Playing with Pigs: Pig Chase (by Utrecht School of the Arts)
“This game, “Pig Chase,” was developed by a team from the Utrecht School of the Arts and Wageningen University. In the concept video above, a human controls a ball of light on a wall in the pigpen. If a pig nuzzles the light, the ball changes colors. The human and pig must work in sync to maneuver the ball over to the goal, where the team is rewarded with a display of fireworks.” - io9 (via Jane McGonigal)
““Look, you need action and you need some kind of skill level. It should be a game where you have to control things moving around on the scope, like, oh, spaceships. Something like an explorer game, or a race or contest…a fight, maybe?” – Wayne Witaenem
In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gave MIT a PDP-1 computer and the games began. The computer game Spacewar! had its origins in discussions among young programmers who had come to MIT’s Kludge room to experiment with the new DEC computer. At first the talk was about making more “interesting displays” for the new computer, but that evolved into talk of some sort of game. Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Witaenem conceived of the now legendary Spacewar! computer game, the first influential computer game. For scores of students across the country pulling all-nighters to write new code, Spacewar! taught a crucial lesson in interactive programming: “how to talk to a computer and have it answer back.” - http://museum.mit.edu/150/25
More on Spacewar! http://pdp-1.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/?f=theme&s=4&ss=3
Article written by Stewart Brand in Rolling Stone 1972: http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
Doctors at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, Canada have taken interactive gaming to the next level when they hooked up a Kinect console to their medical imaging computer. Now when in the operating room, doctors can have direct access to MRI scans, without having to disinfect, leave the operating room, consult the scans, and then scrub back in. This hack allows them to virtually manipulate the scans and retrieve the necessary information by pulling it up on screen with a wave of their hand. (via PSFK)
You guys. We live in the f-ing future!
(via dpstyles)
“With these images I was exploring the unique photographic possibilities presented by using a Microsoft Kinect as a light source. The Kinect - an inexpensive videogame peripheral - projects a pattern of infrared dots known as “structured light”. Invisible to the eye, this pattern can be captured using an infrared camera.”
Games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions. They are able to deliver the high levels of emotional engagement they’re famed for because they’re also adept at delivering the lows of loss, humiliation and frustration. The world of user experience design from which the concept of gamification has arisen has spent the last twenty years erasing loss, humiliation and frustration from its flows. A world of badges and points only offers upwards escalation, and without the pain of loss and failure, these mean far less. And when this upward escalation is based only on accumulation of points, rather than on expressions of my choices and my skills, then this further strips out the sense of agency and competence, so crucial to the emotional and neurological buzz we get from gaming.
—Can’t play, won’t play | Hide&Seek - Inventing new kinds of play
Motivated by the popularity of games, designers of social systems sometimes adopt scoring and ranking systems simplistically, with counterproductive results. The easiest design mistake is to throw up a “leaderboard” ranking all participants by a single dimension. Tom Coates explains that this simply discourages most participants. “Competitive charts, particularly at scale, basically are disincentives! Why compete to be #134,555th best at something!” Jane McGonigal agrees: “Cumulative allplayer scoreboards/ranks/achievements are fail, should be stopped like blink tags ^_^
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
