The $100 Laptop Actually Costs $176

But what's $76 dollars here and there?

The One Laptop Per Child project is finally rolling out, with 3 million units ordered from undisclosed countries. New laptops expected to be in the hands of children around the world by this October.

What games will be made for these devices? I mean here is a truly fantastic opportunity to build and try some cross-cultural educational games. I don't know of any, yet. Can anyone fill me in on efforts in this direction?

Here's the talk founder Nicholas Negroponte gave at TED last year:

Echochrome - the Escher Game

Wow! This looks neat.

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Will Wright's TED Talk This is the reason, partly, that Will Wright wasn't at GDC this year he was at the TED conference giving this talk!

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Kokomori: Experimental Art Games Yay! Friends Heather, Phil, and Damien and their game art collective Kokoromi are profiled in This Magazine.

I went to the GAMMA 01 event last year in Montreal, it was fun - a party, with music (Freezepop played although they got stuck in customs and arrived super late!) and DJs made music on DS Lites, and the experimental games were there projected on walls so people could play. The crowd was a mix of game developers, artists, musicians, and Montreal party people.

What I love about Kokoromi is that they explore the notion that games can be used to make art - that they are a medium for self-expression; and by that I don't mean projects like the excellent iam8bit, in which games are evoked in the service of more traditional visual arts; I mean that the gameplay itself is treated as a potential artform - that interactivity is key to the experience.

Can't wait for this year's GAMMA!

Ride that Line

There's cool little app that seems to have invaded office cubicles everywhere - Linerider. It's incredibly simple to use but the results can get as complicated as the limits of your imagination - and the physics of the thing is what really makes it a fun toy.

GAM3R 7H30RY

MacKenzie Wark, professor at the New School and author of A Hacker Manifesto (in book form here), has launched a new project called GAM3R 7H30RY which is at once notes for a future book as well as a unique platform for discussion and contribution.

I haven't had much chance to poke around myself, but the interface is simple and elegant and its goal is intriguing: open an author's draft for inspection, critique, comment... I don't know that I would have the courage to do that!

Air Guitar Hero

This is pretty cool. Check out the video for a demonstration.

GamePlan Contest

The BBC (bless their progressive little hearts) are sponsoring a game development contest for 13-19 year-olds. You don't have to actually MAKE the game, just submit a game idea, and they'll take the winner and create an online game. The contest is part of Blast, a site dedicated to fostering the creativity of young people. Lots of other neat stuff on there, too.

Let's Go Tokyo: The Game

I really love to travel; but because it takes so long to get to and from international destinations, I like to try to be as efficient as possible so that my time at the target location is spent with as little hassle as possible. Maybe I'll write about my dream travel kit in some other forum sometime, but the times that I've spent the airtime orienting myself have resulted in the best trips.

We all email friends before we go somewhere new to ask for cool locations, tips on where to stay, and so on. We also probably buy guidebooks and check websites. Something I used to do obsessively was buy a city map and study it, getting to know the major arteries, the landmarks and their layouts. That's not just because I have a pretty crappy sense of direction; it's because the minute I land, I like to have a sense of the lie of the land and my place in it. Orientation, perhaps more than anything else, makes me feel the beginning of a connection with a new city.

I was talking with Chris Buffa the other day about traveling. He mentioned that he went to Tokyo for the first time last year, but it felt familiar because he had played Project Gotham Racing. It wasn't perfect, but he could recognize Shinjuku and get a feel for how the city was laid out.

What a fucking brilliant idea. A great tool to orient: the Tourist Game. It could be, say, co-produced by the Let's Go series. It wouldn't need to be ultra-detailed, just hit the main landmarks and transportation arteries. You could have special Scenic Road edition which would be long, leisurely cruises down the California coast or along the Norwegian fjords. I would totally buy that expansion pack.

Our Fake Best Friends

It's no surprise that Nintendogs is the best-selling game in Japan right now. Famitsu gave it a perfect score. The game is driving sales of the DS.

I can understand it. Nintendogs is brilliant - such a simple idea, executed with such cuddly charm. To not feel something when the virtual puppy responds to your stylus-petting is to have a heart of stone.

