William Higinbotham, Tennis For Two, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1958

Although it would take a few more years, namely 1962 and the game “Spacewar”, before we could see the emergence of a true modern form of “gameplay”, “Tennis for Two” nevertheless contains enough basic elements of interactive play to connect it to more contemporary descendants, for example the iconic Nintendo hit, “Wii Tennis”. While there are a few missing details here and there, such as avatars, scoring and the various forms invented to interact with the machine, fundamentally there is very little that has changed since “Tennis for Two”. It contains all the modern tropes of animated algorithmic representation, namely a highly kinetic visual form that emerges in real-time from within the game via its gameplay. From this perspective, it is one of the forebears for “arcade” style games. The game is fast and dynamic, and only by interacting with the system does the image emerge.

But perhaps most importantly, “Tennis for Two” is significant in that it is not only a representation of playable interactive visual forms, but that these forms represent something greater than their graphical output: the game is in fact a physics simulator of a ball moving through space and interacting with objects in its path. Watch how the ball bounces against the net and then try to imagine what it would take to program such a movement, even today; then remember that Higinbotham was working back in 1958. For its time, this is a sophisticated simulator of physical interactions:

“The ‘brain’ of Tennis for Two was a small analog computer. The computer’s instruction book described how to generate various curves on the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and relays. Among the examples given in the book were the trajectories of a bullet, missile, and bouncing ball, all of which were subject to gravity and wind resistance. While reading the instruction book, the bouncing ball reminded Higinbotham of a tennis game and the idea of Tennis for Two was born.” — Brookhaven National Laboratory, The First Video Game?, p.2.

Given the historical context, there is nothing surprising in this idea of a computer simulating a physical phenomenon such as a bullet or a missile. In the 1950′s, computers were still emerging from World War II era cybernetic formulations of “telelogical” or “self-regulating” machines, precipitated in large part by the acceleration of faster and faster flying weapons that required new techniques for shooting them out of the sky (cf. V-2 Countermeasures). The history of interactivity is traversed by this question of simulation, i.e. by the idea of adaptive mathematical and physical models that could allow machines to regulate themselves in real-time, based on constantly evolving conditions. So while it might be considered a historical curiosity that post-war cybernetic machines would produce the modern video game, it is unsurprising that such a game would be constructed out of a physical simulator of bouncing balls or flying bullets and missiles.

Aesthetics, Simulation, Play

But whatever the relationship between aesthetics and play, it is further complicated by this introduction of the principle of simulation in play, made all the more acute in the context of video games. Simulation questions the mimetic tendencies of representation, which might explain in part the constantly recurring uproar over violence in video games (and all the ire over provocative gamer-artists that apparently “hate freedom” ;-). But no matter how small-minded the complaints, people nevertheless understand that these games are not merely mimetically presenting us with representations of violence; instead, they are directly modeling the violence itself of the scene. The resulting image flows from the model; it is a “rendering” of the underlying scene. This is the specificity of simulation: the ability to represent the dynamics of a situation as itself a form of representation. The representation needs to be played in order to take form. This is the historical twist of simulation: the image has shifted from a predominantly mimetic function of re-presentation to that of rendering complex interactions visible through playability. In fact, simulations can take place through other mediums and channels of perception. The American far-west simulator, The Oregon Trail (1971), for example, was a simulator that originally used only textual communication to represent the state of the game. Although modern variants of The Oregon Trail, such as Red Dead Redemption now use sophisticated graphics to represent the game state, the game is nevertheless animated by a simulation engine that cannot be be reduced merely to the artifacts displayed on-screen.

The Oregon Trail (Apple II edition), 1971/1984 & Red Dead Redemption, 2010

A Poor Man’s Simulator

Why so early then our first variant on what would later become Angry Birds? The prophetic nature of Tennis for Two can somewhat be explained by context: Higinbotham was a physicist, whereas Pong’s inventors — Ralph Baer (Magnavox) and Allan Alcorn (Atari) — were engineers. Higinbotham was working with scientific instrumentation that did not adhere to the economic constraints or objectives of Baer who was for his part trying to design mass-producible circuitry that could be plugged into to millions of customers’ televisions.

But it is precisely this poor-man’s quality of video game’s simulators that helped emerge the ludic qualities of gaming. Tennis for Two is frankly a little boring next to Pong, whereas Pong remains one of the best-designed games of all time, giving birth to an infinitely expanding field of variants all the way from Breakout to Bit.Trip Beat.

One of the ironies of video game history relates to this desire to simulate infinitely complex interactions, but with access to only the most mediocre means of calculation. This contradiction has led to what might in some senses be considered an historical anomaly: an in-between period in which computer games’ desire for “realism” would have to wait for the technological means to catch up.

