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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.

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!

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.