Japan excells at wringing feelings out of cold digital or robotic beings. Even slick-and-cool Sony scored a place in people's hearts with the Aibo. Virtual pets like Aibo and Nintendogs make sense in a place like Japan where having a real cat or dog is a luxury; but I think the appeal is deeper than that. These simulcra tap into our deep need to love; they take advantage of our innate programming - by displaying the symptoms of affection, they can awaken real affection in us to the point where we feel a true bond.

Japan is already taking this to the next logical step, with robot therapy [via Gonzalo]. We've all heard that pets help the aged live longer, more fulfilling lives...well, it seems that even fake pets help. As long as our emotions are real, it doesn't seem to matter. For Japan, this is just an extension of all those cute critters telling you what to do at train stations, at police stations, in shopping malls - they direct not by force, but through the power of affectionate mascots.

I think this could be extended into all sorts of fields - training, education, work, other forms of therapy. Like dolls, but with the capacity to respond. Never underestimate the power of the human heart.

Katamari Post Mortem

Posted by Robin.

In other news, how excited are we? We Love Katamari.

We really do. And here's more proof: Katamari Doh-macy and Katamari da Vinci.

The Future of Videogames

Sid at the office sent this video around. It's an absolutely amazing demonstration of reality augmentation technologies. Sure beats wearing a stupid helmet in a cage.

PeaceCraft

Last week I had the good fortune to sit in with some guys working in the "Serious Games" movement. They're working on a strategy-sim to model the Israeli-Palistinian conflict. Still early in the process, but they seem sincere in their efforts.

While we were talking, I hit upon an idea that I think I'd like to see implemented. The interesting thing about war games is that the default state of a war game is peace. Think about it: what if you started up a multiplayer game of WarCraft III and none of the players built anything but workers and buildings? The natural state of the world is for the races of WarCraft to peacefully coexist (although you would eventually run out of resources), and this tranquility is shattered by player actions.

So the way you make a peace game is to create a world where the default state is conflict, and the player must act to calm the violence through a variety of means. That's the trick: you've got to show peace as something that's challenging to achieve, not a default state.

Of course, conflict is a more complicated system to model than the "peace" borne of a situation in which nothing is happening (is this truly a state of peace, or just a state of apathy?), but again WarCraft III can already model this system, since this is essentially AIs on different teams.

Once we have a game system where the player is trying to maintain peace through a series of interesting choices (the same as one would make war in a typical Real Time Strategy), we can make things more complicated. What if the player not only needs to maintain peace, but also needs to be in a dominant position over the other players? We start to get into a situation not unlike the card game Nuclear War, where jockying for position runs the risk of taking you out of the game entirely. This sounds like a game I'd want to play.

To be honest, I'd be surprised if nobody else has ever thought this before. Now that comments are working properly again, anybody know why this wouldn't work?

The Perils of Scripting

I remember playing Half-Life and thinking it was pure magic when one of those head-sucking aliens dropped from ceiling tiles behind me just after I'd walked past, like the level had some pulse to it. I couldn't just simply walk through and blast everything, there were layers I didn't see, and didn't understand.

Then months later, playing System Shock 2, I saw an opening sequence where a mutant chased a human survivor with a wrench, muttering insanely as the victim screamed. It was straight horror shlock, but it sent a shiver up my spine - I was wandering through a gameworld that was fucked beyond my control. Of course I was picking up guns and grenades to try to make a difference. But there was some drama in all of this!

I was arguing with some game designers, suggesting that more of these scripted sequences would make shooters and adventure games more exciting. And they were arguing in favor of emergent gameplay - give the units real brains and elaborate behaviors, and let unscripted things happen. Otherwise, they argued, the gameplay can seem too contrived.

In his Doom 3 review on Firing Squad, Jakub Wojnarowicz illustrates the perils of too much scripting:

It's not even like Half-Life where a scripted event was a rare, pleasant bonus. The levels and action in Doom III feel very alive because the scripting isn't a big deal.

