gaming

Last spring, when the Smithsonian‘s American Art Museum both announced their The Art of Video Games exhibition and asked for crowd sourced submissions for what to include, it brought down their servers for a while as they were inundated with traffic. That was clearly an early sign that this might be a slightly popular show. Now, almost a year later, it’s nearly time to see just how swarmed the museum will be. The exhibition opens on Friday, March 16th, kicking off with a three day festival (pdf) celebrating the launch. Games will be available to play, 8-bit musicians will be on hand to perform, films like Tron and The King of Kong will be screened (the cast of the latter will even be on hand for a meet and greet on Sunday), and a number of panels with industry legends will be sprinkled throughout (the ones with Hideo Kojima and Nolan Bushnell are apparently already sold out). For those outside of DC, or who haven’t been able to get tickets quickly enough, the museum will also be webcasting the events throughout the weekend. We’re no psychics, but we have a sense that this might be a fairly popular show, all the way out through when it wraps up in September. Here’s a description of what the exhibition will look like:

Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by excerpts from selected games projected 12 feet high, accompanied by a chipmusic soundtrack by 8 Bit Weapon and ComputeHer, including “The Art of Video Games Anthem” recorded by 8 Bit Weapon specifically for the exhibition. These multimedia elements convey the excitement and complexity of the featured video games. An interior gallery includes a series of short videos showing the range of emotional responses players have while interacting with games. Excerpts from interviews with 20 influential figures in the gaming world also are presented in the galleries.

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A high-profile controversy has bubbled up late this week in a fairly surprising place: game design. Earlier in the week, Wired conducted an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo designer responsible for titles like Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda. Therein, the magazine seemed to grab a red hot exclusive in learning that Miyamoto was planning to retire, leaving Nintendo to go work on his own, perhaps start something like a new game company on his own. However, by yesterday, the game company was on serious damage control, adamantly denying, as their shares on the stock market fell because of the news, that there was any truth to it whatsoever. Turns out, it was perhaps all just a mix of a fairly devious headline on Wired‘s part (“Nintendo’s Miyamoto Stepping Down, Working on Smaller Games”), and an audience who perhaps didn’t read beyond it, or didn’t quite get what he was trying to say in the rest of the piece. In it, Miyamoto fairly clearly states that he’s merely using threats of retirement to encourage younger developers to realize he won’t always be there and they’ll need to start doing some innovating of their own. “The reason why I’m stressing that is that unless I say that I’m retiring, I cannot nurture the young developers,” he tells the magazine. So while he might be making a move within Nintendo, the designer, unless he’s pulling a Will Alsop-style bait and switch, isn’t moving away just yet.

Even if you’ve at one point pilfered an entire week’s allowance on games like Asteroids or Gauntlet, you might not know the man who was responsible for those hours of fun and sore button-smashing fingers. Ed Logg is his name and he’s soon to receive the 2012 AIAS Pioneer Award (pdf) from The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences for his work in game design. Logg will receive the award at the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, held this upcoming February. Here’s a bit about his early work:

Dedicating long hours of programming at Stanford University’s AI Lab, Logg soon realized he could turn his hobby and passion into a career. Joining Atari’s arcade division, Logg was instrumental in the development of a string of wildly successful games – Super Breakout in 1978, Asteroids in 1979, Centipede in 1980, and Millipede in 1982. Further inspired by his son’s love of Dungeons and Dragons, Logg developed a fantasy dungeon-crawler Gauntlet for Atari Games in 1985. There was initial resistance to the cooperative multiplayer aspect, but this format later evolved to became an arcade staple. It was this intuition that helped Logg produce a further string of coin-op successes for Atari Games from the mid-to-late eighties

Remember those halcyon days way back in 2010 when you could go wait in an incredibly long line at the MoMA to spend a few seconds sharing a stare with Marina Abramovic as she sat and stared for her extremely popular The Artist is Present piece? If you’re hankering to return, and watching the Broad Museum get built in real time isn’t drawn out enough for you, designer and artist Pippen Barr has created the brilliant and bizarre The Artist is Present video game. Control your animated, adventure game avatar through the process of paying $25 for a ticket and then go wait in a very long line to see Abramovic. That’s it. And like the often-referenced non-game game, Penn and Teller‘s equally interesting Desert Bus, where you drove a bus through an unchanging landscape for hours but the steering had a slight pull, meaning you had to sit there and pay attention for all those hours, in Barr’s game, if you ignore your place in line, you’ll get bumped and have to start again from the back of the queue. Beside the game, Barr has a number of interesting comments about his creating the game, adding whole other layers to what first appears to just be a funny endeavor. Here’s a bit:

As happens when you make things, though, different meanings and ideas come up as you go along. On researching the show it was pretty obvious that the core mechanic of the game was about waiting – that’s pretty much what everyone focuses on when they think of the show – either waiting to see Abramovic or, in a sense, waiting with her. And that’s immediately titillating because waiting is obviously the height of poor game design according to convention. (Note that there are some great games about waiting, notably Gregory Weir’s Narthex and Increpare’s Queue). Part of my attitude to it, though, was to take it to some kind of “end game” – just waiting, so real other entertainment or chance of interaction, possibly for hours, possibly never even achieving your aim. Brutal waiting.

Sadly, there’s no bonus level in Barr’s game where if you touch the nude people, you get in trouble with the MoMA staff.

