gaming

While the Smithsonian‘s American Art Museum might be planning a sure-to-be-popular exhibit for next year about the art of video games, a group in San Francisco is attempting to build an entire museum around the subject. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment has recently been established with the intent of collecting pieces of digital works of art and video games and exhibiting them as a traditional, brick and mortar museum in the Bay Area (here’s their full mission statement). While they’ve received non-profit status and have assembled a large, impressive collection, the trick is now finding a space to house it in. They’ve launched a Kickstarter page, and are already nearly $8,000 into their $20,000 goal, which if they’re given, they’ll put to use for “rent and utilities associated with a ~1000 sq ft space near BART for 6 months to a year, depending on the rent we find. Additional funds will keep the space open longer.” Once you’ve sent them some cash, if you’re on the hunt for a way to break into the museum world, they’re also looking to fill a number of positions, all the way up to Chief Curator and Director of Marketing. Might sound a bit risky, the MADE doesn’t even have a location yet, but hey, even the Met and the Guggenheim started from scratch, right?

After a rough patch there the last couple of months for the Smithsonian, it’s nice to read a press release with something a bit more positive; and it doesn’t get much more lighthearted than video games. The American Art Museum has announced an exhibition to launch in mid-March of next year called The Art of Video Games, which will highlight both background art and interactive, moving pieces as well. Beginning this week, the museum has asked for a bit of curatorial help, launching a site for the exhibition and asking visitors to vote for eighty games from a collection of 240 currently considered titles, presumably with the interest of floating the most popular to the top, which will then find a home in the show itself. A fun idea, though we’re guessing the museum didn’t think it would be as wildly popular as it has apparently gotten. As of this writing (and observed last night), the exhibition’s site is still up, but with a note reading “Eek! Your enthusiasm has overwhelmed us and we’re experiencing technical difficulties! Please have patience while we fix this.” Assuming they’re able to get all those overloaded servers back up and running, you’ll have until April 7th to pick your favorites. Here are the details on the exhibition itself:

The Art of Video Games is the first exhibition to explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies. The exhibition will feature some of the most influential artists and designers during five eras of game technology, from early developers such as David Crane and Warren Robinett to contemporary designers like Kellee Santiago and David Jaffe. It also will explore the many influences on game designers, and the pervasive presence video games have in the broader popular culture, with new relationships to video art, film and television, educational practices, and professional skill training. Chris Melissinos, founder of Past Pixels and collector of video games and gaming systems, is the curator of the exhibition.

Did you make a half-inebriated New Year’s resolution this year that you’d spend 2011 really trying to challenge yourself as a designer? If so, we’re encouraging you to keep to your goals with perhaps the most difficult contest ever. Art Director, game designer and blogger Daniel Solis has launched The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge. With it, he’s asking people to submit game designs that will last the test of time (think chess or tag or solitaire). He’s giving you until July 31st to come up with something and $1000 to the winning entry, which doesn’t seem like much given that he’s asking for someone to come up with something that’s essentially immortal. However, at the close of the contest information, he clearly states that you’ll maintain all the rights to your game, as well as all the riches that come with it. He just wants to see, first hand, the birth of a game people will be playing for the next century. Time’s a-wasting, so get cracking.

Decades ago, this writer’s parents would encourage their son to not spend an entire weekend playing what they saw was a mindless video game and instead do something productive, like chores or developing at least some form of base social skills. As a defense, this writer would reply, “But this is all educational. I want to make games for a living!” This likely couldn’t have been further from the truth, but flash forward twenty years and that lie could have possibly been more believable. Late last week, President Obama announced two video game design competitions under the umbrella title National STEM Video Game Challenge (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math). Opening for submissions on October 12th and accepting until early January, the Youth Prize asks students from fifth grade to eighth to design a game either as a paper proposal or a working prototype, the entrants vying for prizes in a $50,000 pool full of miscellaneous things like laptops, software, and money for their school, while hopefully encouraging students to get more interested in the the technological mechanics under the hood. Meanwhile, the Developer Prize will run simultaneously, asking emerging and experienced game designers to come up with a game for younger children that will help foster interest in science, technology, engineering and math. That prize will split a pool of more than $100,000. So if you have a kid like this writer used to be, with vague aspirations or blatant lies, here’s your chance to get them off the couch by saying, “Okay, prove it.”

(Photos: EA and CLC Associates)

Even video game designers have to toil in the non-virtual world, and Electronic Arts (EA) has just cut the ribbon on a 20,000-square-foot game design studio in Salt Lake City, Utah. Upon hearing from EA that the space was “specifically designed to promote the creation of innovative video game content,” we were curious to see what that looked like, exactly. Paul Hirshi, architectural manager at CLC Associates, opted for a mountain theme. In the hopes of encouraging collaboration among the 100 EA employees who will work in the new studio, the floor plan has few fixed walls, with team spaces given prime views of Utah’s mountains (real ones), cityscape, and parks. The new offices also feature a variety of lighting elements suspended from high ceilings, illuminating metal wave structures that give the illusion of flow and movement. The effect is invigorating if mildly mall-ish: think New York Times building-meets-carnival Matterhorn ride—and we dare anyone to doze off in the bright yellow conference room. Among the first orders of business for the team-friendly space is developing Monopoly Streets. Slated for release later this year, the game will present the 75-year-old board game as a street-level tour of Mr. Monopoly’s fully animated world. How a giant thimble will fit in is still anybody’s guess, although Claes Oldenburg might have some ideas.