A Poor Man’s Renderer

Artistic Playgrounds

In the well-known work of French artist Invader, the city landscape becomes a platformer to be traversed literally, leaving behind physical pixels:

Invader Sneakers & Space Invader in Shoreditch, London

In the aforementioned Eddo Stern’s “portal” sculptures, gaming logics of representation and interaction are re-projected back onto traditional spaces of representation (gallery, public square, etc) in the form of sculpture:

While neither of these examples are even playable as games, they communicate nevertheless with the video game medium through this imperfect, unrealistic video game form of visual rendering. They look and feel like classical electronic forms of play.

The artifactual visual language of video games is sometimes constructed out of a patchwork of various historical forms that have been redefined through the filter of gaming. Sometimes video games skeuomorphically imitate previous technologies and mediums, for example by flashing television-style signal noise to signify a weak connection, or imitating hand-written messages and drawings strewn about a 3d world (cf. Myst, Resident Evil). But video games have also introduced their own domain of visual logic based on the specific contours of the technological limitations that animate them. Often a closer reading is required in order to reveal the nature of these contours.

Raster-Scan

Alan Kay, The Early History of Smalltalk, 1993

Like many of the computing concepts we take for granted today, the pixel concept was perfected in the late 60′s and early 70′s somewhere between Douglas Engelbart’s Stanford Research Institute and the Xerox PARC in neighboring Palo Alto:

“The TX-2 display that Ivan Sutherland used for Sketchpad [...] would project a single bright spot on a dark screen and then electronically move that spot around to trace out a circle, say, or the letter A. By tracing and retracing the pattern very, very fast, [it] could create the illusion of a solid outline. [...] The problem was that the more complicated the drawing, the faster you had to wiggle that spot. [...] Then there were the “raster-scan” displays that Bill English had developed for the “PARC Online Office System”, POLOS. [...] The POLOS displays used digital electronics that were better suited to the binary world of computing: in effect, they would divide their screens into a fine grid of “pixels” and then make a picture by turning each pixel either on or off, as appropriate, with no shades in between. [...] The programmers would have a much easier time devising graphics software to generate those images, because all they had to do was define a chunk of computer memory to be a map of the screen, one bit per pixel, and then drop the appropriate bit into each memory location: 1 for white and 0 for black. [...] Unfortunately, that use of the computer’s memory was also the major difficulty with bit-mapped graphics: memory was very, very expensive in those days.” — The Dream Machine. J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal, W. Mitchell Waldrop, Penguin Books, 2001, p.366.

 

But from a purely technological, engineer’s perspective, bit-map images make all the sense in the world. In the above quote we need only retain that “the programmers would have a much easier time…” in order to understand why the pixel approach won out. Computers are “discrete” machines, capable of switching parts of itself off and on independently. This logic gives us random-access memory which in turn gives us databases, which in turn gives us things such as hyperlinks. Machine architecture influences use and to assume that this would not influence the resulting aesthetics is naïve. The infinitely re-configurable and re-contextualizing nature of the machine is the whole point of why we use these damn things. So an image construction method that would closely match this discrete logic, down to the very 0s and 1s of the machine’s ABCs, was an important step in creating a “plastic” image, capable of reconfiguring itself multiple times per second. It is out of just such a type of image that video games as a medium emerge.

Raster-scan vs. Vector-scan

Visually, Pacman (a.k.a. Puckman) is a very different animal. Contrary to Battlezone, or even the more-colorful Tempest, Pacman is practically drenched in color. Ghosts are brightly-colored with different hues based on character traits, allowing players to read their individual algorithmic behavior within the game. The player’s character, Pacman, is a completely opaque bright yellow animated blob, full of visual charm. Like the ghosts, he is full of personality. Color is even used as a gameplay element, allowing players to distinguish between dangerous ghosts (multi-colored) and edible ones (blue). Everything about Pacman screams “bit-map” techniques: the maze is a series of bit-mapped 0s and 1s, turned on or off to represent a wall or a navigable open space. And the dots or crumbs that we eat are also represented as a bit-map, i.e. a scattering of pixels that we have to turn off by running our character over them. In Pacman, the gameplay, in fact the whole game algorithm, is directly controlled by the graphical representation, as opposed to Battlezone where the graphical representation is often in contradiction with the physical simulation of interaction with physical objects. Pacman is a collection of pixels, he lives to eat other pixels, and the level is over when there are no more pixels to be eaten. Pacman essentially spends his time running around a memory map until he has effectively manipulated all the memory registers by setting them all to 0. The internal circuitry of the machine is visually exposed to the player who is then asked to navigate into this memory register map and manipulate the digital switches via an on-screen representation.

