Henry Jenkins is dealing with the problem of how games are telling stories and the basic understanding of narrative architecture in games. But not every game wants to tell a story, for example it’s really hard to find one what tetris could tell to the player. Otherwise you can use spatial stories, environmental storytelling, evocative spaces, enacting stories, embedded narratives or emergent narratives. What these techniques are covering is basically level design, the usage of: space; previously existing narrative competencies; immersive environment; memorable moments; artifacts or spaces that can contain affective potential or communicate significant narrative informations; or artifacts of which perform specific kinds of narrative functions. But what one has to keep in mind is the balance of the story and the game play, because the experience of playing a game can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story. One more thing: a game do NOT HAVE TO tell a story just for the sake of having a story in the game.

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The field is game design. It’s obvious but it doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or an expert in designing games one can always find something in the book because it covers the basics as well the advanced parts.

The method is more scientific but it’s mostly depending on what essay one reads. The collection aims to get to the bottom of the game design practices by explaining basic knowledge and practices. Mixing with real world examples to get the reader engaged if one want’s to.

The relation to other field is more stronger than Rules of Play. By explaining the basics about storytelling, space and level design, behaviors one can easily learn from this book and apply it in other fields where this kind of knowledge is useful.

peter eszes

Olivers Grand Faux-Exhibition list for “Non-Player Objects”

Remanents, Nonfunctional props, Fixed elements

#Dust’ is a 1:1 scale replica of one of the most played computer game maps in the world. The idea is to build the 3D model of ‘de_dust’ of the first person shooter game ‘Counter Strike’ as a permanent ‘building’ from concrete, making this map accessible as a large scale public sculpture.

D

imension: ca. 115 x 110 x 15 meter, Material: concrete

Commissioned by Rhizome 2011

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The bizzare experience of exploring a beloved and familiar space in a way completely alien, and i imagine extrememly disturbing. An architecture designed for combat and balanced gameplay by murderous armies who can jump two meters vertical. The flow is based on line of sight and improbable crates.

1H
public intervention
2008

Video: 2:10
Axe dimensions: 125x39x12 cm, 
material: paper, inkjet plot, glue

“1H” is a workshop and intervention piece for public space. In a one day workshop a group of participants builds paper weapon models extracted from the online computer game “World of Warcraft”. Oversized axes, swords and other archaic weapons are recreated in the exact 3D shape in physical space. Each participant builds his favorite one handed (1H) weapon from large inkjet plotts. In the public intervention the actor/participant carries the weapon model without ‘using’ it. The axe / sword becomes part of every day life in public space while taking the metro or going to a store.

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To withdraw a digital refugee from your personal avatar in an online game, fashion it from the physical equivalent of textured polygons and take the object as your avatar would to a casual setting that mirrors the crowded commercial districts of shopping, trading and socialising in the World of Warcraft

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Obscene metaphorical artefacts of our computer use. Gaming does not materialise without power and processing. 

<iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/36815248?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0” width=”400” height=”300” frameborder=”0” webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

http://www.fatalatour.com/

City of Los Angeles with the FataLAtour map. If you’re within a one-block radius of where a real-life or fictional film shooting occurred, the App will alert you. The victim’s name, death details and location will pop on your smartphone screen. The FataLAtour App is currently available forAndroidphones

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In the Paid tour you are rigged with Hollywood gunshot pads that bang and spray blood when you are too close to a killing. 

This takes artefacts of grim reality and emebeds them into a gamified, surprising ubiquitous device. Keep laughing.

http://www.ignant.de/2012/04/25/good-morning/

GOOD MORNING!  Levi Mandel 

Covert photographs of unprepared people printed, mangled again, and then scanned.

An accident-an artifact- an incident and finally a result.

 Christopher Wyant set up a server in TF2, displaying custom sprays of ceramic pots. Having taken screenshots of the carnage that went on in the serene virtual gallery, he then set up a real gallery in Auburn University, displaying both pictures of the ceramics in-game as well as the actual physical ceramics themselves.  

Based on the first half of Game Cultures it is an extremely comprehensive series of discussions and analysis of aspects of play and gaming- very specifically in the arena of post 2D Computer based play.

There is little talk about the technology of computer games, as it changes and evolves too dramatically (and perhaps barely changes in other respects), making it a fairly null topic. The writers instead concentrate on the the more encompassing themes of the media as a cultural, economic and political force- the first, Culture is a common topic, many seminal texts deal with the internalisation of various media, the behavior it encourages and the formation of identities through it, but it is often assumed, or at least discussed as a more or less closed system.

