THERELATIVITY GOES INSIDE SUBJECTIVE REALITY
With Sony due to release a major update to its PSP/PlayStation 3 Escher-esque echochrome, an update that will bring both the requisite Trophies and a massive 1000+ new user-created levels to the game, it reminds me that I haven’t yet mentioned theRelativity.
echochrome, as you may have already seen, is a game developed on the back of Jun Fujiki’s OLE Coordinate System, a proof of concept PC demo that lets users not only construct the impossible objects Escher helped make famous, but make them interactive playgrounds for its monochromatic artist models. Stripping out all awareness of object permanence, gaps can be bridged just by shifting perspective and covering the hole, dead ends can be extended by realigning elements: it’s a perfect example of the things that only games can accomplish.
Fujiki’s extended that idea, then, with theRelativity, which, as you can see above, takes place not on top of the objects but from inside, giving you vantage into an added impossible dimension and further breaking down all common knowledge. As with OLE, it’s not a game per se, but at least an opportunity to play, and if nothing else: a perfect starting point for echochrome 2.
theRelativity [Jun Fujiki]
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THE GAMER-IN-CHIEF
Tom Armitage has updated his site with his recent GameCity festival talk on what it means to have our first generation entering public life who’ve grown up playing games. Waxing on how that familiarity might inform their approach to resource scarcity, the complexity of an ever more — and data-rich — connected world, and ‘an end to colocation’, Armitage says:
So what does a future run by gamers look like? Well, if they can handle complexity, and they’ve stocked up all the magic item chests ready for when scarcity hits, and they’ve failed enough times at the low-stakes games that they know they can make it at the high-stakes ones, and if our environment is one carefully planned out for effective growth rather than rammed together for efficiency, and if they understand how to handle the ever-more complex forms of communications necessary to deal with the large, distributed teams of people necessary to understand complexity – and if they can create a world that supplies and consumes the data necessary to make smart, informed, decisions – then they might just make it awesome…
And even if we don’t get that, maybe a fraction of that will trickle through, that’s still a start. Games are wonderful things, and people who get games are wonderful people, but they don’t just have to make more games, you know. You could change the world.
The ideas here share a happy overlap with the Superstruct ARG being run by Jane McGonigal and the Institute for the Future. McGonigal has been tirelessly championing the idea of bringing more game-like interactions to all aspects of everyday life to make it more engaging and generally increase happiness.
Specifically, Superstruct itself is her attempt to do just that as it relates to future public policy debates: the game that attempts to “chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.”
The talk is also, of course, prescient following news that Obama’s FCC transition team co-chair is a dedicated World of Warcraft player.
If Gamers Ran The World [Infovore]
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NCSOFT BRINGING TABULA RASA TO A CLOSE
Following earlier word that creator Richard Garriott was leaving the company to pursue presumably more directly space-related interests after an inspiring visit aboard the International Space Station, NCsoft has announced that his epic sci-fi MMO will soon be shuttered as well:
Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we’ve achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.
So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.
Message from the Tabula Rasa Team [NCsoft]
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MECHNER TALKS FILM, GAME, GRAPHIC NOVEL STORYTELLING
Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner has uploaded an opinion column recently published in Game Informer magazine, detailing how he’s varied his approaches in creating games, movies, and graphic novels based on his same property.
As much a filmmaker as a gamemaker by trade (having filmed a documentary on the controversial buy-out and razing of Los Angeles Mexican American neighborhood Chavez Ravine, and wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney-produced Sands of Time film), Mechner has an innate sense and talks well on letting each medium do what it does best, rather than shoehorning content from one medium to another.
Take note, too, if you haven’t already, of Mechner’s “old journals,” where he’s reprinting hand-written diaries from the time when he was just getting his start in the industry, featuring guest appearances by a little known game coming out of Russia called Tetris, and early rotoscope reference video of the Prince’s animations.
jordanmechner.com » Blog Archive » Game to movie to graphic novel
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A NEW LOOK AT DS SPACE OPERA INFINITE LINE
Though there’s a lot to be said for the cheeky sexuality of Bayonetta and the slapstick ultra-violence of Mad World, of all the games Japan based collective Platinum Games announced earlier this year, DS space epic Infinite Line had me at hello.
It wasn’t just the promise of vast, free space exploration shrunk down to palm size, or the fact that you could decorate your warships with lipstick kisses (though both helped), it was designer’s Hifumi Kouno’s assertion that “in playing through the story, across vast space, the player will discover what it means to be human in this vast emptiness.”
