Gaming

Following the reveal trailer that aired during last night’s NBA playoffs and showed actual game play, Activision has now unveiled the full-length, two-minute documentary for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 which was created by The Ant Farm and 72andSunny. Shot in Washington D.C. and featuring an appearance from none other than good ol’ Ollie North, the online film dramatically details the weapons of the future and looks realistic and grim enough to have us believe we’ll be wandering the desolate road with Viggo Mortensen and his son in the coming years. Check out credits if so inclined after the jump.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Mother’s New York operation follows up its “World Gone Sour” music video starring the M-E-T-H-O-D Man with the promotion of the XBox/Playstation game of the same name, which was released this week. Don’t worry, the Meth track is in the mix as is VO work from The Office‘s Creed Bratton to hype up the game, the main goal of which is get the SPK to the human stomach. Feels a little bit Nick Jr. to us, but hopefully it maintains some of the edge that its TV campaign embodies. Aiding in Mother’s gaming promo is developer Playbrains along with Beefy Media.

Deutsch LA is promoting the new Twisted Metal game for client Playstation by providing 100,000 bullets (yes, for real) in a military-sized machine gun for those laptop jocks and jockettes who want to let out some aggression and fire away and blow shit up. The agency went so far as to send us a promo poster, which you can see above, which we suppose a new kind of Valentine’s Day massacre. We’re not sure why we feel giddy/weird about something like this, but we’re on the list. If you care to join in on the fun, time is limited, but go here.

It looks like time has taken its toll on Darth Vader, as the Sith Lord is now getting one-upped by a guy who stars in Parks & Recreation and had a role in Moneyball in this clip promoting the launch of Kinect Star Wars.  AKQA and Swift River Productions are behind this effort for the Xbox Kinect game (release date TBD–perhaps when Lucas gives his official blessing), which stars a smart-ass Chris Pratt, who steps in for Obi-wan and reenacts a classic lightsaber battle. As you can see, it’s not too difficult to tease one of sci-fi’s greatest villains these days. Credits after the jump:

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Though still technically in development, HTML5 has already provided a bevy of groundbreaking websites. And, with the recent announcement that Adobe is discontinuing works on its mobile Flash player (which many are blaming on Steve Jobs and the popularity of iOS devices), the eyes of web developers worldwide are now glued to HTML5 and its promise of a platform that’s only restricted by one’s imagination.

In the spirit of web pioneering, the minds at Mcgarrybowen Labs have decided to combine online gaming with HTML5. The finished product, “Galaxy Explorer,” is not unlike Arcade Fire’s breakthrough interactive music video “The Wilderness Downtown,” utilizing automatically generating multiple browser windows to give a player a fuller interactive experience. As Mcgarrybowen puts it, the game “transforms the way browsers communicate not just with users but with each other, as well.” It can be an awful lot for a laptop to handle, so should you give “Galaxy Explorer” a whirl, make sure to close all other browser windows and stop simultaneously running programs to avoid slowing it down.

And, for the developers out there wondering how they did it, Mcgarrybowen says, “We’ve created illusions of transparent browser windows, animated them with JQuery and Bezier Curves and woven a complex relationship between the browser parent and child windows that communicate with each other and all come together in a cohesive side-scrolling adventure.” It’s pretty nifty, and it’s (hopefully) only a sign of things to come as Mcgarrybowen continues experimenting and creating with HTML5. Credits after the jump.

Playstation pitchman Kevin Butler tones down his snarky/silly schtick for a tick in order to honor Veteran’s Day in this latest “Hall of Play” inclusion from Deutsch LA.  Here, Butler honors a gamer (as well as all the men and women in service) who guys by the handle “TheBigIrish1138″ and happens to be stationed with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Yes, there is a sensitive side to the smarmy sap, who we presume will get back to his usual gamer-saluting antics shortly. Credits after the jump.

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Three months after snagging Call of Duty duties from TBWA\Chiat\Day LA, 72andSunny has rolled out its new work for the Activision franchise, which from the looks of it, doesn’t drift too far from the gonzo, celebrity-driven approach employed by Chiat for Black Ops. But instead of Jimmy Kimmel and Kobe Bryant, this time we have Avatar‘s Sam Worthington and a slimmed-down, unlikely hero in Jonah Hill, who play vet and noob, respectively, as well as Superman himself, Dwight Howard. The spot, directed by Peter Berg and featuring the rather appropriate “Shoot to Thrill” from AC/DC, is just as over-the-top as the game play itself and dominated commercial breaks during yesterday’s NFL coverage. It’s something Michael Bay would surely approve of, but where does 72andSunny’s Call of Duty debut rank when it comes to video game ad of the year? Modern Warfare 3, by the way, hits shelves tomorrow.

