The Endless Forest: ABIOGENESIS for the Red Girls

Nothing like a little party to end our anniversary celebration of The Path. And there is nothing like an ABIOGENESIS party in The Endless Forest! So please accept this last minute invitation to join us in the forest which has been shrouded in mist. Let’s bring some color back! If you don’t feel like running with the deer just open up the game and follow us in ABIOGENESIS Camera mode by hitting CTRL-W. It’ll be wild! We’ll probably crash the server! But it’s not a TEF party till SOMEONE crashes the server!

Download The Endless Forest for free here!

Presenting in Madrid

On Thursday, February 18th, we’ll be presenting our working at the ARCO art fair in Madrid. We were invited by Domenico Quaranta to talk about our work at a symposium entitled EXPANDING THE FIELD. Or, 8 good reasons to talk about new media (in an art fair)”. Other guests are Hans Bernhard and lizvlx of UBERMORGEN.COM, Marius Watz, Trevor Paglen, Oron Catts and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky).

Something is happening in the field of art. Postmodernism seems to have been replaced, but nobody is really able to say by what. Art critics such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev explained this change looking backwards to Modernism, but Modernism itself is many things, and it’s still not clear if this new modern, or Altermodern, is rooted in a new utopianism, as argued by Christov-Bakargiev, or in creolisation, globalisation and travelling, as suggested by Bourriaud.

What is clear to both is that new technologies, in the broader meaning of the term, are having a central role in this change. Starting from here, and appropriating Ippolito and Blais’ idea that the change will come from artists operating “at the edge of art” – Expanding the Field will involve artists and researchers that address, with different approaches, various new technologies – from the Internet to videogames and biotechnology – and issues and practices of the digital culture, from media hacking to data mining and surveillance.

Should be fun! 😉
And we’ll have an entire day to spend at the Prado!

ARCO Art Fair, Forum Auditorium 2, Hall 6.
February 18, 2010, from 12.30 to 2.30 p.m. and from 4 to 8 p.m.
(we’re scheduled at 6)

Photo post: Towards an Art History of Games

Various photos of presentations at the symposium. This is a flickr slideshow, if you fullscreen it and choose ‘Show Info’ (top right) you can read context and commentary on each image.

a few personal highlights of the symposium:
* listening to John Romero describe the design choices which lead to the invention of ASWD camera navigation.
* Brenda Brathwaite’s moving confessions of her design process, all that she puts into it and the way game design effects and expresses life.
* And playing her game, Train, at the gallery.
* Jason Rohrer describing how he came to the design of his game “Sleep is Death” and how it grew from a desire to communicate stories that defied telling through words alone.
* Hearing Christiane Paul talk about net artists in the context of art game history.

And finally, yes, there exists a photo of us standing next to John Romero. Amazing!
(yes, we know, we look silly. should have smiled. it was a pretty fun evening though. :))

Art History of Games presentation online

We have posted the text and slides of our presentation at the Art History of Games symposium last Saturday in Atlanta.

Over Games

Videogames are stuck. Despite of the ongoing technical evolution and the continuous calls for a new medium, videogames have stopped evolving. They have found their comfort zone. Videogames are happy. Happy being exactly what they are. Fun activities that nurture our inner child.

While our inner grown-up is starving!

We need a new medium that can help us cope with the complexity of our post-historic universe. The interactive, non-linear and generative capacity of computer technology offers such a medium. There is no need however to limit what we create with this technology to the format of games. The possibilities are endless.

There’s a lot of work to do.

Videogames have taken computer technology hostage. It is time to liberate the medium and start feeding our starving hearts and minds. We need to stop making games and look further, go farther, step into a new world. Create interactive entertainment for all instead of squeezing people into oppressive sets of rules and goals. We have the technology. We have the desire. So let’s get to work!

Enjoy!