While we wait for more detail on quite how Kouno can affirm our essential humanity, thanks to Tiny Cartridge we have the first English version of Infinite Line’s happily perplexing anime intro short.
Infinite Space DS short fansub (DATS) [YouTube, via Tiny Cartridge]
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THE OFFWORLD LAUNCH WEEK UNICORN CHASER
We’re wrapping up the first week here at Offworld, and I should thank everyone that’s commented, written, and left overwhelmingly positive notes about the launch here, and say that if you need me, you’ll know where to find me, as again captured via BBtv. It’s just how I do, you know?
(BBtv) Unicorn Chaser, Friday Review: Offworld.com Dirty Dancing Death Dwarf
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CERN SCIENTISTS DIVERT NIHILANTH THREAT
We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Reddit community for supplying scientists at the Large Hadron Collider with their very own crowbar to hold down Earth’s fort — so far as we can tell, that interdimensional rift hasn’t yet been torn open so wide that we’ve been affected on this side of the ocean. From the photo series sent over from CERN labs, though, that’s only due to the heroic effort of CERN’s very own Swiss Gordon Freeman.
the crowbar arrived at CERN, Freeman received it, world saved [Reddit]
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THE BIKE HERO THAT WASN’T
By now you’ve probably seen the viral Bike Hero video recently linked via our gadget loving bretheren, and by now you’ve probably sussed out that it was indeed a highly staged hoax, from the same agency behind Marc Ecko’s alleged Air Force graffiti-bomb, and that might have left you feeling a bit cold.
Friend of Offworld, interesting-web-thing-maker, and keen link-smith Tom Armitage at Infovore sums up the disappointment nicely:
Why don’t marketers and advertisers understand that, sometimes, the target audience for this kind of thing will like it just as much if it’s honest about being advertising? It’s a lovely piece of footage, and it ties into the garage-band, DIY ethos well; it’s a good fit for the Guitar Hero brand. As it is, I’m disappointed because I now know this wasn’t the product of hard-working fans, wanting to promote a product they love; it was the product of a lot of time/effort from people with money to spend on time/effort.
As a long-time appreciator and equal-part promoter of smart — but transparent — advertising, I couldn’t agree more.
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OBAMA’S NEW TAURAN SHAMAN OF STAFF
Over at the Mother Boing, Xeni notes that Obama’s just-appointed FCC transition team co-chair Kevin Werbach has been recognized as verifiable “virtual worlds nut” and World of Warcraft Level 70 Tauren Shaman Supernovan Jenkins, along with a breakdown of just what that affiliation means:
What does this tell us about him, as a person, as a gamer, as a government official? I will attempt to translate all the dorkese.
1. – CULTURAL RELATIVISM
Every player in WoW belongs to one of two warring factions, Alliance or Horde. Werbach is Horde. Children often choose to be Alliance because they perceive them as “the good guys”, but students of history (both ours and Azeroth’s) recognize that Alliance culture is based on medieval European culture and Horde culture is based on the indigenous cultures that were supplanted by the West.
Werbach is a Tauren (a minotaur), which basically makes him a Native Kalimdorian. The Tauren revere nature, living in wigwams near giant totem poles. As a Shaman (see below), he could also have chosen a troll (blue-skinned Jamaican-like monster) or an orc (green-skinned Klingon-like monster), so there must be something about the cow-man that appeals to his liberal guilt.
Warcraft Identity of Obama’s FCC Transition Team Co-Chair Revealed, Analyzed
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INTO THE MIND OF THE MEIJIN
Takahashi Meijin is one of those gaming figures who you might have heard of on the periphery but never fully wrapped your mind around — he was semi recognizably the face of Hudson’s Adventure Island series, and indeed has served as the company’s spokesman for the past two decades. More amazingly, though, he was the star of Game King, Japan’s rough equivalent to 80’s NES advermovie The Wizard.
As you can see in this montage, which is self-parodying to the point of near postmodern, the program saw Meijin training for a national Star Soldier championship by honing his famous ’16 shot’ skills — the ability to press a NES controller button 16 times a second — by vibrating tabletops to bring tea-sets closer and, amazingly, exploding a watermelon with just a structure-weakening flick of his hummingbird-flutter fingertip.
All that is prelude to a hat tip toward 1up’s Ray Barnholt, who has landed the most extensive English language interview with Takahashi we’ll see in some time. In it, he explains how he came to Hudson, his thoughts on the East/West hardcore/casual divide, and confirms that he essentially invented the Turbo-Grafx 16’s sliding turbo switches, but, delightfully, kept them limited to 8- and 15-shots a second so no one could steal his crown.
Master Higgins Speaks [1up.com]
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