I don’t know if there is a precedent on this one. Some real-life flesh-and-blood dude actually married a character from a Nintendo DS dating simulator, in a church in Guam. Left for the rest of us to imagine is how they will have t3h s3x and what the babies will look like…

By the way, here is the bride.

Additionaly, it is quite interesting to note the profound tone of some discussions that popped-up after the Kotaku article.

She argued, even if they don’t communicate, the digital coding, on the binary level, in each copy of the game for this girl, is exactly the same; essentially making this girl and every other player of the game who has chosen her an adulterer. -Dallas Peterson

[Edit] And here’s the video report by Lisa Katayama from Boing Boing.

(via Kotaku, more Kotaku and Gizmodo)

I’m tired from the early plane trip back from Athens, mentally exhausted for all the stuff I saw at ACE 2009 and I am also slightly sick to boot.

Given all the above, I am seriously unable to even comment on such shocking news…

“[Baby and Me] takes doll-playing to the next level by incorporating motion control (and balance board support!) into 18 game modes (…). Not only that, this hellspawn will actually cry through the Wiimote’s speaker. You quiet baby down by rocking, burping and teaching him/her/it to walk. There’s even a feeding exercise. I’m sensing a Wiimote breast pump attachment down the line.” – via Kotaku

Couldn’t have said it better.

Remember the intro to the first Resident Evil movie? We are introduced (to the sound of a stomping, gritty theme which I love) to this whole underground secret virus lab  where they are producing the T-virus, the ingredient to make zombies, let’s say. Or the Regenerate Commercial? Here it is directly from YouTube to freshen up your memory.

So after that, how would you feel about buying this… uh, Derma-Full X3 Facial Filling Serum, from Avon?

Avon Clinical Derma-Full X3 Facial Filling Serum

Or, as Joystiq puts it:

Via Joystiq (click on picture to link there)

But hey, that’s just a strange coincidence. I don’t assume that the folks who design the Avon product packaging ever saw the Resident Evil movie. And then again, I might be assuming too much, and that’s just where they got inspiration from  On the other hand, I wonder if the asset designers for the movies inspired themselves on Avon products. Given that the Avon product was released this year that is seemingly impossible.

Here we have a toy made to the image of a Halo assault rifle. No mistake here folks, it’s quite clear where the inspiration came from.

Via Kotaku (click on picture to link)

The Halo Assault Rifle (via IGN)

And last but not least, my own finding. Last month I was walking around the Urfahranermarkt (a seasonal fair in Linz) with my new flatmate Vesela. I couldn’t resist the calling of my inner child and check out the toy stands. And then I saw this.

The Sword of The Great King War Craft

I have my doubts as to whether there is a similar item in World of Warcraft. I honestly don’t believe so. But in such an expansive game world, there might surely be something similar. So it’s not really a game asset come to the physical world, it’s a cheesy trick from some cheap toy company. Nevertheless, interesting to note how videogame culture – here represented by something so recent as World of Warcraft – is pervading so many aspects of modern life.

One of the last things I would expect to find at an Urfahranermarkt stand would be The Sword of The Great King War Craft.

Thanks to Ricardo Nascimento I came to know of The Fun Theory, an initiative by Volkswagen that aims to show that “something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better”.

My crystal ball tells me that if you have an idea for such a fun and beneficial behaviour-changing project, there might be a 2500€ prize in you future.

Anyone want in with me?

This then leads back to the notion of Persuasive Games. Ian Bogost wrote a whole book on the subject (a book I have yet to read) and became founding partner of the Persuasive Games studio.

And quite recently Prof. Luca Chittaro posted once again about one of my works. Headbang Hero is attracting a lot of attention and everyone has his/her own view on what this beast really is, it’s intentions towards the player. In Prof. Chittaro’s view,  it’s a persuasive application with two faces: initially it seems to try and make headbanging more fun by awarding points for it and allowing several players to compare their scores; then it seems to try and tame down the players by pointing out the risks they incurred.

Guess who also has a profile on Facebook now?

Tiago Martins | Create Your Badge

I had to eventually end up there, like everyone else.

Now let’s see how to integrate both Facebook and WordPress without destroying something in the process.

If computer assisted pervasive gaming were to become much more commonplace now, and by comparison to current state-of-the-art videogames, it would still be in the 8-bit era, or even worse.

It seems to me that the major problem in what concerns input/output in what could be a commercial, widely-adopted mobile pervasive game, would be – still comparing with current-gen videogames – realistic output.

