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3131 Guru Meditation [iPhone]

Guru Meditation is a iPhone port of Ian Bogost’s Atari 2600 game of the same name, itself an homage to the folkloric game played by Amiga OS developers on a Joyboard peripheral, circa 1982.

The aim is to stay still as long as possible, taking a break from the noise of daily activities. Time passes subtly during the game. Clouds move. The time of day changes, roughly every hour, from day to dusk to night to dawn. If you move or a sound disrupts you, the yogi will fall and the game will end.  You must also ensure that the noise level around you is kept to a minimum as the game monitors sound around you (microphone input on iPhone only). Not an easy task in this day and age but a fun way to test your ability to stay still, something we all need from time to time.

The game retains all the graphics, sounds, and gameplay of the Atari VCS original. The input, of course, is updated to take advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer, touch, and sound controls to encourage focus and inactivity.

Guru Meditation is also available as a limited edition, numbered set with cartridge, Joyboard, and accessories. It is nevertheless great to see that Ian has also ported the game to iPhone and iPod Touch to make it available to a broader audience.

Ian Bogost is a videogame researcher, critic, designer, as well as an author and an entrepreneur. He is a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

About Ian’s research at  Georgia Tech:
My research focuses on videogames as cultural artifacts. In particular, I’m interested in a kind of game criticism that contextualizes games in the long history of human expression, and game rhetoric, or how games make arguments. These two subjects are the respective topics of my first two books, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, both from the MIT Press. Much of my work concerns the uses of videogames outside entertainment, including politics, advertising, learning, and art. But I’m also very interested in mainstream commercial videogames and historical approaches to videogames. I write frequently in the videogame trade press, and I also edit Water Cooler Games, a popular website on videogames with an agenda. more..

For more info on the game, see bogost.com/games/guru_meditation.

Thanks Ian.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $0.99
Developer: Ian Bogost

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• Author: Filip

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