Vanitas trailer

Our first iPhone app Vanitas will be launched on February 4 at the opening of the Art History of Games symposium for which it was commissioned. Vanitas will be exhibited in a special installation (including live ladybugs!), next to games commissioned from Jason Rohrer and Nathalie Pozzi & Eric Zimmerman, at the Kai Lin Art gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from Thursday, February 4 until Tuesday, March 2. The opening reception will take place Friday, February 5 from 8:00 pm until 10:00 pm. More information here.

There’s still some tickets for the symposium and exhibition.Register here!

And don’t forget to check the App Store as of 4 February!

The Art History of Games

Ian Bogost has commissioned us to make a game to be revealed at the Art History of Games symposium in Atlanta. That game will be Vanitas, reported on earlier. Next to us, two other games have been commissioned. One by Jason Rohrer and one by Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi. We applaud the initiative to commission artsists to create new pieces. Wish it would happen more often.

And if that wasn’t enough, the 3 day symposium will have presentations by all sorts of interesting speakers: Ian Bogost himself of course, but also Jay David Bolter, Brenda Brathwaite, Jesper Juul, Christoph Kluetsch, Frank Lantz, Henry Lowood, Michael Nitsche, Christiane Paul, Celia Pearce, John Romero, John Sharp and of course the commissioned artists (expect some provocative statements!).

Hope to see you there!

Register now for The Art History of Games, a symposium and exhibition jointly organized by SCAD-Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology

February 4-6, 2010
Rich Auditorium at the High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree St N.E., Atlanta GA 30308

Register at: http://arthistoryofgames.com/registration

The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form.

Speakers include:

* John Romero, designer of Doom and co-founder of Gazillion Entertainment
* Christiane Paul, New School professor and Whitney Museum adjunct curator
* Jesper Juul, author of A Casual Revolution
* Brenda Brathwaite, creator of Vanguard Award-winning Train
* Frank Lantz, designer of Drop7 and Parking Wars
* And more…

Attendees are also invited to attend the premiere of three commissioned art games by Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales, and Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman, at Kai Lin Art (800 Peachtree St. N.E.).

Early registration ends Thusday, January 14: $15 for SCAD and Georgia Tech students, $25 for academics and students from other institutions, and $40 for the general public.

Register at: http://www.arthistoryofgames.com/registration

For more information, please visit http://www.arthistoryofgames.com or contact arthistoryofgames@scad.edu.

Our first app… coming soon!

Vanitas_submitted_to_iTunesConnect

Today we’ve submitted our first app for iPhone/iPod touch to the Apple app store for approval! Excitement!!

It is called Vanitas.

Vanitas has been commissioned for The Art History of Games, a public symposium which is taking place February 4th-6th, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, at the High Museum of Art. Where we will be attending and speaking among good company. We are one of 3 developers selected to make something on occasion of the event. The other two being Jason Rohrer and Eric Zimmerman. All 3 projects will be at a special exhibition at the Kai Lin Gallery during the conference and for a month afterwards. We’re planning something special for the gallery … 😉

Vanitas is not a game. Hopefully the approval process won’t get complicated. It should be available in time for the exhibition opening, then you can find what its all about!

IGF official selection

The shortlist for the Independent Games Festival has been revealed. The good news is that our entry FATALE was not selected and so we don’t have to go through Homeland Security Fun Park San Francisco in Spring. The bad news is that the selection is rather… boring? Only a few noteworthy games were selected. I guess this confirms Derek Yu’s observation that 2009 was a slow year for indie games. Good thing my New Year’s Resolution includes a goodbye to games (*). Otherwise, I think I’d be sort of… upset?

(*) blog post to follow soon

My selection for the IGF

FATALEFATALEFATALEFATALE

Our invitation to judge in the Independent Games Festival was withdrawn when we said we were submitting an entry ourselves. As it turns out, that was probably a smart move. Because when I had a look at each of the 301 entries in the festival, I couldn’t resist the urge to compare them with our own. And, frankly, FATALE beats them all, in every category. :) This is why I have only selected 4 games for each prize in the festival. The fifth game -and clear winner- of each category is our own FATALE. I’m sorry, I just can’t be objective about this. :)

I have based my selection on the information available on the IGF website, the game developers’ own websites, videos and screenshots. I have played demos and games when they were publicly available. But I must admit that some of my choices were based on very little data. So I reserve a margin of error. I could have missed a really great project. And I could have included a rather lousy one. Apologies ahead of time.