I could imagine players walking around with head-mounted displays to provide a (more or less) mobile output channel for mixed reality graphics, or even portable projectors (which don’t work very well in broad daylight). But in a situation where real objects are used in-game and the developers want the game to autonomously affect these objects’ position in space (and other physical properties such as size, color, shape and whatnot) there is still a major problem as far as I can see.

Let’s imagine that I am playing a wizard or telekinetic character of some kind. How would I go about moving real objects with my mind? Maybe my powers can only affect objects from that other dimension or plane – the virtual.

I might not be completely serious about this. But what it tells me is to expect the current design of pervasive games to be much more about metaphors – just like in the times of the Atari 2600 when everything graphics-wise was blocky and you really had to fire up your imagination there for a bit until you could understand what was going on in the screen in front of you.

As a more extreme example, consider the Magnavox Odyssey, which had no sound output whatsoever and came with these transparent overlays which you would stick to the TV screen to define the game-world. Most games didn’t even enforce the rules by themselves so, for instance, you were free to cross a wall with your “avatar” as long as other players didn’t mind.

I think that if you watch the Angry Video Game Nerd’s review of the Odyssey (NSFW) you’ll pretty much get the point. The Odyssey even came with chips, dice and cards, something that would be unthinkable nowadays because computers handle all the logic and representation in videogames.

Oh no, wait, I forgot Eye of Judgment, a PS3 game released only last year. That one uses cards

Anyway, would something like what happens with the Magnavox Odyssey make sense for a pervasive game? To further ponder about this, please do take a look at this article from Wired, which is accompanied as always by witty comments.

Pocket Players: 13 Great Portable Games

Another Summer that ended with me rushing off from somewhere to be present at the Ars Electronica festival – but maybe more importantly, at the Interface Culture exhibition.

This year students pushed hard to organize the Royal Interface Culture Masquerade Ball, which took place at the twin building from Kunstuniversitat – also commonly referred to as the Hitler buildings (1).

Anyway, here’s a video of the opening and of a few projects.

I guess that much thanks to this exhibition, Headbang Hero captured a lot of attention. During the time I spent there I traded impressions and contacts with many interesting people. For instance with Nobumichi Tosa, the President of Maywa Denki, of whose work I am a great fan. He actually played HBH and put a lot of energy to it, but in the end he looked very disgruntled. I was hoping that HBH would put a smile in his face, because his quite cunning and positively hilarious work always puts one big smile in mine.

Nobumichi Tosa is hard to impress.

Eventually invitations started more or less raining for the HBH team. So, as posted on the Headbang Hero website, we will soon be staging our heroically masochistic game at the Musiques Volantes festival in Metz (FR) and then at this year’s Campus Party in Mexico City (MX). Oh, and there is also the demo at the ACE 2009 conference, but conferences are becoming boring and you have to pay a s***load of money to attend, even as a student.

So, as a bonus to this post, here’s a heads-up for the people who organize entertainment-related conferences: it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee, just because you want the conference tolook properly scientific doesn’t mean that the demo sessions must be boring as hell. Interactivity isn’t any more – or better never was, to begin with –  a computer-science subdomain, nor is it so much about computers and technology as it is about people and experiences. So please, if you want to have good demo session, provide proper support to the demo’ers, don’t make us have to rent computers and projectors and whatnot (2).

Onwards then to some Ars Electronica Festival stuff.

First off, look who I found in the Brucknerhaus.

Shrink performance, part of the Human Nature Exhibition.

No, dammit, not the plastic-encased people, although these were also pretty cool. I mean Nuno Correia and Monica Mendes. Every year I end up meeting more Portuguese people at the Festival but to me these two are especially dear as they are part of the story that brought me to Linz.

I'm always glad to see them. I hope it's reciprocal.

There was also Bare Conductive, the conductive ink project, into which I must delve deeper one of these days. The photo is actually from Engadget, but that’s the Brucknerhaus allright.

Bare Conductive by, photo via Engadget.

What about Japanese Device Art? I’m a sucker for it, I must admit. As Machiko Kusahara puts it:

As a concept, Device Art is rooted in the analysis of the key role that devices play in certain types of art, that is, artworks involving hardware (a device) specifically designed to realize the artistic concept. The device itself can become the content. Technology is not hidden, its function is visible and easy to understand, while it still brings about a sense of wonder. Well designed interfaces made of the right materials facilitate interaction for users, often in a playful manner.

At the Ars Electronica Center, visitors were able to come into close contact with carefully selected examples of Device Art, such as the ones from Maywa Denki – of which I am a great fan, as previously stated.

The sequencer from the Knock! family by Maywa Denki.

