Games for Change – an interesting offer from AMD, a kit to develop your own ‘noble games’. A set of video’s is nice, although is very tempting to remix them all in one large simalcrum. Let’s see how these creature will evolve. Bit more information can be be found here, AMD Releases Social Issue Games-Focused Toolkit
There are many more ironic and funny, but also thoughtful and provoking images on the Wilhelm Staehle’s website – Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre.
A poster developed by John Armlender for the DLD 2009 which is taking place at this very moment in Munich, Germany. As explained on the DLD site, the work (full title is Aboard on spaceship earth from the future is now to the future is the past) “conceptually recalls the 1960s Op Art Movement like a visual comment conflating actual knowledge production and the post-production of existing cultural material.”
When using an interace of the Archive.org to browsing their digital books, I had an experience somehow similar to what I just described: one can roughly point by the coursor at the remaining pages of the books, to quickly thumb them up to that place. The end of the book is marked quite clearly, so you don’t have these feeling of freeing uncertainty; but the interface is still nicely non-precise.
I put the above book just an example, but it is also quite an interesting reading; it’s one of the ‘founding stones’ of modern ludology, yet still not that well-known to the modern practitioners.
I’ve been reading (rather, finishing) a trilogy by Philip Pullman His Dark Materials; I will write later my impressions on the book itself, but now I’d like to capture an interesting feeling I’ve got.
The edition I have combines all three books in one volume. As it happened, I first watched the movie, Golden Compass. When you start reading, you soon realize that the movie follows the plot quite closely, and you gain a certain feeling where the first novel will end (which also corresponds to the number of pages you still have to thumb through).
The second book was a completely unchartered territory for me. Of course, I have an assumption that the second and the third volumes are of similar size, and so the fingers ‘know’ how many pages are left till the end. But in any case, these estimates were very approximate – which created an interesting feeling of freedom, a suspension, as if a ‘textual pressure’ disappeared. One would indeed need a very ’subtle knife’ to make a precise cut between the books.
I remember Nabokov once wrote about this feeling of confident anticipation from the thickness of the book ahead of you, which is gradually give place to a growing anxiety, when the finger start trembling the last, and increasingly thin, pages of the book; the sand of the last seconds in a hourglass speeds up time in a similar manner.
How to retain this, I admit, pleasant feeling of freedom and independence of the text, unawareness of the end (and may be even of the beginning)? I remember having somehow similar experience when reading Cortázar’s Hopscotch or Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars; if I remember, Eco also write about similar things in his Open Text (Opera aperta). Besides already mentioned ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ also emerged a distinctive playful mode, a play with the text of a kind.
Prado in Madrid and Google widely announced a new way of watching famous paintings – via the web and in uber-high resolution (stunning 14.000 megapixels ) – Google brings masterpieces from Prado direct to armchair art lovers. The above fragment is not even the smallest possible, but even this magnification is simply amazing, especially if to compare with the original size (I hope you can find the fragment, in red rectangular):
If I would use the zooming function of Google Earth to the max, I can get something like that:
meaning that now every amateur can start studying Bosch to the very crackle. Miguel Zugaza, head of the museum, is saying “Google’s gigapixel gallery was especially useful for paintings such as The Garden of Earthly Delights, which contained so much detail it was difficult to take it all in, even after seeing the painting many times“. Of course, he then hastily added “a photographic image, however precise, could never replace the original. This shows you the body of the painting, but what you won’t find here is the soul – you can only find that by looking at the original.“
Interactive Games Make Museums A Place To Play>Interactive Games Make Museums A Place To Play – a small article on how games and ‘playfulness’ can be used by contemporary museums. No very informative, and yet interesting, because it points to the key lines of debates about the issue, so it worth to copy here a few quotes.
“[Jane] McGonigal [a very known game practitioner, currently with IFTF where she recently launched Superstruct, considered a breakthrough by some, and a total failure by some others ] says games make people happy — and she takes happiness very seriously. She’s come up with four elements she believes we all need to be happy: satisfying work, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be a part of something bigger“.
I feel something crucial is missing here – for example, role-playing, and also a certain degree of other-worldliness we cherish in games so much. Plus, a development, growth, transformation even. From another side, these very four things can describe something not necessarily related to game, for example, any established community.
“Games work better than most of reality because they give us clear instructions. We know exactly what we’re supposed to do,” McGonigal says. “They give us better feedback; you can’t be good at something unless you’re getting feedback … Gamers don’t mind criticism.”
Bit of a ‘hmm’ here; do we play chess only because of the rule-set clarity? Do we play tennis because of the same reason? A raid stage of the World of Warcraft?
“Why shouldn’t adults play games? [Because] It’s still the most effective way to learn and push our buttons to get information into our heads.”
This sounds nice, and I’d love to buy it, but still it looks more like a wishful thinking at the moment; as well as the following statement:
“Biologically, games are how we’re hard-wired to learn — that’s its evolutionary role.”
That cause an obvious “Wait, wait! Can we get a source, please?” Exactly because the gaming behavior of people were so diverse during their history, and across cultures, anchoring it with ‘biology’ makes it the weakest link of the argumentation.
“The fate of humanity hangs in the balance over whether we’re going to get crowds to do anything useful or not,” McGonigal says. “Are they going to put all of their cognitive bandwidth into virtual worlds, or are they going to contribute?”
Most notably, “putting cognitive bandwidth into virtual worlds” is directly juxtaposed to “contributing [into something good]“, as if they can’t be complimentary to each other .
As usual, the comments do bring few gems:
“It’s a shame how many millions of man hours are devoted to World of Warcraft when people could be using that time to accomplish something brilliant, something real.”
Let’s also agree that people sleep too much; a total waste of time.
“[McGonigal's] need to reduce great art to a video game in order to get something out of it is a sad reflection of an ethos that had developed in our modern culture which is losing a sense of meaning and a deeper understanding of the world around us. I think she completely misses the point of art, which is to be pondered deeply, appreciated emotionally and allowed to speak to us through its color, texture and universality. It will be a sad day when the Pieta is reduced to a pawn in a cheesy fantasy consumer game to satisfy a generation of over-stimulated, Dopamine-addicted kids.”
At this moment I start hearing the voice of a colleague of mine, who is patting my shoulder and saying, with a characteristic condolatory voice, “You have to talk more often to real people”.
This is of course not so much a ‘topology’ yet, but rather a landscape (and rough time-line) of a few classical examples of ‘magical worlds’; the source is a plain brain-dump, and any additions are most welcome. The general framework I am mostly interested is the following: there is ‘our’, ‘normal’ world populated by more or less normal kids – who are at some point, somehow getting into ‘another’, much more ‘magical’ world. Something happens then – here, there, or in between the two realms.
This description leaves out purely fantasy worlds, such as The Lord of the Rings, for example, or any other sci-fi projects (unless they follow the above scheme). I started to play with these ‘worlds’, roughly following personal construct approach by George Kelly. But I foresee more complex work ahead, because my aim is to provide yet another description and analysis, however deep, but reveal a more eluding matter: What are the magical worlds of the future? What sort of worlds we would need to develop for – and together with – our kids to prepare them for this future?
More reading and more thinking ahead.
I spotted this picture in a Flickr-stream of fdecomite; I liked how he explores possible evolution of chess gameplay (making a board fractal).
Few days later I found another development, this time leaving the flat world of the chess board and elevating to the third dimension:
After few more days the game departed the rectangular-ness of initial world-view, and star creating its own mini-worlds:
Currently the author is bravely re-designs the very geometry of the world that created the games, that re-created the game itself.
What’s next, I wonder.