Of course, all that simply highlights the fact how poorly the action is really done. It's almost beyond belief that at no time during development the team didn't stop and say "Wait, are we actually having monsters pop out from behind secret doors in walls? Wasn't this one of the lamer decisions back when we developed the original Doom?" It's not that the enemies come through the ventilation system - which they sometimes do - or are climbing above you and then drop down.

They're quite literally waiting for the player to pass by, setting off a scripted trigger, then their door opens automagically without noise and they shoot you in the back. OK, fine, you got me id, that was sneaky. Made me jump back in the seat and I needed to take a break just two hours into the game. After eight hours of that, however, the feeling of fear is replaced with irritation.

So scripting that much "interaction" feels like elaborate hand-holding - the player must walk through that tunnel to trigger those two baddies who will try to flank. To build a game that feels like it has both responsiveness and player choice, like Deus Ex tried to do, requires more and more elaborate scripting and branching narratives, to cover all possible paths. The alternative is to build a rich gameworld with a few scripted events maybe, and allow combinations of physics and artificial intelligence make nearly unreproducable combinations of fun and frustration.

The upcoming Half-Life 2 seems to offer both rich physics, and some scripted events. From the technology demonstrations, it looked awesome - "Hey! You can shoot out that crane holding up that beam which knocks over those barrels, killing those dudes!" My third time watching it, I wondered whether that wasn't just a more elaborate form of a script, choreographed hot physics action. A sort of Buster Keaton moment where the ladder, the Model T car and the falling piano miraculously come together into hilarity.

I enjoy Buster Keaton as much as the next undergraduate film student, maybe even more. Beautiful scripting is a high form of design. Jackie Chan keeps this tradition alive - unnatural physical acting, choreography. Maybe Doom 3 didn't have too much scripting, but rather scripting that was not subtle enough, balanced by different flavors. Something else besides "Boo!"

Postscript: Wojnarowicz used this line: "id, hire some women. They know the trick - to always leave someone wanting a little more." I have mixed feelings about this. Yes, hire more women; No, women aren't fixed in sexual distance.

The reviewer has interesting things to say about scripting, so I want to quote him. But I'm concerned that that line detracts from the overall intelligence of the piece. I guess you take what insight you can get.

Souris on Shooting

Souris and Silvio of Invasiv Studios NYC went shooting. It was Souris' first time handling heavy metal, rifles that resemble the serious tools of infantry combat from TV and the movies. She didn't shoot as well as Silvio, she thinks, because she doesn't play first-person shooters. But she did watch Predator at some point in her life, and she had a ripe film quote to share as she sprayed bullets across the field.

Gamester

A very interesting article in the New York Times (free registration required) highlights the research of sociology PhD candidate Danah Boyd, also known as Zephoria, who is studying the popular social networking web tool Friendster: "Ms. Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures."

Sounds like a gameable system to me! Friendster allows the creation of multiple online identities, some of them completely fabricated - "Fakesters". While Friendster administrators, who want the software to function as a dating site, are vigilant in eliminating obviously fake friendsters, nevertheless it is fun to claim to be friends with Lara Croft (I am.) My favorite Fakester is Frodo: under the "about me" section, he wrote, "My uncle left me this ring. It changed my life."

But the gaming aspect of this tool goes beyond made-up identities; Friendster turns friendship and dating into a game. You can browse the galleries, pick people out, and see how you are connected to them - if at all. The idea is that you're more likely to contact someone whom you know is a friend of a friend. There are "testimonials" written by that person's friendsters. Finding that special someone, then, merely requires mining these social networks like a resource in Warcraft. Set your peasants to work!

In any case, the article goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of Friendster over other similar network systems like Ryze or Tribe, both of which are arguably sleeker and faster. Friendster is more fun. It invites people to play.

Psst... Hey, Buddy, Augment Your Reality?

So, how about that Augmented Reality?

I recently attended The 2nd International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality in Tokyo, Japan. From my time hobnobbing with other presenters at ISMAR03 and the related Augmented Reality Toolkit Workshop, I can say that this is a technology that gamers would do themselves a favor to get aquainted with. Currently, the Sony EyeToy is the only real forray into commercial use of (limited) AR tech for entertainment applications, although non-commercial explorations exist. ISMAR03 Keynote speaker Nassir Navab, of Siemens Corporate Research, centered his entire speech on getting the AR development community used to the idea that the technology is ready for prime time in the industrial sector, and that means its time for the game developer to raise her groggy head, get a web cam, and start hacking.

