La miniaturisation de l’informatique et la popularisation du phénomène du jeu vidéo ont convergé vers l’apparition des jeux dits ubiquitaires ou pervasifs vers le début du siècle. Ces expériences empruntent le langage du jeu vidéo pour immerger le joueur ou les frontières entre le jeu et la réalité se chevauchent, s’entre-effacent.
Seeing as the conditions at the IGF pavilion weren’t optimal for poesysteme-ing, I decided to go towards the “performance” approach and have every visitor collaborate to create and maintain a poesysteme every day. The game only got rebooted when the game crashed and at the end of the day.
People could add one or several words and see how they would trounce or get trounced by the other words that were there already there, adding their contribution to the gene pool. Before they left, I asked them if they wanted to adopt a word, based on a “Love at first sight” algorithm. Upon seeing a word they liked, they were asked to write a quick sentence depicting what the word meant.
Their collaborative efforts result in this dictionary of the absurd.
Okay, this awesome. A while ago, Matt Peckham asked me if he could feature Poesysteme in a PC World article about indie games, and I told him that yeah, he could. A week later, he does.
PC World – Great Downloads: Award-Winning Indie Games
You Rock, man! Thanks!
I attended the Awards Show, and I have to say that it’s the most awesome thing I ever attended in my whole friggin’ life!
Poesysteme was nominated, next to great games like Crayon Physics Deluxe (Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner, go Petri!) and Synaesthete (Student Showcase winner). Having met Petri and the Digipen guys, as well as Nils (the author of Rückblende) and the P.B. Winterbottom crew, I can assure you that they are all great guys and that you should play their games and give them many bags full of money, sweet money. The room was packed with the coolest people of all, and I know Sid Meier, Gabe Newell and Ralph Baer now know my game exists. ROCK ON!
I was planning to do a daily writeup of the GDC but I guess I’ll have to accept the fact that a regular day at the Expo is too taxing. Usually when I get back to my hotel I just want to crash and burn. Cool-headed impressions from the confort of my home it will be, then!
Also, the expo? Sheer. Madness.
Okay, sorry I haven’t been able to pay more attention to this blog, it’s just that I’m putting in a bit of overtime on M.A.Z.E. to compensate the week I’ll be spending at GDC, which is also taking me time to get ready for.
I’m sure GDC will provide me with good stories to tell, and I’m also sure I’ll be unable to update this until I come back.
If you are attending GDC, I’d be glad to meet you! I should be stuck at the IGF Booth during the expo (Wed. to Fri.) to demo Poesysteme, and I think I won’t miss the IGDA party either (Tuesday, I think).
So, until then, then!
Insult Swordfighting: Books that should be made into games
I stumbled upon this through Kotaku‘s Maggie Greene. The author, Mitch Krpata kicks things off:
So many games are based on movies and TV shows. Why not games based on books? There are centuries of fantastic literature to draw from, and in most cases the source material is in the public domain — no need for onerous licensing fees.
Brilliant!
As a sort of before-after experiment, I wanted to see if there were going to be significant differences in terms of coverage before and after the GDC for Poesysteme. My hypothesis is YES, but we’ll see.
This Gamasutra piece is a very “rare” (heh, get it?) proof that good sense still can be found amongst developers.
In a nutshell, this Rare developer talks about how his company finally realised that good elements can be found everywhere, and that it is better to talk and show respect to students (a.k.a. potential employees) than trying to impress them with how cool you are.
Really, you should read the article, if you haven’t already… The only thing that still ticks me off is that they only talk about programmers or artists, but say nothing about designers… Why do you think is that? Double standards?
Gamasutra – Video Games: Officially Art, In Europe
France has always had an ambition: to be seen in all walks of culture as a leader, a trend-setter, as “unique”, opposed to the “mass” culture. This can be experienced when going to see a movie or attending a concert: at some point you realize that what you’re experiencing is undeniably, irrevocably french. Of course, “french” is not a synonym for “good”, far from that…