Houston, We Have A Problem

BBC article on NASA MMO

Mass Effect Soundtrack Review

Soundtrack article from scifi.com discussed how well the music created for the roleplaying game works.

Future Interaction

Here’s a dump of links regarding the next Tech breakthrough esp. electronic paper

Tech.co.uk article

1. Virtual Reality
2. Gesture recognition
3. Next-generation wireless
4. Genuinely smart cars
5. Electronic paper
6. Yes! Microsoft’s working on another Zune! We can’t wait.

Out of Body Experience for VR

HPL

VR article

use this for my ‘haptics’ stuff

holograms…

electronic paper-roll out screen

electronic paper-on a train

electronic paper-thin paper display

electronic paper-watch-type bangle thingy

electronic paper-Seiko Hi-res paper

Razor – and it’s not Occam’s

Razor is the intro to the 4th series of Battlestar Galactica (the last episode), it will go out online and follow on DVD hot on its heels which is where I’ll hopefully pick it up. Battlestar Galactica is one of television’s finest hours – a remake from an old late ’70’s TV series but reimagined to perfection.

Nice website for Battlestar Galactica arcade game.

Every Extended Extra

While dipping in and out of magazines I’m still catching up on at the moment (namely XBOX WORLD 360, Deathray Issue 6 & GamesTM Issue 63), I caught this snippet on the game Every Extend Extra Extreme (E4) and it got me thinking about interfaces. E4 is a game or more rightly, an experience that involves a blending of light, sound and motion and the players interaction with it. The motion is fed back via rumble in the pad. It’s billed as an action shooting game in Wikipedia’s entry based upon the creator and producer, Q Entertainment’s description. I played Rez, the rail shooter game incorporating Synesthesia is inexorably linked to the Every Extend Extra games via its creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, at the Game On exhibition in December last year on a PS2 and then it struck me as a beautiful thing to play. The thing was that it draws the player in, in to a world. In this case the world is wireframe-like graphics which can seem pretty old school but the ability to draw you in nonetheless is what counts. XBOX World 360 magazine states E4 is available on XBOX 360 Live with Rez HD becoming available in 2008. Space Giraffe is a game in a similar vein by the famous Jeff Minter of Llama fame.

This one snippet has thrown up a whole area to explore in relation to interaction with computers through games and is one I’m going to re-visit in a lot more detail.

Ballard >>> Baudrillard

The Ballardian pointing to Vale blog of RE/Search Publications, mentioning Baudrillard – now, where was that first session’s lecture notes…

HALLOWEEN

HALLOWEEN online with all your favourite games (from WIRED).

Casual Games

Does that mean you wear comfortable shoes and a baggy top?

Gamasutra’s article thinks not and that it’s worth $2.25 billion a year. Perhaps I should wear a tie!

Unraveling a ball of string

I need to come up with a 21st Century/Web 2.0 equivalent for ‘unraveling a ball of string’. I very rarely use a ball of string these days but I am frequently carrying out actions that are tantamount to unraveling said string. Take my excursion onto the web today.

I started at a frequent starting point of mine WONDERLAND >>> This led me to digging into the ‘Gamecity‘ International Interactive Entertainment Festival >>> which in turn led to the speakers list and Dan Hon who was speaking about Alternate Reality Gaming which mentioned ‘Hiro Nakamura’s blog‘ (Heroes’s TV prog character). I didn’t really know much about formally so I jumped to Wikipedia for a heads’ up on the subject. It discusses interactive narrative, based upon a real-world platform, using multiple media elements to tell a story that can be altered by the interaction of the user (participant). Halo’s in there, Perplex City (which I always peered at in Forbidden Planet’s shop window but never really delved any further into) pops up, Lost is referenced as is Matrix and Heroes.

It led me on a paper chase (see, now there’s another equivalent I need to come up with, I’ve never been on a paper chase, the only time I’ve seen one is in the film The Railway Children) and there’s a wealth information and websites I need to search through. It looks like an area that will be crucial to the MA in that it is a young medium, in use today with a potential for a project.

Ah, well. back to unpacking my binary string (nearly, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘unraveling a ball of string’. We’re working in such a young medium…)

A simple interactve artifact

While perusing all things Halo at the moment I found this interactive artifact (I’m not claiming credit as a digital archaeologist, it was too easy to unearth). It’s simple but effective, based upon issue 15.09 of Wired magazine.

The Microsoft Labs article in the same issue is worth reading to show how a modern game (for those with an aversion to the word game insert ‘extended interactive artifact’) is tested

The Halo primer article from the same site kicks things off nicely.