a videographer in the partially destroyed buildings surrounding the World Trade Center site. Ideally, it is meant to be a critical answer to the proliferation of rhythm games ‘a la Guitar Hero. These karaoke-derived products simply capitalize on already successful music, generating royalties for a dying record industry and reinforcing the mythology of the rock star as super-human that common people should identify with.
An alternative approach to the musical game form would link the independent music and independent games scenes. Indie music games could promote unknown bands to the multi-tasking, hyperactive, interaction-addicted new generations. They could enhance the listening experience while being autonomous works as the best music videos have been done in the last 30 years. ”

http://www.molleindustria.org

Our lives are full of quests. Remember that birthday card, send that email, or drag ourselves to the gym on a regular basis. Trouble is, sometimes we’re having too much fun doing other virtual stuff like hunting down rare items in World of Warcraft or leveling-up in Facebook games, to remember the stuff we’re supposed to be doing.
EpicWin is an iPhone app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.

http://www.epicwinapp.com

Originally created for the Darklight Festival’s ‘4 Day Movie’ project, Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and Motion Capture animation were used to insert the players’ in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit.

http://vimeo.com/9157869

The 8-Bit Cities project, which started with 8-Bit NYC, is an attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space: the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation.
Created by by Brett Camper.

http://8bitcity.com

[via creative applications]

Digital: A Love Story is a game by Christina Love set entirely within an Amiga Workbench desktop. “A computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988. Crawl BBSes, uncover conspiracies, commit telephone fraud, fall in love. Welcome to the 20th century.”

http://www.scoutshonour.com/digital/

[via Creative Applications]

Every day the same dream, by Molleindustria, is a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor. The idea was to charge the cyclic nature of most video games with some kind of meaning (i.e. the “play again” is not a game over). Yes, there is an end state, you can “beat” the game.

http://www.molleindustria.org

The typical browsing experience is conducted through a single application window. This is indeed a useful, practical thing. Browser Pong instead exists between a collection of windows. During play the negative space between windows is transformed into a playing field—the abstracted tennis court of Pong. The idea of thinking inside or outside some “box” is of course a dead and beaten horse. Browser Pong attempts to think with the boxes. (Stewart Smith of Stewdio).

http://stewdio.org/pong

The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine, by Marc Owens, is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.

http://www.marcowens.co.uk

Xbox 360 Self Portraits, by Marque Cornblatt, are executed within various games available on the Xbox 360 game console. The artist’s avatar and all other elements were created using the “character creation” tools provided within each game. There was no use of hacking, programing, or other methods beyond the options provided within the game itself used to augment each piece. The inherent limitations of the game tools present a conceptual challenge to craft digital representations of the self which accurately reflect the nature of the artist’s personae, vs. the essentialized character presumed by the game’s designers.

www.marquecornblatt.com

They Watch, by Workspace Unlimited, is an immersive art installation with virtual characters literally watching visitors. Several duplicates of the virtual characters – one man, one woman, and both portraits of the artists – surround and interact with visitors, who are tracked as they move about the physical space, and even projected into the virtual space. Years of research and development with game-technology have resulted in a 360° audio-visual environment, exploiting a 15-meter-wide panoramic screen and a 32-channel sound system. The subtle collaboration of the real and virtual agents and environments conflate to engender a hybrid space where the observer becomes the observed.

http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2009/fall/workspace/
http://www.workspace-unlimited.org

“The vacuum, long an instrument for chasing cats, has now been turned against its own. What better use for automatic home appliances than to have them chase each other in classic video game style? Built using our spare time, Roomba Pac-Man is designed to showcase the extensive Unmanned Aerial System software suite that we have developed to support our personal research. It was also a great opportunity to use some of our skills for our own entertainment. ”

http://pacman.elstonj.com

A crew of Freeborders took over a San Francisco street to create a real life video game. Which game? Tetris of course. The tetraminoes are giant neon structures set up over every skater’s head.

http://www.freebord.com

Electronic Snowball Fight is a life-sized, electronic game for your yard, based on an Arduino microprocessor. The necessary code and schematics are downloadable from the website, as well as some addictional pictures.

http://randompool.com/snowball/Arduino_Game.html Share/Save]]> http://www.random-magazine.net/2009/09/electronic-snowball-fight/feed/ 0 http://www.random-magazine.net/2009/09/headbang-hero/ http://www.random-magazine.net/2009/09/headbang-hero/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:03:49 +0000 vtanni http://www.random-magazine.net/?p=1612

Headbang Hero, by Tiago Martins, Ricardo Nascimento and Andreas Zingerle is a music/dance video game for testing and improving your headbanging prowess. A special wig is used as a game controller, feeding motion data to the game software. The game analyses in real time how well your headbanging follows the rhythm of the music. You are awarded points for your personal headbanging choreography… but you should be aware that your health is at risk! To stress this point Headbang Hero also analyses how hazardous your performance is. As opposed to what happens in games where the player is in control of an avatar, in Headbang Hero what matters is the player’s own health. The game keeps track of two distinct aspects of the player’s performance. The first is the player’s (potentially heroic) sense of style and rhythm as he headbangs along to the music. The second is the amount of health damage the player is causing himself in the quest to become a hero. When the game ends the player receives a printed health report based on his performance analysis. Included in this report are tips on how to improve the performance and advice on how to avoid injuries.
Headbang hero is currently installed in Linz for Ars Electronica 2009 (Interface Culture Exhibition. 4-8 september 2009).

http://www.headbanghero.com

Sportpong is an interactive physical computer game. The field is projected on the floor, two or more players can fight in teams against each other. With a paddle on each foot you hit the ball to the goal or to defend your goal. Not only smartnes and reactivity let you win, also geometric appreciation and teamplay is required. Sportpong is a mobile game which can be installed in locations of various dimensions both indoors and outdoors.

www.sportpong.ch

Dear Esther, an Half-Life 2 mod, is part of a research project based at the University of Portsmouth, UK. The aim was to use Source to create something radically different from normal: an interactive story that dispensed with traditional gameplay and focused instead on an open-ended, semi-random narrative.
A deserted island… a lost man… memories of a fatal crash… a book written by a dying explorer. Dear Esther is a ghost story told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/dear-esther

The Path is a short horror game – developed by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn’s Tale of Tales – inspired by older versions of Little Red Ridinghood, set in modern day. The Path offers an atmospheric experience of exploration, discovery and introspection through a unique form of gameplay, designed to immerse you deeply into its dark themes. Every interaction in the game expresses an aspect of the narrative. The six protagonists each have their own age and personality and allow the player to live through the tale in different ways. Most of the story, however, relies on your active imagination.

The Path is designed with accessibility in mind. There are no ticking clocks or monsters to defeat. No hard puzzles will ever halt your progress. Most activities in the game are entirely optional and voluntary. The player has all the freedom in the world to explore and experience. The Path is a Slow Game.

http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath

Mark Essen is a game artist living in Los Angeles and he recently received his B.A. from Bard College. His games have been shown at music venues and arts festivals around the world. His works are known for their odd control schemes, masochistic difficulty and nonsensical humour. Read more about him here…

http://www.messhof.com

Last week Cory Doctrow posted this link on Boing Boing. It is a brilliant, absurd and unplayable version of the famous videogame Tetris. Anne, like everyone else, got quickly bored by it, but she didn’t close the window and just let it run for two weeks. Look what happens…

http://sovietrussia.org/f/src/tetoris.swf
http://ohdave.com/tetris