In this book there are constant references to incidences where games or games culture has impinged on, or more often triggered significant political debates and rulings or economic turbulence or restructuring. This is very apparent in the structure of the chapters.

They are also careful to point out the hallmarks of New Media Art (technology determines society, Interactivity, Immersion over spectating, simulation instead of representation, ubiquity and the freedom to play rather than work for the meaning) and mark out the interactions between the main forms of media: Literature, Cinema and Game, not as subsets of each other, but conceptual frameworks, forms of mediation vying for dominance and a structural presence in the creative output of each field. Dovey and Kennedy use the term “colonising” for this interaction.

Game production is susceptible to this as a young form and in their words “the way we study computer games is through the tension between these approaches.”

I guess this tactic of reading the tensions, reading between the lines to use an analogy, produces the interesting chapters on the wider impact of Games, as a supplement to the accumulation of historical Play and Games theory.

In a digital age extension of MacLuhans message-is-the-medium, they state that the technology has become more that just the message, but also the structure of the society.

This incorporates cybernetics, feedback and Post-humanism- that a persons subjectivity its-self is linked in with the technology and the ‘happening’ of new media. This could be exemplified by the participant/co-creator status of interaction, or the cyborg relationship with ubiquitous media.

Gunnar Leistol delineates this situation by examining the word gameplay as a fusion static of verbs to form a noun that represents a a process of interaction requiring time and activity.

The mechanisim of this is mediation

configuration, dynamic simulation, immersion.

Both shows the method of control and the transparent empowerment of the user. The deluge of user control and necessary stratigising distracts from illusion-breaking elements.

Although immersion is a prime goal of most computer games, It is suggested that immersion and this dynamic, constant leapfrogging of control vs fluidity removes the ‘critical distance’ of the participant, allowing for an intense experiential reading but not a critical viewpoint or detachment. (G.Frasca 2004, p10)

The assertion being that it leaves the participant open to manipulation, as mediation basically involves two way argument over the final outcome, and if the ‘immersion’ is heavy enough it becomes a control method.

This is an issue if you accept the idea of technicities, technology mediated identities are the idealised outcomes of these interactions.

The consumption/production model in New Media is significantly different from most, this made the ”Cultures of Production” chapter particularly interesting to me.

The tools and nature of digital medium allows unprecidented abilities to archive, change, appropriate nad recirculate content.

There is a strong production subculture, or subcultures, “ProSumers” such as modders, slash/artitst, fan art which in some cases can bridge the traditionally cavernous consumer/production divide and directly influence economic entities and creative industries. Similarly Games tend to bring to the fore many political and moral issues that get forced through courts and government agencies alike.

Gaming production companies are renound for their open plan offices, social setups and anemitis and so on, and yet staff are expected to work 18 hour days.

The three aspects of production (outside the prosumers) consist of Hardware (controls via software support and market pressure), the publisher (Exerts creative control, and basic rights as the creative team, however is often subject to pressure from the two other s) and the Publisher which has the greatest commercial influence.

When one is talking about game design it is really hard to frame it. Of course there are sound– and graphic designers, architects and so on but what a designer is doing when one is a game designer? In the book Rules of Play Katie and Eric states that: “Design is the process by which a designer creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges.” Which means the designer of the game can be considered culture at large. The context of the game takes the form of spaces, objects, narratives, and behaviors. Participants of the game are the players whom are inhabit, explore, and manipulate these contexts through their play. And also meaning is a concept. But what exactly a designer design in a game? The form of the interaction, the meaning of the interaction, something that stands for something, to somebody, in some and context. But all in all we can say that design is to create meaning and so game designers design systems.

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The field is game design. It’s obvious but it doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or an expert in designing games one can always find something in the book because it covers the basics as well the advanced parts.

The method is not really scientific, but there are a lot of examples to make sure that the reader understands what the writers are talking about. Despite all effort thought from time to time readers can lose themselves in the text due to shift’s between subtopics.

The relation to Playful Interface Culture is clear and strong. Playful doesn’t mean game and vise versa but both has the same roots to start with.

The book says that when one is designing a game one is designing a system and with that system creates meaning. In other fields where one also have to build something whit what others can interact with one can rely on the same principles as game designers relying to create good systems and / or meaning.