Last year, the Obama administration received plenty of praise from video game makers for their launch of two game design competitions withing the new National STEM Video Game Challenge, one prize for students and another for professional developers. But what is giveth may at any time being taketh away, it seems. Gamesutra reports that this year’s STEM competition has just been launched (STEM, by the way, stands for science, technology, engineering and math) and now appears to exclude the professional side, instead focused strictly on the youth side, ranging from middle school and through onto academics designing educational video games. Granted, the developers prize wasn’t all that substantial last year, the $50,000 given to Filament Games for their game, You Make Me Sick!, still must have been a substantial help to the budding educational game company. As of now, the STEM organizers haven’t addressed why this secondary section of the competition was dropped, but at the moment it appears that they’ve simply decided to shift the focus to solely encouraging students to become interested and engaged in video game design.

Brilliantly reverse-engineered by Tom Fulp of Newgrounds

“I am really good at George Plimpton’s Video Falconry, and I confess that I have cheated. You may know that on George Plimpton’s Video Falconry, if you do up-up, down-down, claw, flap-flap-flap, beak-grab, claw-grab, flap-flap, pitch, yaw, beak-grab, double-flap, you unlock the Kazakhstan Golden Eagle level, and you get to hunt foxes.”

-Author, minor television personality, and future Nobel Prize winner John Hodgman, settling a dispute concerning the ethics of video game “strategy guides” in a recent episode of the Judge John Hodgman Podcast (listen below)

The Sound of Young America

Back in February, you might recall, the Smithsonian‘s American Art Museum launched a kind of crowdsourced curating effort, asking people to vote for titles to display as part of next year’s The Art of Video Games exhibition. So popular was the site that it crashed due to the volume of visitors almost immediately and then was extended for several weeks to make sure they’d be able to both capture all the votes and garner that much more attention for what’s sure to be one of their most popular exhibitions in recent history. Now the list of the 80 winning games has been announced (pdf). Browsing through the list, you’ll see of course you have your expected fare, like Pac-Man and Super Mario Brothers, but there are a handful of surprises in there as well, like 1983′s Commodore 64 game, Attach of the Mutant Camels, which is the first thing we’re eager to check out when the exhibition opens in March of 2012. Here’s video of the official announcement of the winning games, apparently shot inside of the Smithsonian’s private spaceship:

“There are more than a half a billion people worldwide—including 183 million in the United States—who play online games at least an hour a day. Why? Because games do a better job of provoking our most powerful positive emotions, like curiosity, optimism, pride, and a desire to join forces with others. Games are fulfilling genuine human needs the real world is unable to satisfy.

Gaming is productive. It produces positive emotion, stronger social relationships, a sense of accomplishment, and for players who are a part of a game community, a chance to build a sense of purpose. I’m interested in bringing this mindset to our real lives and efforts to tackle the world’s most urgent problems, from curing cancer to slowing climate change.”

—Game designer Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin)
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It’s a good time for interesting design-based lawsuits this week. First, Hormel Foods has taken the Zwanenberger Food Group to court, alleging that the packaging for latter’s luncheon meat, Prem, looks too similar to Hormel’s famous and infamous rival product, Spam. This particular battle has reportedly been going on since last fall, when Hormel issued a cease-and-desist letter to stop copying their packaging, which Zwanenberger initially agreed to, redesigning their Prem tins with simple blue type on black metal. However, Hormel has discovered that the company is still selling the product in its original packaging in the Philippines. Hormel issued another cease-and-desist, which has apparently been ignored, and now it appears that the food giant is bringing the hammer down.

For the second interesting case, unrelated to processed meat, but somehow seeming somewhat similar, the original designer behind the massively successful video game series, Madden NFL Football (or just “Madden” if you want to sound like you’re in the know), is suing publisher Electronic Arts for the millions of dollars in royalties he feels he’s owed from the franchise, which has to date “reaped more than $4 billion in profits over the years.” Robin Antonick claims he designed and developed the game in the mid-’80s, signing a contract with EA that entitled him to a portion of the profits made from any future release of the series, though he hasn’t received a penny since the early ’90s. According to Reuters, the two parties have spent the last few years “engaged in confidential settlement negotiations,” but have never worked anything out, hence this new suit.

Because this writer is ancient, he still remembers way back to when only children and the socially inept played video games, largely because he fit into both camps at one time or another. And even though it was the dream of many to one day be creating the next MegaMan or the like, to actually do so and, even more bizarre, prosper at it, still holds a tinge of ridiculousness. But then you remind yourself that the gaming industry seems to pull down more money in a week than both the film and music businesses do on an annual basis. Only then does it make sense that The Princeton Review and the magazine GamePro have banded together for the second year to release their ranking of the top 10 undergraduate and graduate video game design programs. The University of Southern California mopped up this year, winning the top spot in both categories. The rest, well, if you’re like us, you might be thinking, “They have a video game department?” However, if you’re the parent of a soon-to-be-college-age kid, maybe this list will help you better come to terms with your child’s choices and you’ll let them pursue the video gaming field, instead of getting a traditionally extremely valuable degree like English Literature. Now if you’ll excuse this writer, he needs to go sew some new patches onto all his clothing scraps. Here’s the list of top undergrad programs:

1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles

2. University of Utah, Salt Lake City

3. DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, Wash.

4. The Art Institute of Vancouver, Vancouver, B.C.

5. Michigan State University, East Lansing

6. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.

7. Drexel University, Philadelphia

8. Champlain College, Burlington, Vt.

9. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, N.Y.

10. Becker College, Worcester, Mass.