So here’s a mechanical music sequencer. The “typical” sequencer interface, as per music creation software like Fruity Loops, is here realized in fully physical fashion. I am unaware from where the software sequencer interface got its looks and functionality but I am tempted to say that it was from an abstract mental model of a physical device such as this one. So here we see the device realized, brought to existence, instead of a purely virtual interface based on the same mental model. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

LoopScape by Ryota Kuwakubo

Here’s a very simple yet interesting take on gaming. You might get dizzy playing this two-player shooter game, simple where rules are concerned but requiring the players to circle this ring-like display. It interests me not only because it bridges retro gaming to a new approach, but also as it an example of  a game-worlds that becomes challenging when mapped to physical space. That is LoopScape by Ryota Kuwakubo, who has tons of other cool stuff going on such as Bitman and the VideoBulb.

The MIT Media Lab put up quite a display. Even if most was just showcasing and documentation, few will disagree that they have tons of great work. I would like to have tried the Sixth Sense by Pranav Mistry for myself but I understand it’s a prototype. Still the idea is great, not far from my own vision of interaction using the Gauntlet. Now I just need to get my hands on a portable projector, or maybe a phone with an integrated one.

Still I had quite a lot of fun with Drawdio.

I also fancied the Proximeter very much. I noticed now that this one at Ars 09 had a wooden frame, as opposed to the shiny metallic one on their website. I guess it looks more familiar like that, like something you would find at your grandparent’s house. On the other hand the one in the website would fit into a steampunk submarine, for instance. With all the useless iPhone App out there (such as the lighter thingy) and geo-referenced microblogging, wouldn’t this become an interesting one, for a change? Apologies for the blurry picture, I was kind of in a hurry back then.

Proximeter by John Kestner

And to finalize, something from the Cyberarts Exhibition – which I didn’t really relate to very much this year, gods know why. I had seen something similar at a previous Cyberarts in 2006: Yokomono by Staalplat Soundsystem. The common base might be in these Vinyl Killer vans – each of these “coasts on the surface of the vinyl, gliding the needle over and into the grooves, churning out music from its own built-in speaker” (from the Vinyl Killer webpage). Nevertheless, Yuri Suzuki’s approach integrates the modularity of a construction set (or more closely slot car tracks) into the playback and remixing of music, to bring back the physicality of music media – something that seems lost to digital formats and portable players.

The Physical Value of Sound by Yuri Suzuki

And that, my friends, is about enough for today. I still have more to tell you, particularly about the Japan Media Arts Vienna, meting Junichi Kanebako, the fun I had at the opening and all… but I would like to get some sleep now. You see, tomorrow I have to pick up a Bulgarian at the train station.

While searching for something totally unrelated, I found this quote from Claude Vorilhon:

Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don’t have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison.

Claude Vorilhon (aka Raël) [via BrainyQuote]

The founder of the UFO Religion of Raëlism, a man of both great fame and great notoriety, is a manifest supporter of technology and science (namely cloning) for a better way of life. As he is of sensual meditation. Still, it’s quite surprising to find reference to videogames (a positive reference if I’m understanding it right) in his words.

Although I’m bound to disagree… I’d say that playing with wooden toys will propitiate the development of a set of skills that may not be quite the same as (although it may overlap) the set of skills developed by playing videogames. I don’t really believe that wooden toys or videogames have the power to atrophy the brain. Unless it’s a videogame about Raëlism…

Anger, what an amazing feeling…

In videogames, anger usually has its roots in stuff like stiff controls, unbalanced game rules, cheap deaths, sparse checkpoints… well if you’re a gamer, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you might have already been witness to angry displays of gamer frustration. These often include cursing and swearing, violent tossing of game controllers, pounding fists – everything at once and much more, if you’re an angry german kid.

But what about a game that feeds off of your anger? A game that cordially invites you to repeatedly pound on a table and – best of all – to literally flip a table as a finishing move?

Japan is full of awesomeness. Nothing so wild as Boon-ga Boon-ga this time (1), but on the same note… a game that invites you to take it all out on it’s tangible interface. While in Boon-ga Boon-ga there was an ass, in Cho Chabudai Gaeshi [via Kotaku] there is a tea table.

[via Kotaku]

(1) which is actually South-Korean in origin, but was a success at Tokyo Game Show 2000

White Shadow, by Team 4040. Commissioned by Ars Electronica Linz.

For three nights now, White Shadow has been serving as a live channel between Mexico City and Linz.

It will be there until July 14. If you live in Linz, please drop by the Hauptplatz after 21:00. If you don’t, you can always check out the live streaming at the Team 4040 website