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Now that the “Rocket Project” is in the books ,180 LA and Sony are coming down from the heavens and heading underwater in a new effort called “Project Shiphunt.” The venue now shifts from the Nevada desert to Michigan, where a group of students will once again use Vaio laptops (with Intel tech included) in the hopes of finding, yes, a sunken ship. After starting their deep-sea exploration schooling at the NOAA’s Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Alpena, MI, the kids along with expedition lead Dr. James P. Delgado will eventually get down to work.

To coincide with the actual ship hunt, which will run from late spring through the summer, 180LA with the help of digital production shop Unit9 have launched a game (which they claim is one of the first ever created in Google Earth) called “Oceans of Treasure” (trailer above), which lets you the user collect clues and data then virtually search for a sunken ship via provided Sony/Intel technology. Why do we have a sudden urge to watch The Goonies?

 

According to Mike Tyson, the most famous ear-eating (convicted) rapist in America, he got into boxing because getting beat up looked like fun. Okay, earning the title of “The Baddest Man on Earth” and tattooing nearly half of your face might not make you the most reliable narrator. But, as I learned from a recent episode of Ellen I  watched with my mom accidentally saw part of when I was robbing an electronics store, when Iron Mike talks, people listen. In this spot for “Fight Night Champion,” it’s hard to look away.

And, good for EA and the agency behind the 7-minute spot, San Francisco-based Heat, for realizing that in a world where MMA makes professional boxing look like croquet, the sport needs someone like Tyson around to keep breathing his brand of brutality into young fans. On EA’s YouTube channel, a series of videos featuring Tyson, Tommy Morrison and Joe Frazier have a 17+ Mature rating and an age lock as the athletes talk about the “dark side of boxing.” Tyson’s video might start tame, but around the 4:45 mark, he uses graphic detail to talk about his time in prison.

It might seem like an odd tactic for moving copies of a video game. But, when you consider that Mayweather v. Mosley doesn’t carry nearly the weight as UFC’s Velasquez v. Lesnar, it’s time to step up your game. That’s probably why Heat turned to the notorious cultural bad boys at Vice to take over editing the spots. Credits after the jump.

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Yesterday at SXSW, gaming finally had its day. Officially kicking off the interactive portion of the conference was a highly anticipated keynote delivered by Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old CEO of SCVNGR, a Google-backed, location-based gaming startup.

Priebatsch delivered an energetic, organized presentation focused on the game layer – gaming mechanics applied in the real world that will create influence. He stated that the last decade “was about social – putting our connections online”, and we’re now at the point where those connections can actually drive action. Games are the key.

To prove his point, he took the audience of 2500+ through a series of examples, beginning with education. Referencing the problem of cheating, he cited Princeton University’s solution to combat the problem. The administration changed the rules, and removed oversight during exams – no teachers or TAs in the room. Students simply sign waivers agreeing to the honor code – not to cheat, and if they see anyone else cheating, they must report it. It’s a very subtle shift that changes the game – other students become both competitors and comrades. Cheating has since dropped from 400 to 2 incidents annually.

Subsequent examples were business focused – he moved from school, to customer acquisition and loyalty – but what Priebatsch really wanted to get to was how gaming will combat bigger, global problems. In his final example, he challenged everyone in the keynote ballroom to play along in what he called “communal gameplay”. Each person was given a colored card – there were 3 colors in total – and the challenge was for each row of seats to be one color. Audience members had to agree on colors and swap cards to reach the goal within 180 seconds. The reward was a $10,000 donation to the National Wildlife Foundation. The audience won.

The point? That decentralized leadership and organizing around local solutions to global problems can often lead to faster results than organized government. “Moving something from impossible to something that is very difficult is a very big win”, he said. The game layer will eventually help us do that.

Kirsten Cluthe, the author of this post, is a consultant with The Frontier Project and a mediabistro contributor.