videogames

Line-Drawings, Cameras and New Videogames

by Andy Polaine on December 6, 2008

in General

Karl reminded me of two new games for the Playstation that depart from the normal 3D extravaganza. The first is another EyeToy game called EyePet. Basically you draw with a special pen and your doodles become 3D and part of the mixed-reality world of the game and your virtual ‘pet’.

The second is Echochrome, which seems to be a bit like Portal (PC DVD), except that it is in a plain, wireframe and stickman style:

It’s very encouraging to see this trend towards games that designed from a point of view of ingenuity rather than pure 3D rendering power. There’s nothing wrong with full-on 3D games rendered in luscious detail, but I don’t feel games as a medium progress much when that’s the only focus.

There is little difference between the basic gameplay of Wolfenstein 3D:

Wolf3d_pc.jpg

and Call of Duty:

750px-CODscreen4.jpg

Apart from the amount of pixels you are shooting at of course.

Tagged as: camera, eyetoy, gameplay, interaction, playstation, sony, videogames

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Children Playing Video Games

by Andy Polaine on December 2, 2008

in General

videogame_kid.jpg

The NY Times web site has a great video of children playing videogames from photographer and video artist, Robbie Cooper (you can watch a higher quality original plus stills on his site).

In 2009 he will be teaming up with the Media Centre at Bournemouth University as part of their ‘War and Liesure’ project. They will then analyse the footage using Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System (FACS). (I didn’t realise that Ekman had published so many books with the all the images of his research).

I don’t get the feeling that Cooper is judging gamers or videogames either way, more that he is fascinated children as they play them, particularly war games because war is outside (most) children’s daily experience.

His blog is also worth having a look through, there are some great finds there including his responses to the comments about Immersion.

Should you feel the need for the antidote, I can recommend Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

Tagged as: children, ekman, robbiecooper, videogames

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The Unfinished Swan

October 27, 2008

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo. The Unfinished Swan is a still in-development game set in an entirely white world. Instead of splattering the blood of monsters around the walls, the player splatters black ink to find their way through “an unusual garden”. Apart from looking stunning in its [...]

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Game Controller Family Tree

March 29, 2008

From the old, beloved Atari 2600 joystick to the Wiimote, how did we get from there to here? The “Sock Master’s” family tree of controllers has the goods. There are some classics and some real stinkers like the The Nintendo Virtual Boy Controller. What were they thinking? [tags]controllers, games, videogames, hardware[/tags]

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Parents to be educated about the Interweb

March 27, 2008

There’s a well-balanced piece from Patrick Wintourin the Guardian today about parents being shown how to protect their children online. It reports of a government initiative based on a review by Dr Tanya Byron (she works as a consultant in child and adolescent mental health and also presented quite a few programmes for the BBC [...]

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