Apart from simply choosing the most interesting projects in each category, I have tried to limit the amount of overlap between the different categories. Which wasn’t always easy because interesting entries tend to be good in several categories simultaneously. such as our own wonderful FATALE, for instance

Despite of the high quality of some, I have rejected games created by DigiPen students because I don’t consider them serious contenders. The IGF has a separate competition for student work. I hope they use this category in the future.


Seumas McNally Grand Prize

Windosill
Windosill
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
Amnesia
Amnesia: The dark descent
TRAUMA
TRAUMA

I make no secret about the fact that the thing I like most about the games industry is its girlfriend its potential. There are many videogames that are fine games as such, even on the independent scene. If you want to play a game, there’s an enormous amount on offer. But I know this computer of ours can do a lot more. I even believe that it can bring us a new medium, a medium as relevant and important to our times as cinema was to the previous century and printing to the centuries before. But the developers who strive for such greatness are few and far between. Even on the independent scene, where one would expect them in larger numbers than in the so-called mainstream industry.

If I had to make an absolute judgment, I’d probably send each and every game in the IGF back to the drawing board (including our own amazing FATALE). Luckily I can suffice with a relative selection. So I have chosen games that give me hope for the future of the medium. Games that are ambitious, that try to explore interesting terrain and/or allow us to do so while playing.

Windosill brings back fond memories of computer-based entertainment’s early days, when an interactive piece could just be called a “CD Rom” instead of getting labeled “GAME”. I think we could do much worse than reconnect with that time and pick up what was so rudely interrupted: playful interaction without the need to compete or achieve. Fig. 8 is equally whimsical but more challenging. But its challenge reminds of the real-world challenge of trying to ride a bicycle as a child, so it feels a lot more natural than in most games. It’s also a wonderful illustration of how a videogame can simply be a journey. Amnesia: The dark descent is probably the most ambitious game in the festival. Its scope and aesthetic rival -and exceed- many of the productions in the commercial industry, even. This is the kind of game I would like to see more of on the independent scene: uncompromising exploration of the narrative potential of high tech. Trauma re-invents the idea of an interactive movie in a spectacular and exciting way. It combines an intuitive and beautiful control system with an intimate engaging story (expressed by means of superb voice acting).


Excellence In Visual Art

LIMBO
LIMBO
A New Zero
A New Zero
Saturated Dreamers
Saturated Dreamers
DOPPELSCOPE
DOPPELSCOPE

I was pleasantly surprised by the care that independent developers are starting to put in the aesthetic presentation of their games. The “faux amateur” style seems to no longer be a badge of honour. Good riddance, too. Because there’s a lot of work to be done.

I was also glad to see that, next to some excellent examples of traditional 3D aesthetics, several developers are starting to explore real-time 3D aesthetics in an experimental way. In A New Zero all shapes are reduced to their bare minimum covered with a seductive colour palette, that can almost make you forget you’re playing a relatively banal war game. Doppelscope adds to its simplification of shapes a new kind of sensory experience that affects the entire environment and doesn’t shy away from a bit of glossy spectacle here and there. Many entries in this year’s festival feature silhouettes as their main graphical element. But aesthetically, Limbo, is the superior game of the entire lot. Saturated Dreamers surprised me. The characters that seem to carry the story are naive art at best, and actual typography has been carefully avoided, but the playing reveals an interesting generative canvas of unlikely combinations of shapes and colours. I like the aesthetic connection it suggests between computer-based geometry and walllpaper and textile patterns.


Excellence In Audio

Broken Brothers
Broken Brothers
Demonica
Demonica
DOPPELSCOPE
DOPPELSCOPE
microsia - molecular tunes
microsia – molecular tunes

I was not very impressed with the sound in most entries this year. Sound still seems to be very much an afterthought for most independent developers. Which is a real shame, considering how powerful its effect can be on the player.

