“The fireflies are leaving the city, looking for a new home. Let your touch guide them as they soar through the skies and dance among the trees” is the description of an experimental video game ‘Flight of the Fireflies’ by Jonathan Hise Kaldma that takes you on an atmospheric journey through places and emotions. The focus of the game is not on the challenge – but on the experience.�

Continue reading.... Flight of the Fireflies – “Atmospheric journey through places and emotions” [iPad, Games]

From Roger Ebert’s pedantic proclamation that “video games can never be art” to the clichéd fawning over the truckloads of revenue generated by each new release in the Modern Warfare series, gaming consistently inspires overarching conversations about media and culture. At this point, these ‘big conversations’ should surprise no one, as with each passing year gaming becomes less esoteric and permeates more and more demographic groups (e.g. the popularity of social games on Facebook, senior citizens embracing the Wii as an exercise platform, etc.). So while gaming may be everywhere, it is strange that it is often difficult to locate conversations about it that speak to how we actually integrate play and simulation into our everyday experience. What can games tell us about relaxation, work and routine? What do they have to say about movement and the body? How might we subvert gaming conventions through pranks and humour? Ian Bogost’s recent book How To Do Things With Videogames thoughtfully considers questions like these while endeavouring to re-frame the medium through a series of focused, topical texts that draw on familiar and engaging points of reference.

Organized as 20 bite-sized chapters, How To Do Things With Videogames carefully considers how gaming has been leveraged to explore sex, art, politics, branding and boredom – all the touchstones of contemporary life. Within each of these articles, Bogost carefully blends accessible pop culture references with illustrative gaming examples as the basis of his ruminations on how the medium functions as a cultural mirror. The “feel and weight” of Go pieces sets the stage for a meditation on haptic feedback, a FPS shootout set in the Manchester Cathedral serves as a gateway into a conversation about awe and reverence. Bogost’s knowledge of game history is encyclopedic and it is hard to come away from this book without a renewed appreciation for just how weird and wonderful game design can get – some of the more obscure references to SimHacks, mundane minigames and naive game tourism are priceless.

There are many compelling moments within the text, I’ve picked out two that I found particularly provocative.

Red Dead Redemption / Screen capture: Red Dead Wiki

In the chapter on “transit” Bogost sketches out a history of the moving image that considers panoramas, how the advent of rail altered the experience of landscape and the broader implications of movement in games:

Instead of looking forward to a future in which the risky, laborious process of traversing a space could be lessened, in-videogame transit re-creates a past in which reality had not yet been dissolved into bits, but had to be traversed deliberately. Like the panorama show, the transit simulation is a kind of replacement therapy for an inaccessible experience of movement.

Could this thesis be any more clearly articulated than in Red Dead Redemption, where the 21st century leisure class faux-nostalgically gallop across a simulated American Southwest on horseback?

How To Do Things With Videogames also unpacks how game design can complement and challenge corporate identity. The following passage is culled from a consideration of how games put brand identity under the microscope and (for me) it really evoked memories of the recent high speed turfing of Molleindustria’s Phone Story from the App Store.

Of course, unauthorized brand abuse in large commercial games might not be possible or desirable. But brands’ cultural values offer a bridge between visual appearance and game mechanics. In some cases, our understanding of particular rules of interaction has become bonded to products or services.

Phone Story sketched out a damning narrative of the consumer electronics industry’s reliance on conflict minerals and dubious labour practices and tells this story as playable narrative. The fact that a game that explicitly took aim at Apple’s supply chain ethics was so quickly ‘disappeared’ underscores the degree to which gamespace is contested (branding) ground. Bogost’s analysis of this milieu weaves together several examples of promotional games, an analysis of Monopoly tokens, commentary on Obama’s 2008 in-game ad purchases and also considers examples of “anti-advergame” critical resistance.

How To Do Things With Videogames is a lightning fast read and the book’s success is largely due to both brevity and charm. As a topical ‘scan’ of an entire medium, the undertaking is noteworthy for clearly articulating down to earth approaches for reconsidering the politics and experience of play. Bogost’s conclusion describes an ongoing process whereby games are becoming “more ordinary and familiar” and the cultural currency of ‘the gamer’ as a distinct subculture is fading – the tone and execution of this work certainly support this forecast. While a delight to muse over, this text should be read as a serious reconsideration of ‘first principles’ for anyone who plays, designs or avoids gaming on a regular basis.

Purchase on amazon.com / amazon.co.uk

“Boy uncertain of his sister’s faith enters limbo” is the tag line of the absolutely wonderful game “Limbo”, now available for Mac!

