Games

In September CollecTic was played at the Come Out & Play Festival 2007 in Amsterdam. The Festival was part of PICNIC'07 and was a great platform to present my game and meet people who love to play. Mission of Come Out & Play: The Come Out & Play Festival seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play. We want to bring together a public eager to rediscover the world around them through play with designers interested in producing innovative new games and experiences. Oh yeah, and we want to have city-size fun. ...

In August I had been at the Games Convention Germany 2007 in Leipzig. It is one of the biggest consumer game fairs in Europe, so all known game companies are there and presenting there new titles. Besides this commercial event, there is also a complete hall about Game Art and here was also a Machinima booth with machinima movies exhibited, workshops and talks. I was invited to give a talk about Games and Art. If you are interested what my talk was about, have a look at my powerpoint presentation. ...

In July I had been at the Test_Lab : Play event at V2 presenting CollecTic. TEST_LAB: PLAY! will feature a selection of the best European electronic-art graduation projects. The pieces have been selected according to originality and quality, and especially the way they use the concept of play - that is, the playfulness evoked by the work. At TEST_LAB: PLAY! these projects will be demonstrated, tested, and discussed among makers, audience and experts. ...

There is hope for young independent game developers: There has been alot of complaining - some constructive, some not - about the relative plight of Independent Gaming in the face of towering production budgets, IP gorging producers and guarded distribution monopolies. One of the most active voices, Greg Costikyan, has actually done something about it, along with other industry activists behind the Scratchware Manifesto. It’s called Manifesto Games, an alternative distribution and publishing context for developers with small teams and budgets, and especially those teams with the kinds of risky game designs (read ‘innovation’) the videogame industry believes it can’t (ironically) afford to make. ...

My graduation project CollecTic is finished. I presented it on 30th of June ‘06 at Media Technology, Leiden University. Since August 2006 it is available for download at http://www.pixelsix.net/collectic Here you can also find the paper and some more documentation material. CollecTic is further discussed online at: Pasta and Vinegar Pspupdates.qj.net download Collectic at dl.qj.net Kotaku.com YouTube Dcemu.co.uk (1) Dcemu.co.uk (2) Techeblog.com Awayfromkeyboard.org Numberless.net Homebrewhowto.com Blinklist.com Ownage.nl Atocorp.free.fr Unmediated.org Bashers.nl …

Animal Controlled Computer Games is the graduation project from Wim van Eck, a study college and friend of mine. In his project he build a Pacman game, in that the player can play Pacman against real crickets, that controls the ghosts in the Pacman maze. By doing this he analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of real-time behaviour of live animals in comparison to behavior-generating code in computer games. Interesting about this idea in my opinion is, that through the use of real life elements in a game, the game gets unpredictable. It happens once to him that during playing the game one cricket piled his skin. Because of the new and white skin of the cricket, the color detecting system of the game could not detect the cricket for certain period. During this period the cricket was a real ghost for the system. ...