There’s a lot of music games out there. Many use the music to structure simple gameplay (last year’s audio category winner Audio Surf seems to have influenced a lot of designers) and others allow you to create some kind of music-like soundscape through interaction. Microsia stands out by successfully combining amusing interaction with actual composition. Broken Brothers didn’t fall into the tired trap of adding soft piano music to a war game but opted for a menacing oppressive soundtrack through minimal and almost humoristic means on top of melancholic music that actually helps you concentrate on your strategies of destruction rather than making you feel oh so bad about killing the enemy. Demonica‘s musical wall of sound is probably the most atmospheric entry in the festival. Doppelscope confronts electronic sounds with human interaction in analogy with how it expresses its theme of nature preservation through a very synthetic stylized look. Makes playing with computers feel hip again, without the need to resort to retro aesthetics.


Excellence in Design

Windosill
Windosill
Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!
Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!
Constellation
Constellation
Galcon Fusion
Galcon Fusion

I don’t think videogames need to be games as such. But for this category, I selected videogames that I find well designed as games in the strict sense of the word. The fact that two of them are dressed up as space conquest games only illustrates how irrelevant story and meaning are when it comes to pure game design. Both Galcon and Constellation are wonderfully simple-yet-complex systems that are fascinating to interact with. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble! does have a story. Quite an extensive one, even. But it feels so much like a board game that I couldn’t resist putting it in this category. Windosill is probably the only game I selected for this category that is undisputedly at home on the computer. And in an irresistibly charming way at that. Games this playful are too rare.


Nuovo Award

Lose/Lose
Lose/Lose
hell is other people
hell is other people
Wait
Wait
A Slow Year
A Slow Year

I’m considering this category as the place for art works. Not necessarily “art games” but simply artistic pieces that use game concepts or technology. Lose/Lose reminds me a lot of the some of the net.art of the 90s we used to be involved in, especially the work of Jodi. I may not be the world’s greatest fan of modern art, but I like seeing it become part of independent game development. If only because game distribution would offer media artists an alternative venue for showing their work. A venue that is more appropriate for the digital medium, in my opinion. The other games are more interesting as experiences, rather than simple conceptual statements. There’s something very melancholic about playing with people who have been playing before you but are not at the moment (hell is other people). Wait may be ugly but it has a very inspiring game mechanic (which is rare in indie games). And A Slow Year simply appeals to me because of its references to traditional painting and the link that it makes between nature and machines.


Technical Excellence

Heroes of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth
Amnesia
Amnesia: The dark descent
HurricaneX2
HurricaneX2
7 Nights
7 Nights

All videogames are small miracles. Contrary to popular belief, computer hardware is still incredibly slow, unwieldy and inaccessible. But of all software that one can make with a computer, real-time 3D games must be the most complicated and technically impressive. There’s a tendency on the independent developers scene to look down on 3D games. But I think that’s just a self defense reflex that should not impair our judgment.
With the exception of Amnesia: The dark descent, none of the games I selected in this category are games that I would play myself. But I want to pay tribute to the effort that the developers are doing to, independently, create such technically ambitious projects. Hopefully their work encourages other indie developers and artists not to shy away in their comfortable flat platformer and shooter zones.

Presenting in Italy

On Thursday, at 9 am, we will be presenting our work at the View Conference in Torino. It’s a very general event about the use of computer graphics in all sorts of fields.

VIEW Conference is the premiere international event in Italy on Computer Graphics, Interactive Techniques, Digital Cinema, 3D Animation, Gaming and VFX.

VIEW 2009 will continue to focus on exploring the increasingly fluid boundary between real and digital worlds. Through lectures, meetings, tributes, exhibits, screenings and demo presentations VIEW will reveal the new digital frontier sweeping from cinema to architecture, from automotive design to advertisement, from medicine to videogames.

There’s presentations by people from Electronic Arts, Industrial Light & Magic, Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Blue Sky Studios, etc. Us, intimidated? Naah… 😉

Here’s the full program (PDF).