Again I’m way behind in blogging about the events I’ve been going to. A couple of weeks ago I got to attend this year’s Playful, a one day conference with a great collection of speakers from different fields, all talking about game design. There were 16 talks in total, each 20-30 minutes long. I don’t have time (or the memory, to be honest) to tell you about all of them, but I’ll try to remember the highlights for me:

Roo Reynolds

Because of transport fail, I sadly missed the beginning of this talk, but Roo talked about the relationship between movies and video games. He gave examples of games of movies and movies of games (like Max Payne and Super Mario Bros), and that they rarely work that well. He also showed how games themselves are difficult to illustrate properly in movies. For example, there’s a part in the Trainspotting book about how the main character thinks he’s in a video game and is a great piece when you’re reading it. But the scene in the movie? Not that much. Another example (although not a video game) is the poker playing in Casino Royale. While for the rest it’s a great movie, that poker playing is ridiculous. Roo ended the talk with giving the one example of a movie/game which is the exception to the rule, where the movie and game go both ways and work perfectly on both levels: Tron.

Daniel Soltis

I should have been paying more attention to this talk, but I was busy replying to an important email (I know, lame excuse, but this was the type of email I couldn’t leave until later). Anyway, I missed most of what he said (anybody have a complete description somewhere?), but he ended with talking about a GPS puzzle box. The idea was basically geocaching in reverse: a box with a small lcd screen on it, that showed you how far you are from the goal location and you can only open the box on that specific goal location. The person who made it gave it as a wedding gift; the newlywed couple had to find the secret special location where they finally could open the box.

James Bridle

This talk was the highlight of the day for me, which is also why the description is a bit longer than the others. James talked about the idea of the miraculous, which pretty much leads to the idea of awesomeness. For him, when he thinks about things that are awesome (and miraculous) it all kept going back to scale and complexity. Quotes from Douglas Adams and Thomas Pynchon are great in showing how metaphors are used to illustrate the ideas of scale and complexity. He also showed how you have complexity in complexity, scale within scale: Zak Smith created a book of illustrations based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. For every page in the 760 page book, he made an illustration, creating a complete new work based on the former. Another example was Tom Phillip’s books The Humument, where he painted over the pages of an old Victorian novel, creating a new narrative with new characters.

The same can be done with technology: with scale and complexity you can make strange mechanical objects and machines. For example, Heath Robinson’s contraptions of weird complex machines aimed in doing simple things. Another example was the predecessor of the Collusus (the machine that broke the Enigma code) which initially didn’t work, but they ‘changed the frequency’ and it did. Or Babbage’s difference engine machine, which surprisingly works even though it only was finished decades after the design was initially made on paper.

The best part of the talk though was a machine called MENACE: the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine. It’s a ‘machine’ that plays noughts and crosses, built from 304 matchboxes. Each matchbox represents one of the 304 board layouts the opening player might face (excluding rotations etc) and contains glass beads representing the possible moves. During a turn, you pick the matchbox representing the state you’re in and randomly select a glass bead which shows you which move to make. The cool thing is though that MENACE can learn: every time you win a game you a glass bead to each of the matchboxes you used, corresponding to the moves you made (and vice versa when you lose). The more often you played the better MENACE became in knowing which moves to make. James found many simulation programmes for MENACE, but no reports of an actual machine: so he built one himself.

But how about scaling it up? Like for Go? So James started thinking about MAGE: the MAtchbox Go Engine. He did some calculations… and MAGE would need 3.4 x 10^15 matchboxes, each needing to hold 3610 beads. If each bead is 5mm, a match box would have to be 18m^3, which results in a final volume of 6.1 x 10^16. That’s larger than the Crab Nebula. Awesome.

James’s talk is completely online on his website Short Term Memory Loss.

Russell Davies

Russell first talked about the concept of bubble-building vs world-building. In world-building you’re trying to recreate reality, trying to build an actual replica of a world. It’s hard to do, cause there’s always something that can shatter the illusion. In bubble-building, you’re trying to build a bubble of illusion alongside our own world, drawing heavily on the power of pretending.

It’s these type of games, the ones that rely a lot on pretending, that Russell is most interested in. “These aren’t games, like the industry thinks of games, these are something a little less, these are Barely Games.” He gave all sorts of examples on how pretending is an everyday thing. His entire presentation is online, so if you’re interested in hearing more, just head on over there.

Chris O’Shea

Chris O’Shea’s talk was basically a showcase of all the cool projects he has worked on. Out of Bounds: an interactive museum installation that lets you “see” through walls as if you had x-ray vision (using an infrared torch and laser tracker). Air Guitar Championship: an interactive installation at Glastonbury, where festival go-ers could play air guitar. Flap To Freedom: a race between two people, each ‘controlling’ their own robot chicken by flapping your arms as fast as you can. Audience: an installation consisting of around 64 head-size mirror objects, with each object interacting with the visitors moving its head in a particular way to give it different characteristics of human behaviour. Some chat amongst themselves, some shy away and others confidently move to grab your attention. Beacon: similar to the Audience project, but with light beacons. The lights ‘interact’ with visitors, tracking their movements and reacting on them. Hand From Above: outdoor screens from the BBC, in which they added a giant hand of god into the real time video from people near the screens. People could see themselves on the screen being tickled, squashed, picked up and taken away by the giant hand.

