mbf tod@y

Brave New Pong

"Evolution and capitalism have brought us to the point where it’s possible to propel ourselves out our current state of affairs. We're intelligent enough now that we don’t need the randomness of a competitive system. We can program randomness. Things that used to be competitive games should now be cooperative games, or even non-games.

The world is no longer made up of unpredictable systems separated by incommunicable distances. By using computer models to produce what we want and distribute it fairly, the age old game of producing for production's sake can come to an end. Humans have tried organizing themselves in more equitable arrangements in the past, but these systems were ultimately run by other humans. In the new world we will be able to relax and let technology do the job. The pong ball will never fall off the table again!" (Monochrom)

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Premio Duellanti 2008 (Triennale Milano, 28 maggio 2008)

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Body Movin'

"The massive success of the Nintendo Wii proved the appeal of motion-controlled gaming. Now Softkinetic, a company based in Belgium, is working to let video-game players use a wider range of more-natural movements to control the on-screen action. Softkinetic's software is meant to work with depth-sensing cameras, which can be used to determine a player's body position and motions. "You don't need a controller in your hand," says CEO Michel Tombroff. "You don't need to wear a special outfit. You just come in front of the camera in your living room, and you start playing by moving your entire body."" (Erica Naone, Technology Review)

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Alex Galloway vs. Guy Debord

"Galloway’s scholarly pursuits were of less interest to Becker-Ho than was his apparent violation of the Debord estate’s copyright on Le Jeu de la Guerre. (Kriegspiel was made available for free downloading about two months ago, and now has a few hundred registered players. “It’s a smattering of, like, black-wearing English graduate students and sixty-year-old military-reënactment nerds,” Galloway said.) Through a law firm in Paris, Becker-Ho sent cease-and-desist letters both to Galloway and to N.Y.U. at the end of March, requesting that Kriegspiel be taken off-line." (Ben McGrath, The New Yorker) Read more

Championship Gaming Series on Eurosport!

From the press release: "The Eurosport Group and Championship Gaming Series (CGS) announced today that Eurosport has signed a deal with BSkyB (Sky) that grants Eurosport the exclusive continental European broadcast rights for Championship Gaming Series, the only worldwide professional video gaming league. Highlights from the inaugural 2007 series will be broadcast in primetime on Eurosport 2 April 28 – May 3, followed by the highly anticipated 2008 season later this year, bringing CGS programming to 41 nations in continental Europe for the first time, including France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Eurosport 2's broadcast footprint for CGS will complement Sky’s coverage in the UK and Ireland, DIRECTV’s coverage in the Americas, and STAR and ESPN STAR Sports broadcasts in Asia and Australia. The addition of Eurosport 2 coverage will expand the overall reach of televised CGS programming to more than 400 million potential viewers across five continents."

SimCity is Dead, Long Live SimCity

"Cities XL allows gamers to develop cities on realistic 3D maps using an incredible collection of unique structures and monuments based on American, Asian and European-influenced architectural styles. The maps feature a variety of environments: mountains, hills, canyons, beaches and islands, all set in different climates from tropical to desert, Mediterranean to temperate. Players must create the right combinations of social services, leisure activities, special events and other job opportunities within their cities in order to feed, clothe, employ and entertain their citizens. Be it planning and building a new zoo, public park, residential neighborhood or transit system - there's always a fresh and exciting challenge for would-be city managers and mayors in Cities XL." (IGN)

City Life is the most underrated and overlooked city builder out there - this new online project might change its status, however. Truth is: SimCity is a thing of the past.

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Rom Check Fail

"You don't need to be a videogame fan or being a teenager in the seventies / eighties to know videogame classics like Space Invaders, Pacman or Tetris. Their iconic power is still intact in the public imagination, also thanks to many reinterpretations and updates. Their patterns are often used by game artists as metaphors to create new connected sense: Mario Bros. can be restyled with a new graphic, so you can take your cue from it to discuss immigrant labor conditions, Space Invaders can be used to represent the never ending battle among Linux and the proprietary operating systems and so on. Sometimes the action's target is the algorithm itself. In "Basho's frogger", "Mario Battle no.1" and "Tetris 1d" the hack is s pure conceptual practice that intentionally kills the ludic component: In the best software art tradition, the program functionality (entertainment in this case) is attacked with Luddite fervour" (Paolo Pedercini, Neural)

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Print media confirmed dead

"The corpse of print media was found on a wooden folding table in the offices of small Japanese corporate office this afternoon. The body has been identified as the April 2008 issue of Future Publishing's Official Xbox Magazine, which might have actually been published as early as five weeks ago, according to coroner's reports. Detectives identified the murder weapon as an advertisement for Ubisoft's upcoming surefire smash hit first person shooter Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The advertisement is fashioned to be a doppelganger of an Official Xbox Magazine cover, complete with the magazine's logo in the upper-left-hand corner. [...] "Magazines have been figuratively selling their covers to the highest bidder for years now," Tim Rogers, expert on videogames and marketing in general as terrorism, told us. "This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a magazine did so literally."(Tim Rogers, Insert Credit)

This entry will be remembered as a timeless classic. Kudos to insert coin.

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Celebrating The Sims

In the winter of 1860 Milton Bradley, a lithographer in Springfield, Mass., released a new game he had developed called the Checkered Game of Life. Its players began on a checkerboard square called Infancy and tried to make their way through various trials to the destination of Happy Old Age. Before radio, before phonographs, at a time when cards and dice were tainted in the popular imagination by their association with gambling, that first version of Life in some ways opened the modern age of in-home games. Almost 150 years later, it still isn’t often that a new game breaks into the canon of family entertainment. The classics — the likes of Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk — are many decades old. In board games there hasn’t been a new mass phenomenon since Trivial Pursuit’s debut 26 years ago. (Seth Schiesel, The New York Times)

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Top 10 Games Industry Taglines

"1. "Live in your world, play in ours"
In 2002, Sony adopted the most appropriate, imaginitive, and least-pretensious slogan for describing videogames: "Live in your world, play in ours." The expression brilliantly summarizes gaming's true allure: an escape from reality. After 120 million units sold, the PS2 is the best-selling console to date by far. And with a game library of more than 2,400 games and counting, Sony has truly fostered a living and diverse world in which to play. It's catchy and effective. The best videogame tagline ever." (Blake Snow, Next Generation)

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