The simple truth is that, right now, there isn't that much to be said for AR entertainment. The BBC's R&D department has some interesting stuff for adding bits of AR to a news broadcast, and a few groups have done stuff for edutainment, but when it comes down to it, AR is an awesome, approachable technology with a high wow-factor and a vertible forest of low-hanging fruit. I say, time to start picking.

An Open Spirit

At the Tokion conference, or though Souris and Silvio Jane and I are meeting New York hipster artist writer designer kids. They ask us, "When is your game coming out?" Somehow they translated our brief "We're writing about game culture" into "We're experimenting with game design."

It's inspiring when people don't fix Jane and I with the identity of journalists. Here in New York, we've met fewer serious programmers, fewer serious business people, fewer dedicated game designers - instead we've met a bunch of writers and artists who are experimenting with game engines and bootstrapping small game design group projects. More cultural experimentation than studied game development. Dabblers - why not? The future of games has many designers.

Shall We Play a Game, Mr. Kottke?

Jason Kottke (a blogger, but clearly a gamer first) describes an intriguing encounter with a computer programmed to learn from a game of 20 questions.

First, it's twenty questions. And then it's global thermal nuclear war.

Will Wright does SimPassive

Will Wright has raised the stakes on gaming. The Sims enabled millions of people to use their computers as laboratories to experiment with human relationships. SimCity did the same for city planning - how would you run your home-town?

By making everyone an urban planner or a family psychiatrist, he's used computer games to alter our sense of power. We can practice manage the complexity of modern living through his toys.

Will Wright routinely gives lectures to large crowds of game developers hungry for his insights, drawn from calculus, weather patterns, psychology, Japanese comics and network theory. He runs a social robots laboratory in Berkeley, regularly competing in Robot Wars with his daughter.

He's a brilliant guy, completely unassuming considering he invented the best-selling computer game series of all time.

Maybe games were only a stopover as he expressed himself across culture: according to Yahoo News, Wright has just inked a TV show deal with Fox.

He's already reprogrammed millions of minds with interactive media, how could he do so with broadcasting? Fortunately, it doesn't sound like he intends to do a stiff product tie-in cartoon show:

"I'd like to fast-forward into the future a bit and explore how machines and artificial intelligence will impact human beings and how robots will help us define ourselves," Wright said. "The trick is going to be to hook a mass audience with a new concept and then Trojan-horse these ideas into the show."

Wright said there are a lot of things that he has learned in creating original franchises for interactive entertainment that he can apply to linear entertainment.

"I think there are ways to get a deeper level of creative input from an audience of a TV show," Wright said. "I'd like to explore ways to connect the loop between a show and its audience, going beyond the current methods of phoning in a vote."

I'm eager to see how America's greatest living toy maker takes to television.

You're in Control! or, Play with your Pee

The geniuses at MIT Media Labs (and I'm not being sarcastic) have come up with an expensive but sanitary way to play at the urinal. The stream is read by sensors and used as the interface for an onscreen game mounted above the urinal. "You're in Control encourages cleanliness while reintroducing play to the act of micturition," says the paper (available in PDF).

For the future? "We envision a variety of additional software applications. For example, users could play a game in which they uncovered a hidden image with their urine." Oh, fun! Pee off the sand and find the treasure! "Another possibility is a co-operative networked game -" Never mind, I think I'll stop reading that now. My favorite: "Users could even browse through news stories, advertisements, and stock quotes as they voided their bladders, in a new form of bathroom multitasking." Sounds great. When's the female version available?

My Trip to Liberty City

Writer Jim Munroe plays a friendly Canadian tourist in the short video, "My Trip to Liberty City" (Quicktime movie). A great little exploration of agency, gamespace, and identity.

Also, it's funny!

(Thanks, yi!)