Peter Eszes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2PJ-W7Ba6Q 

Many sound installations with electroacoustic techniques have been presented so far. However, those systems usually require a large space or complicated instruments. There are very few compact interfaces for enjoying music with other performers or audience like conventional musical instruments. Here I introduce a portable instrument called beacon for socio-musical interaction. A number of line laser modules are installed, and the laser beams are produced and rotated around the instrument. The beam performs like a moving string because sounds are generated every time the beam lying on the ground passes the performers feet. A real-time motion capture technique and pattern recognition of the users feet are used in order to create a new style of musical interaction. Therefore, this instrument provides an embodied sound media environment where everyone can readily enjoy it for playing the sounds without scores and also can interact with others through collaborative musical experiences. In the interactive environment around beacon, people can communicates with each other by means of sound, music and his/her own body motion like dancing or tapping. The promising applications include edutainment, recreation, fitness, rehabilitation, entertainment or sports and new artistic expression.

I choose this example because it is a game, without fixed rules. Beacon can be agon, mimicry, or ilinx (as I experienced myself) according to how you use it.

Agon: One Person tries to repeat the sound of another one.

Mimicry: Try to not only create a nice sound, create a performance.

Ilinx: Try to follow the lasers.

http://kimasendorf.com/========>http://tempub.net/

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tempub.net is a contemporary html dump, an open board, a constantly changing website controlled by the website visitors.  TEMPORARY PUBLIC captures the moment and gives an insight into the thoughts of the previous user.

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Temporary Public is an invitation to play, while perhaps not overtly becoming a game.

It is playful in asking you to interact with is substance, a part of a website that is almost always hidden and private.

It is also of course, a fairly typical (although customised) interface.

You are left with the choice to make it ‘better’ or ‘worse’ by project yourself onto it (Mimesis) , or simply leave.

It establishes the rules and the arena or circle using text and an introduction, then allows you the feeling of power (ilinx), choice and fantasy, perhaps of doing something worthwhile.

It is declared that your influence will be received by further visitors to the site, who will react in their own manner to what they find there.

Although it is more likely to be approached with a sense of Paida (I believe that random Internet sites are more conducive to vandalism and pranks than earnest hard work.) it is possible however to approach it with a ludus methodology, trying to communicate a message or respond if another entity changes it.

It is also true that the participant would benefit from some knowledge of HTML. I am not sure if that lies in the category of “knowing the rules of the game”, which is a given. Probably not, but you can always copy or delete chunks of text.

I am interested in the power will has over a game. just because chess is designed to be ludic doesn’t mean the pieces cant be thrown at cats. Anything can be Pieda-ed with and almost anything can be turned into a Ludus system of play.

I also find the area between playing by onesself, and playing with others interesting. The anonymity of the internet is interesting in this situation. You are not communicating with Asendorf, but he probably checks it. You are told others will view your traces and you assume they will react. Is this a game interaction?

Read More

This interactive art piece can be either ludus or either paidia but it’s definitely an ilix. There is a plain well defined space with two possibilities of control. The first is the iPad which starts the “game” and the second are the prisms what the participants can use the to make a “lighfield” of their own or “play” with the others. With the iPad you can control the light, the angle and the color. With the 15 triangle shaped prism you can create and interact. Of course the installation is works just fine without any participation but it’s not the same.

“The installation is a collaboration between Wonwei and Shanghai-based design studio Super Nature Design. It was first exhibited at the 2011 International Science and Art Exhibition in Shanghai where it received the Best Creative Design Award.”

// Peter Eszes

With their movements on the interaction plate the user can influence the light installation hive. The embedded capacitive sensors help to transform the swarm, to hunt or displace the light points crowd.

 This art piece is an agon playful interface. With the interaction plate the user tried to split up the light points in groups, to banish them and also creating something beautiful at the same time. There wasn’t a guideline how the plate would interact, because it reacted different to every human body. The communication language was easy to learn and the user probably understood the usage already after the fist few seconds.

by Veronika

Thoughts and references to the Roger Caillois essay from the book Man, Play and Games 

by Veronika Krenn

In this text I’d tried to describe Roger Caillois games categories. Furthermore I picked up two games, which I’m playing very often, and defined in with categories they are placed.

In Man, Play and Games Roger Caillois, written in 1958, explains first the difference between ludus and paida. Paida describes the impulse to experience with the environment, like children always do. Ludus is the grown up version of playing, with defined rules and outlines. Roger Caillois also divides game into four main categories: agôn (competition), alea (change), mimicry (illusion) and ilinx (vertigo), he also makes it clear that one game can be placed in two categories at the same time.