There were loads more interesting talks, but these were the ones that really stood out to me (and that I still vividly remember after a couple of weeks). I’m guessing they’ll be doing it again next year, and if they do, I can highly recommend it!

I’m a major addict to the Final Fantasy games, and I’ve been waiting for the latest addition to the series for ages now. The main reason I still haven’t gotten a PS3 is because FF-XIII isn’t out yet, and I think that would be the game I’d primarily play on it (even though there are many more awesome titles out there, I just know I don’t have the time to get addicted to yet another series). So I’ve been waiting, and waiting until FF-XIII comes out to finally give me a reason to buy a PS3.

Anyhow, in Japan it was just announced that Sony is bringing out a limited edition PS3: the Final Fantasy Lightning Edition. Lightning is the main protagonist in the game, and she herself is printed in pink on the chassis of the PS3. Yep, pink…

I like how this looks like, even though I’m not much a fan of pink. I would have loved to see in this other colours, but despite the pink, I have to admit it looks pretty sleek.

It’s got a HDD space of 250 GB and ships with a version of FF-XIII. In Japan it’s priced at 41600 Yen (around the £280), but I wonder how much it’s going to be here (if it even is released here).

Via GirlyBubble

One of last year’s best conferences I went to was Playful 2008 (see my blog post about it); it was an interesting day with a fun collection of speakers from different fields, all talking about game design (without necessarily being game designers or working within games). It was great to hear that this year they would hold another event, and the lineup of speakers is again pretty amazing.

Here is Playful’s description of what their event is all about:

Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers. We look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games…what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry.

Check out their programme to see the full list of speakers that will be there. I know all the talks will most probably be great, but in particular I myself am looking forward to a couple of the speakers: Robin Burkinshaw, who is behind the blog Alice and Kev (an experiment in The Sims 3 with two homeless sims), Simon Oliver, the founder of indie games studio HandCircus, creators of the Rolando series for the iPhone, and Roo Reynolds, because his talk from last year was awesome!

There are still a couple of tickets available on the Playful evenbrite page for only £40. That’s a bargain compared to most conferences! But be quick: tickets are limited, and I have no doubt that these will be snapped up before you know it.

So, see you all at Playful?

Yeah, I know this might be one of the more geekier choices for my ‘Listening To’ series. I fell in love with this song though the first time I heard the opening credits from Civilization IV, and it never feels to somehow cheer me up whenever I’m in a bad mood.

I’m loving this cute photo spread from French magazine Amusement, picturing the actual way video games are manufactured. Here’s what they have to say about Tetris:

When Alexei Pajitnov first ordered a load of bricks from Karpov Abramtsevo’s workshop, workers there were wondering who could be interested in all those right-angled blocks. No one in 1985 could have imagined those concrete Tetriminos would become world famous and constitute Russia’s deadliest weapon against Reagan’s America.

And Mario:

In 1995, the collaboration between Oita’s mushroom farms and Nissin Foods Co. in Sapporo revolutionised the conditioning techniques of the time, also bringing biochemistry out of labs and onto a global stage. Without Shigeru Miyamoto’s 750 billion colored (shiitake) mushrooms, the Japanese food processing industry wouldn’t have cruised through the 1990s with the same optimism.

Besides these two they’ve also got images of Arkanoid, Pong and Sonic.

I still want to blog about the fun I had at this year’s Hide & Seek Festival. As usual there was lot’s of running around (lots and lots), puzzle solving and random silliness. I hope to blog about it in more length some time this week, but for now here’s a short video about it:

This is part of this week’s Pocket TV episode, a new music based show hosted by Holy Moly’s Matt Edmondson. Every week, you’ll be able to watch a new episode in full or broken down into 5 segments so it’s a bit like jumping to a scene on a DVD. Simple and easy.

I like the idea of the show, but I’m not that much into current music myself. It’s not that I don’t listen to music (I do, a lot), but seriously 90% of my music library consists of movie soundtracks, TV show soundtracks and West End musicals; I’m not exactly up to date with the “hottest” music out there. However, if you are into music, Pocket TV seems pretty fun.

Check out the Pocket TV channel on YouTube.

I really enjoyed some of the previous Need For Speed titles (I played a lot back in my old student flat), so when I got an email inviting me to a special press event I was psyched to go! Turns out though it’s in the Bay Area, not exactly easily reachable for me. Instead though I can give away two tickets here on my blog, so one of you lucky readers (plus a friend) is going to be able to enjoy this event.

Here’s the info:
Date: Thursday 13th August, 2009
Location: Icon Longe SF
Time: 5p-8p
Food & Beverage will be served. DJ will be on hand.

The event will offer the first glimpses of Need For Speed Shift. Plus you’ll have the opportunity to play the game, ask questions to developers & EA staff, and interact with your fellow gamers from the Bay Area! Here’s a trailer of the game:

If you want to enter this competition, all you have to do is leave a comment below with your name, email address, and which video game is your favourite (and why). Entries are open to anyone, but you have to be able to come to the Bay Area to enjoy this prize.

