Category: games

Ilia Ovechkin told me about a work of his from ’07 entitled: A Thousand Knights; No Respawn. that he created using the Sauerbraten game engine.

The piece features a sparse landscape brimming with, seemingly, a thousand knights colliding into each other as they stomp and slash. “Respawn” is a gaming term referring to the resuscitation of a character after its death.

As i understand the game, players entering the field of play are instantly killed by the myriad marauding knights and spend most of the game in the afterlife (‘no respawn’).

I’m not sure what that afterlife consists of, or if it exists within the game proper, or elsewhere as the perspective of the person playing the game watching the inevitable, instant killing machine that is the field of play (i think it’s the latter), but, in any case, i find the project clever and inspiring, and find myself wandering into ARG land, wondering how to script some poetic interactions with a player that occur within a game’s afterlife – and how the creation and definition of that afterlife environment could be the intention of that phase of the game, and developed collaboratively between the player and the game and, perhaps, how the resulting and varied afterlives could echo lightly back into the initial field of play as some subtle change… but that’s just my own current fascination with transfigured respawn.

my student anthony mattox – check out his project wikiweb (wikipedia visualization in processing he did for my scripting class this semester) showed me euh? last week. nice.

in speaking with sam about euh? we agreed that neither of us have seen such an interesting use of pop-up windows as in this version of pong.

on a crowded train tonight i saw a teenager pointing and wagging her fingers at someone – i couldn’t figure out what she was up to, and eventually realized she was playing some sort of hand game.

as i’ve been thinking a lot about hand-made, hobby, hacked ‘games’ and off-beat transactional schemes lately i was intrigued.

walking back to my apartment and trying to figure out what the game was i recalled trying to develop a hand game a few years ago as an out-of-gallery component to a project i was working on for art interactive in cambridge, ma. i wanted to create some off-site action that would reflect some of the underlying logic and intentions of the installation in a portable form. the hand game component never happened.

when i got home i started searching and found out about chopsticks – and also located an online version – i’m pretty sure that was what the teens were playing – i’d never heard of it before. i like it.

here are two girls playing chopsticks:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyxR0IKCGKs[/youtube]

this reminds me of a favorite video of the wisconsin card sort, a test of frontal lobe function where subjects try to figure out the rules for placing picture cards in front of other picture cards by placing cards on the table and receiving and ‘yes’, or ‘no’ from the person administering the test. the challenge behind the wisconsin card sort is that the rules change during the test…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABlncLQ4x4E[/youtube]

would be interesting to develop a hand game where one of the moves is to change the rules silently.

hand nomic? – sort of…

let me know.

apparently my school is moving forward with a gaming concentration, along with an initiative to more formally introduce flash into our curriculum. when i heard this yesterday i wasn’t initially sure how i could contribute, then i found these flash based games entitled: i made this. you play it. we are enemies., and game, game, game, and again, game. now i’m interested.

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