The Agôn category defines all the competitive games, which focus on competition and challenge. Roger Caillois doesn’t make here a different between mental and physical games in his theory. Two individuals or two teams are staying in rivalry and with defined rules and limits the winner appears to be better in a certain category.  Polo, tennis, football or boxing are good examples for physical agôn games. The same category also summarizes the mental challenging games like chess or billiards. In agôn the searching for equality, creating same conditions are important and a game like chess shows that every player has the same conditions.

Alea builds the contrast too agôn, the player is entirely passive during the game because he doesn’t use his personal skills, muscles or intelligence. So the player can’t influence the outcome of an alea game. Examples for this category are roulette, baccara and lotteries. The change and gambling facts eliminates the professionalization and the training for alea games.

In Mimicry games the players are building up a new imaginary universe, escaping from the real world and are re-defining themselves or are acting in a defined role. All the role-playing games and also the carnival are good examples for mimicry

Ilinx is described with vertigo, which means for example to loose control over your body like in the children game when they are twisting around until they just fall on the ground. Also climbing is part of this category, in this case ilinx means that the person wants to destroy his reality for a moment with by putting himself in a shocking situation.

World of goo is a 2D computer game, where the player has to build bridges or towers with moving black balls, which also act like a liquid. The goal is to transport them to the end of the level, without falling into the water or getting spiked, where the liquid gets aspirate. Another challenge is to build huge towers with the moving balls without loosing the balance.

World of goo is an agôn game, each player has the equal changes to win but in this game they are not playing against another person, they are challenging with the gravity and the hindrance. The player also has to use his experiences to deal with the situation when the tower is getting too instable. For me the game is also a kind of mimicry game, the game environment is a totally imaginary universe and the player acts like an engineer or the boss of the black balls.

Table football, I probably don’t have to explain this game, is for me a really good example where the teams are starting in the same positions, they can’t even move the footballer in another direction as it’s defined. Cheating or ignoring these rules are more or less impossible. The players can practice and become better, he uses his experiences from other games and he is getting faster and more unerring every time.

Demitrios Kargotis and Dash Macdonald (dashndem)

In Your Hands, 2008

http://www.dashndem.com/in_your_hands.html

• Spectator can move artist with roller skates by remote control

• In Your Hands is a performance and accompanying video where remote-controlled roller skates place the artist’s fate in the hands of the audience, creating a situation where ethical parameters are challenged. Humour and spectacle are used to lure the participants into the thrill of the event while distracting them from what is really happening, namely a subversive social experiment which questions how far people are willing to go to seek their own enjoyment.

• Cultural topic of manipulation

• Political body (Foucault)

• Participants use the remote control for driving another person and can feel that they have him in their hands. What kind of feelings they have? Where is the ethical border for playing with somebody? What do they really want to do? The important role plays cultural as well as psychological aspects. The artwork is playful and shows the ethical borders of each participant.

Susanne Weirich

Silent Playground, 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zyg0MHBPhM

http://www.susanneweirich.com/work/work-index.html

• Silent Playground, shot in the Grand Hyatt Berlin in collaboration with the actor Inga Busch is informed by the logic and setting of survival-genre computer games such as Project Zero or Silent Hill3. Filmed on steadicam in a variety of situations, the game’s identificatory protagonist evolves into a hyperrealistic avatar. Cast into changing spatial scenarios, her deepest desires and fears are exposed to a pattern of ingenious logic that permits only two options: a happy end or a bad end.
  It analyzes a particular genre of mass culture, exploring references to contemporary film and clichéd notions of problem-solving. Silent Playground invented a game set-up that convincingly draws on the film aesthetic of PlayStation, while also acting on the structure of polar alternatives in our wish projection onto reality.

• The art piece is a kind of playful parody of game. The simulation of game environment by the actor creates a special kind of aesthetics. From gender point of view we can read it as a women confession about feelings and conditions in society and culture where she still has to fight with unknown force.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG

Freedom, online performance, 2010

http://vimeo.com/16864989

• In Freedom (2010) we are faced with a live performance set within the popular first-person shooter videogame “Counter Strike”. Here, the artist, Eva Mattes, is refusing to accomplish the basic goal of the game, to kill the enemy. She instead tries to convince the other players to save her life because she is “trying to make an artwork”. The result is the performer being endlessly and brutally killed and abused by the other players.