That’s the concept behind The Cartoonist, one of twelve innovative media projects that have been named the 2010 winners of the Knight News Challenge. Dreamed up by video game designer, critic, and researcher Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology) and fellow game design guru Michael Mateas (University of California Santa Cruz), the project would enable budget-strapped media outlets to produce their own current event-themed video games—an interactive spin on editorial cartoons that could also help to differentiate a publication’s print and online versions. “The editorial cartoon has been a casualty of newspaper cuts, especially in local news,” says Bogost in his video summary of the project. The trend has been detrimental on many levels, because “The cartoon serves as a familiar and appealing entry point to the news.” Bogost and Mateas will use their $378,000 Knight Foundation grant to develop the free tool, which will automatically propose game rules and images based on input concerning the major actors in a news event (e.g., oil company, busted oil well, ocean, wisecracking band of superheroic eels). We suggest a splashy meta-demo to get media folks on board with the concept: anyone for a disturbingly short version of Paperboy?

Unless you live in a place without children or adults who enjoy thinly-altered versions of Simon, you’ve likely seen the endless stream of promotion for “The Beatles: Rock Band,” the next title in the series of sort-of-music-y video games. While we enjoyed the animated commercial being passed around a few months back, that’s likely as close to the game as we’re going to get (we share Jim DeRogatis‘ opinion of it). But that’s not to say the creation of the game isn’t of interest. That’s why we turn to this interesting piece about the design of the title, talking to Josh Randall, its director. In it, there’s some info about how he and his team created the animated stand-ins for the famous pop group in their most iconic settings. Although there’s a little too much “Oh, I get it. This guy needs to look like a hero” fluff in there, there are bits and pieces of genuine interest about the process of designing the characters. Here’s a bit:

Yoko Ono was particularly helpful when working with the 3-D model of John Lennon. “At the time, our version of John was really not there yet,” Randall explained. “We were suffering because of it. We were trying to figure out what we were missing and, sitting with Yoko, she was like, ‘He was such a strong personality. You need to capture his essence, his spirit.’ “

From there the developers went back to the original footage of the Beatles performing at Shea Stadium. Their in-game model of John looked hunched-over and shy during that performance, but in real life he was apparently much more active. Describing the video, Randall said it was obvious — it just took Ono to point it out.

Okay, maybe it’s all fluff. But we still found it kinda interesting.

Comic books and video games are going straight to hell—all nine circles of it. Beginning Thursday, Electronic Arts and DC Comics will preview their adaptations of The Divine Comedy at Comic-Con in San Diego. Both companies are hellbent on bringing the first infernal cantica of Dante’s epic poem to a contemporary audience, one that would rather skip the 14,000 lines of verse and jump right into the vivid doom. EA’s Visceral Games division is developing an elaborate video game version, Dante’s Inferno, in which “a soldier…defies death and fights for love against impossible odds,” picking a path through the afterlife with the help of a soul-reaping scythe, holy powers, and the ability to tame horrific creatures. For those who prefer to prowl the underworld on paper, DC Comics is at work on a comic book mini-series based on the Inferno. Illustrated by Diego Latorre (The Incredible Hulk) and written by Christos Gage (X-Men/Spider-Man), the comics go on sale this December, just in time to prime audiences for the 2010 launch of the game. Can’t make it to Comic-Con? EA’s website invites you to view a trailer for the game and “Explore Hell,” where you can Twitter in Limbo.

We’ve covered a little bit of that “video games as art” movement from time to time, that desire in the industry to try to make games more emotionally touching, like films often have the ability to do. Now comes an interesting piece about Jason Rohrer, perhaps one of the most well-known of the movement thanks to Passage, the self-financed game he designed and constructed that deals with life and death (and has made a lot of people cry according to more than one blog post we’ve run across in our time — unfortunately, this writer isn’t much of a gamer, so he just found the whole thing a little boring, much like real life, we suppose). After remaining fiercely independent for years, living a very pastoral existence, Rohrer has announced that he’s signed on with an ad agency to make interactive campaigns. Again, as we aren’t really gamers, we wonder if this is like your favorite band selling out and appearing in a Noxzema commercial and all the die-hard fans suddenly turn away. Though with the gaming industry, isn’t 99.9% of it commercial and the weird thing was to turn away from that? We suppose it’s something for the collective who live and breathe games to discuss and ultimately pass judgement on. Fortunately, for the rest of us, there’s this great interview with Rohrer at Edge Online about his decisions and what exactly it means for him. Here’s a bit about the chief reasons:

I was saying “no” to most of the offers that came along, finding some ethical grounds to say that in each case. But I got to this point where I’m now thirty and I have two children. Over the past year I’ve had a patron, but he only supports people for two years, so I’ve been thinking: how am I going to pay for my children’s college and things? So I’ve switched my policy, and started saying “yes” to everything.

All in all, from an outsider looking in, it’s all very interesting and we’re curious to follow how it will all play out.

Game designer and critic, Jonathan Blow, who you might recall us talking about a few months back, has returned to our hallowed halls of news by making waves at the Montreal Game Summit. Asked to appear as a keynote speaker, he bashed the gaming industry, saying its designers “are only producing the videogame equivalent of a McDonald’s meal.” Yowch. Here’s a little more from The Escapist‘s coverage:

He compared criticism leveled at McDonald’s and tobacco companies to the way the videogame industry treats players, suggesting that with the current standards of design, “We don’t intend to harm players but we might do so.”

“In pursuing ever more players the games industry exploits them in an unethical way,” he said. “We don’t see it as unethical, though, because we refuse to stop and think about what we are doing. We don’t have a sense to be ashamed.”

If you’re in the industry or, you know, play games, you might be feeling a little low right now. So we offer you the perfect pick me up in the form of Ernest Adams wonderful report over at Gamasutra on the last decade in game design in “The Designer’s Notebook: Ten Years of Great Games.” Ah, good times.