The game takes on a journey of a boy that transverses through the ‘horrible world’ challenged by obstacles which gradually more difficult and more hostile (see video interview at the bottom with Mads Wibroe, the producer). Somewhat influenced by film noir, the game is a solitary, dark, black, silhouette filled journey filled with soft depth blur to describe mood. No text, no music, in “Limbo” you are in the game, alone, in the dark. - our post from may 2010

Limbo won Excellence In Visual Art and Technical Excellence award at the IGF and previously only available for the XBox. You can read the full interview with the PlayDead’s CEO Dino Patti on IFC.com.

Download from the AppStore ($9.99)

Continue reading.... Limbo [Games, Mac]

Windosill by Patrick Smith (Vectorpark.com) is now available for the iPad.  An adventure puzzle game filled with peculiar objects, it is your task to resolve abstract but yet logical puzzles to progress from room to room.

Our post from 2009: The world is populated by objects and beings but it is the square that fits right above the door on your right is the object you are after. This may be given to you by the bird or it could be the part of letter “i”. None of this may make sense but you really need to play the game to find out what is all about. I have managed to pass first 3 levels pretty easy, but I am not sure If I can make logic from level 4. Greeted by weird but wonderful five objects on plant stems, each with individual properties, I am trying to make sense of it all. From the weird characters to the little steam engine that is ‘you’, everything in this game looks great.

Continue reading.... Windosill [iPad, Games]

Photo/Nykto is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the “Unterplay” project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. Edric describes at as a game for nyktophobes (fear of darkness – wiki) and photophobes (the oposite). It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back.

Continue reading.... Photo/Nykto [iPad, openFrameworks, Games]

In collaboration with Rump-Recordings, Futura Epsis 1 (the collective behind GRID) have just released QDD, an iPhone game and music promo for Quasi Dub Development’s newest LP “Limousine to the Guillotine”.

The app combines game mechanics with unlockable tracks featuring remixes from artists like Thomas Knak aka Opiate, Jason Forrest , Kim Hiorthøy, Guido Möbius and Loopspool (Tied + Tickled Trio). Task in the game is to destroy enemy cells by firing particles from your own cells. As you fire the particles your cells reduce in size which can then be merged by applying multitouch to the screen. Each enemy cells has a lifeline and they also fire back. As you complete the level, next level and remix unlock.

Made with Objective-C and OpenCL. Effects made in After Effects.

More screenshots and demo video below.

Continue reading.... QDD [iPhone, Sound, Games]

SpellTower is a new iPad game by Zach Gage, the name behind the titles such as Halcyon, Bit Pilot, and Unify. SpellTower is a word puzzle game that combines the traditional word making with Tetris style block physics. In the game, the task is to make long words or use bonus tiles to clear extra letters from the screen. As you work, more word tiles rise from the bottom of the screen, and it’ll take all of your word wits and tactical know-how to keep them down. If any of the letters make it to the top row, it’s game over. After playing the game for few days now, I asked Zach what was the inspiration and the reasons for making SpellTower..

Continue reading.... SpellTower [iPad, Games, openFrameworks]

Kent Sheely recreates famous photos from World War II using a video game engine (2009).

Continue reading.... World War II Redux [Games]

Created by an indie developer based in Denmark and Germany called ‘Die Gute Fabrik’, ‘Where is my Heart?’ is their new debut on the PlayStation Network for PS3 and PSP platforms.

In 2009, after the first Where is my heart?–prototype was displayed the independent games festival winning the student showcase prize. The game had a particular visual twist; the representation of gamelevels as comic panels. It is one of the basic mechanics of the game which has both a strong influence on the level designs and the visuals of the game. The levels themselves are all tied to the overall topic of getting lost in the woods. The environments, even though fantastic with flying platforms and such, are rooted in a moderate climate. The player moves a monster family through a traditional 2d world, but the visualization of this world as comic panels mixes things up. The player needs to find her way in this world of splitscreens, where she might exit a frame at the bottom right of the screen, but enter another frame somewhere located in the top left.

Continue reading.... Where is my Heart? [Games]

]]> http://www.creativeapplications.net/games/where-is-my-heart-games/feed/ 0 http://www.creativeapplications.net/games/parallax-games/ http://www.creativeapplications.net/games/parallax-games/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:35:46 +0000 Filip http://www.creativeapplications.net/?p=19856

Submitted to this years IGF 2012, Parallax by Zi Ye and Jesse Burstyn is an interdimensional platforming and puzzle-solving game. The goal in each level is to reach the exit by travelling between two overlapping dimensions through rifts. Parallax challenges the player to think beyond the spatial boundaries of traditional platformers.

Continue reading.... Parallax [Games]

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