This contest is now closed.

Recurring readers might remember my blog post from last year about the Hide & Seek Festival. It was a great three days of playing pervasive games, meeting like-minded people, and running around like crazy. This year the event is again being held for three days, and it sounds like it’s going to be just as fun.

The event will take place in and around the Royal Festival Hall, part of London’s Southbank Centre. They’re starting this evening at 19:00 with a couple of games (with as theme Beyond Werewolf), including Grand Emperor (which I’ve been wanting to play for some time now) and Hermit’s House (Players take the roles of a group of people stuck in a haunted house, and must find creative ways to solve the problems presented to them).

Tomorrow and Sunday the games run from 11:00 to 18:00, although if you just want to dip in for some brief gaming, you can drop in (and leave) at any time you want. It’s sounds like as if it’s going to be a fun couple of days, and I’m really interested in going. I’m not too sure about tonight or Sunday yet, but I’m definitely going to make it tomorrow (although 11 might be a bit too early). Check out the complete schedule on the Hide & Seek website, so that you can plan which games you want to participate in (no need to sign up or anything). See you there?

I’m pretty much addicted to both Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan these days, so imagine my delight when I found out both of them are (soon to be) available on the Nintendo DS (discovered via Twitter while checking out the ‘tag’ carcassonne). I’m not sure how I missed this, but the Catan version has been available since this May!

The Nintendo DS version of Catan was developed in collaboration with Klaus Teuber. Besides the Basic Game, it also contains scenarios from the Seafarers expansion (among others, Greater Catan) that offer additional adventures and challenges. The Basic game presents a varied Campaign with eight different computer opponents. You can also play against up to 4 others over the wireless Nintendo WiFi connection. Here’s the trailer of the game:

From what I can find, I think it’s only available in Germany, but the NDS cartridge contains the English as well as the German language version. So far, I haven’t found an actual store that sells this game though; apparently it’s not as popular as I imagined it could be. If anybody finds out where you can get Catan for DS, please let me know.

The Carcassonne game for the Nintendo DS will be coming out this September. It’s already listed on Play.com for £24.99, so that will at least be available here in the UK (no idea about the US though).

Carcassonne for Nintendo DS will contain the main game including the River expansion. In multiplayer mode, both Single-Card Play and Multi-Card Play will be available for Nintendo DS owners and their friends via the wifi connection. The adaptation is true to the original, but with three added new locations: the Asian, Arabic, and Nordic worlds. I’m curious to see how this looks; I can imagine the gameplay will be exactly the same, it’s just different “themes” basically in which you can play in.

The above screenshot is from the Xbox Live version, so I’m assuming we’ll get a smaller trimmed down version of that. Still, I think it could look pretty sweet, and it’s definitely the type of game I’d love for on my DS.

Anybody know of any other Nintendo DS boardgame versions?

One of the reasons I was so hesitant in buying Settlers of Catan, is that officially you can only play it with 3-4 players. It’s a great game if you’ve got enough players, but what if you’re only with the two of you?

I’ve found a couple of adapted rule set so that you can play it with two players, but none of them felt completely right. What we’re playing with now is mainly based on the rules from this website, with a small change.

1. No Trading: Players may only trade with the bank. It’s rare that both players will agree to a trade anyway, so we just scrap that away completely.
2. Throw Dice Twice: At the start of each players turn, the player throws the dice twice and resources are collected for both throws. If a 7 is thrown on the first roll, the robber is controlled by the player with the least victory points (if victory points are tied, the player who rolled the dice controls the robber). If a 7 is thrown during the second roll, the control of the robber stays with the player who threw the dice.
3. #Victory Points is 12-15: This depends on how fast a game you want. If you want a reasonably fast game, go for 12 points. If you want a more difficult longer game, go to 15. With 15 points it’s really about making smart investments; you can’t win with only settlements/cities, you need the longest road or the largest army to collect that many victory points.
4. Card Limit is 9: Instead of holding a limit of 7 cards in your hand when the robber is thrown, you can hold now 9. This is because there is no trade opportunity anymore with other players, so you need more cards to obtain your goals.
5. Open Victory Points from Development Cards: Whenever you draw a Development Card giving you victory points, you must play it right away. This is because otherwise the first roll robber rule doesn’t make sense, giving control of the robber sometimes to the stronger player only because his victory points are “hidden” (besides most of the time you know that when a development card is lying for ages in front of a person, it’s a victory point).

For the rest the rules are all the same; you play with the same type of board and setup of the resources. There’s no difference there. I still prefer playing the game with 3 players (with 4 there is just no room to maneuver properly on the board), but sometimes we’re only with the two of us and still want to play.

At the moment we’re also playing a special scenario for two players with the expansion Seafarers of Catan which I like even more than this version, but I’ll blog about that next week.

Settlers of Catan is available for £29.99 at The Orc’s Nest (near Cambridge Circus), £33 on Amazon.co.uk, and $33 on Amazon.com.