• Performance tries to be totally interpassive. What will happen if you make a revolution in such a kind of hyperspace? If you stop following the rules in such a hyper collective. Who is interested in art in this environment? Nobody. People just want to play. Don’t speak about anything just play! Players expect a game with a traditional magic circuit, don’t disturb them!

by Lenka

1. Title: Knife.Hand.Chop.Bot
Author: Emanuel Andel
http://5voltcore.com/typolight/typolight257/index.php?id=1&articles=3

2. Title: Snout
Author: Golan Levin
http://www.flong.com/projects/snout/

3. Title: Hard-wired devices
Author: Roger Ibars
http://homepage.mac.com/rogeribars/rogeribars/index.html

4. Title: AR Magic System
Author:Clara Boj y Diego Diaz
http://www.lalalab.org/armagic.htm

5. Title: Shadow Monsters
Author:Philip Worthington
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJTTkwrZ9s

6. Title: “This painting is not available in your country”
Author:Paul Mutant
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmutant/4992725876/

Projects submit by Mar Canet

Seven Mile Boots
Laura Beloff
http://randomseed.org/sevenmileboots/

“Seven mile boots, the magical footwear known from folk tales, enables its owner to travel seven miles with one step. With little effort one can cross the countries, to be present wherever it seems suitable and to become a cosmopolitan flaneur with the world as the street.”

The project SEVEN MILE BOOTS is a pair of interactive shoes with audio. One can wear the boots, walk around as a flaneur simultaneousy in the physical world and in the literal world of the internet. By walking in the physical world one may suddenly encounter a group of people chatting in real time in the virtual world. The chats are heard as a spoken text coming from the boots. Wherever you are with the boots, the physical and the virtual worlds will merge together.

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Extra Room
Bernhard Hopfengärtner and Gunnar Green
http://www.thegreeneyl.com/extra-room

The Extra Room exists in an imaginary world where neuro-imaging is used to «read» the human mind. As the mind becomes transparent in this world a new necessity of protective self discipline emerges. Utilising effects of sensory deprivation and methods used by the military to break someone down, the room enables subjects to adjust their thinking and beliefs. The Extra Room, a reversed disciplinary architecture, is built into the basement of a multi storey building where it is shared by the house’s inhabitants.

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Wide Eyes
Kenichi Okada
http://kenichiokada.com/projects/2008/wideeyes.html

If our body was to become a hundred times bigger, how would we perceive the world?

Would we feel that everything was smaller than our bodies, like miniature toys?

Building on my experiments for the Nano project I attempted to control the perceived dimensions of space by widening the distance between our eyes. I’ve done this through a series of playful experiments working at different scales - going from the intimate to the architectura

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Jubilator
Roel Wouters
http://www.xelor.nl/xelor/pile.php?item=Jubilator

Jubilator was first performed in October 2007 during the opening event of the new big screen CAS Zuidas in Amsterdam. Around 500 people witnessed the unique moment when Jubliator was first launched. 

Jubilator is a ball of 120 cm diameter with a wireless built in camera and microphone. The image that is captured by the ball is live projected on the screen in front of the crowd. 

Jubilator’s name is lend from the verb ‘jubilate’: show great happiness, rejoice. By throwing the ball up high in the air, letting it drop to the ground, passing it on from person to person, holding your face in front of it or just by everyone reaching their arms far out, the most divers and spectacular images emerge. By watching the screen you can directly see the results of your own interactions with jubliator: while observing the crowd you suddenly see close-ups of faces, hands, arms and other body parts and together with this image you hear the emplified jubilating sounds people make by interacting with the ball. But Jubilator also brings the spacial surrounding into new perspectives. Due to the camera’s lens, the ball’s movements, it’s spinning and the dynamics of bouncing, everything - people, houses, ground and sky - becomes an actor in the crazy ride through space and time.

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Teleprotest
Ivo Vos
http://www.ivovos.com/teleprotest.php

‘Anti-war protester Brian Haw has been protesting on Parliament Square in London since 2001, non-stop.’

An exclusion zone of one mile around parliament prevents anyone except Brian Haw to protest in front of the Parliament. But do the same laws apply when the protest is mediated through technologies like telepresence? Do the restrictions apply for physical presence only , or for audio and mental presence as well?

In this project for O2 Mobile , a collaboration with Mathhew Holloway and Cheryl Bauer, we were interested in how activists communicate in the public space. In response to talks with Brian Haw and his colleague’s we built a DIY-telepresence kit, making it possible for more people to join the protest.

Twenty pounds on material hacks together a telepresence device consisting of a cheap mobile phone and battery powered speakers. It can be freely accessed by anyone carrying the phone number. The stick automatically picks up when called [hands-free function on every mobile] and starts broadcasting.

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 Jaak