War Games

A friend called this morning to ask, "Do you think that people have a renewed interest in strategy war games because of the war? Or is it just me?" He's heading out to buy his first war game in several years - he used to play as a teen, but he lost interest in the genre until now.

I don't think he's alone. Certainly the mainstream press recently has run several pieces on the subject. I'm not a psychologist, but I think it reasonable to suggest that some of us are having a tough time grappling with our thoughts of the war, and perhaps playing a simulation is one way to process our conflicting ideas and feelings. At the GDC last month, I spoke with several people who were either researching the military-industrial-entertainment complex or actually working within it. The well-publicized release of America's Army last year also brought the link between the military and the videogame industry to the public's attention.

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A New Expansion Pack?

Kevin Maney for USA Today writes:

"It's time for the U.S. to unleash a powerful new secret weapon.

You might call it: The Sims Iraq.

This might be a way to counter what is apparently the biggest blunder of the war so far — i.e., the mistaken assumptions about how Iraqis would respond to our invasion. If it's too late to fix that mess, the secret weapon could be used in the next war.

Sims-style technology could become so powerful, it won't just help us win wars — it might help us win them without armies."

He doesn't mention robot fighters but I'm sure that's in the DoD works, too.

Culture Jamming

We saw a lot of interesting talks at the 030303>Collective Play conference yesterday, but I wanted to quickly mention one Marc Davis, at SIMS (School of Information Management and Systems) at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on giving users the tools to play in a space which he calls "TVLand" - a sort of alternate virtual universe. Essentially he's creating systems for video capture and edit that would use meta data in television shows or commercials and let us easily mix and play with them. I loved his attitude that television is shared culture which belongs to us, and we have a right to play with it. Imagine applying this to video games! Definitely technology to keep an eye on.

Theatre on the Quake Stage

"'Friends' was recently renewed for a 10th and final season. Anyone puzzled by its sustained success should greatly enjoy the notion of its congenially witless characters being dispatched in such gruesome fashion."

The NY Times reports that a group of artists will take to a Quake III arena to perform an episode of "Friends".

Games Without Frontiers

Steven Johnson wrote a fun piece for Slate on the expansion of game space:

L3 takes place in virtual space, while the Go Game unfolds on actual city streets. But they share a common denominator: the widening of the game environment. Most forms of entertainment are defined by their edges: the outline of the Monopoly board or the dimensions of a movie screen. To enter the world of the game or the story, you enter a confined space, set off from the real world. Play-space doesn't overlap with ordinary space. But Go and L3 don't play by those rules. Go colonizes an entire city for its playing field; L3 colonizes the entire Web. These are games without frontiers.

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Got an Experimental Project?

This year's GDC Experimental Gameplay Project is looking for participants! If you're an indie game developer, a basement tinkerer, a conceptual artist, or a total amateur with a totally awesome idea, here's your chance to present what you've been working on among a community of like-minded folks. So polish off that dusty code and get yourself to the GDC!

AI can't love - but it can play Tetris!

An enterprising fellow describes in a fascinating article not only how he created an AI program to play Tetris, but also a history of Tetris, mathematical breakdown of how Tetris works, a list of other wonderful projects inspired by Tetris. A bit geeky at times but worth a read even for non-geeks! (thanks, chris!)

Video game for the blind released

It's interesting that one of the first video games being developed for blind gamers would be a driving game. But what better fantasy could there be for a visually handicapped person than to get behind the wheel of a race car? Driving can seem sort of mundane to a sighted person, but to most blind people it's just as inaccessible as casting magic spells would be to the rest of us.

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un-fun games to make you think

Clive Thompson has an article over at Slate: Online games are the newest form of social comment. Interesting idea, and one I've written a little before, but if a game doesn't hook you, what's the point?

A better example of a "social comment" game is probably America's Army. Now there's a fun game (I hear).

Link via Ludology.org

Wolfenstein 5k

Tired of excessively flashy and responsive video games? Care to marvel at modern entertainment in miniature? Combination throwback and technological wonder of the web, Wolfenstein 5k allows you to "Blow the heads off the monsters in this texture-mapped, first-person shooter crammed into 5K of JavaScript." If you're running certain web browsers, that is.