Cellular Automata

 

One of the best known games of all time, Sim City, was directly inspired by this Conway thought-experiment:

“[John Conway's work] is so extraordinary, because the rules behind it are so simple. It’s like the game Go. [...] They can arise from fairly simple rules and interactions, and that became a major design approach for all the games: “How can I put together a simple little thing that’s going to interact and give rise to this great and unexpected complex behavior?” So that was a huge inspiration for me.” — The Replay Interviews: Will Wright, Gammasutra, 23 May 2011.

 

Animation

Many interactive characters were built out of these basic, often extremely limited, collection of “bit-map” pixels: the whole Pacman family (Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pacman Jr., etc), Mappy, Dig Dug, Mr. Do, Mario, et cætera. Even known animated characters — such as Popeye —, found their way into the heavily pixellated game screens of the 1980s.

There is nothing arbitrary about this use of cinema-animation logic aesthetics to animate the characters of early video games. For animation had already solved this problem of opening up cinematic figuration by eschewing realism and embracing the artificial nature of the image. Gerty the Dinosaur, Betty Boop and Felix the Cat, all the way up to La Linea and Don Hertzfeldt‘s pencil-drawn absurdities: these are all forms of reduction down to the visual interaction of a few basic visual forms. So too in video games: the key to their success in adding expressive characteristics came not from the militaristic, cybernetic-inspired scientific simulation instrumentation. Instead, it came precisely from embracing the abstract, graphical, nature of their primitive cousins and in accepting the artifactual, visually limited detail of the early digital machines. In accepting this fate, video games tapped into a deep tradition of expressive visual tapestries that had been explored throughout the 20th century in cinema through the work of experimental film-makers and animators such as Len Lye or Norman McLaren, using simple abstract shapes such as lines, scratches, and blobs of color to great expressive effect.

Vanishing Points

Due to the purely arbitrary nature of the discrete pixel grid where any section can be turned on or off at will, a strange form of mixed perspective becomes possible with multiple forms of perspective not only co-existing on screen but even interacting with one another. Pacman and the ghosts within the maze are completely devoid of principles of foreshortening and vanishing points, and are in fact a mixture of top-down vertical perspective (of the maze), and side-view perspective (of the characters) reminiscent of early forms of perspective emerging in the work of Giotto where, to take an observation from Deleuze & Guattari in Mille Plateaux (p.219), Christ alternates between divine receiver, enduring the stigmata, and kite-machine, commanding the angels and heavens via kite strings.

The emerging nature of the Brunelleschian-style of geometric perspective is not fully developed at the time of Giotto, hence the optical oscillations for a modern eye between flatness and depth, foreground and back, and so on. Jesus is at once commanding Saint Francis, and simultaneously being flown by him like a kite. It is only through narrative cues, understood by semiotically reading the painting, that we are able to reconstruct these spatial relationships between the various figures.

Like many paintings from the middle ages to the early renaissance, perspective in early video games contain multiple points of view and often chooses its perspectival representation based on contextual narrative needs. These are naïve and/or mixed perspectival geometries (cf. Tapper, Zoo Keeper, et al.) that have recently been exploited to brilliant effect in Polytron’s visual delight, Fez.

Tapper, Bally Midway, 1983 & Fez, Polytron, 2012

We could also mention Game Yarouza’s Echochrome where the gameplay takes place somewhere in between the OpenGL pipeline where vector data is rasterized into pixel data and itself becomes a gameplay mechanic as players exploit visual absurdities and try to line them up.

Such hybrid forms of perspective would have been much harder to acheive had gaming stuck with purely vectorial and mathematical forms of representation.

Visual abstractions

Piet Mondrian, Composition 10, 1939–1942 & Piet Mondrian, Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930 & Taito, Qix, 1981

Obviously, on some level there is a visual inheritance taking place, either explicitly, culturally or unconsciously, even though such causalities are either impossible to prove or even, if true, merely anecdotal.

Another juxtaposition might be to look at the Russian avant garde, starting with El_Lissitzky, and compare his visual language with the shapes and forms of more abstract forms of video games, including early 3D games that had not yet perfected their perspectival rendering engines:

A Prounen, El_Lissitzky, c.1925 (cf. Prouns) & Sixty Second Shooter, Happion Laboratories, 2012

The problem, ultimately, with all these approaches is that these are merely visual cues and not aesthetic ones. The problem with just such a visualist reading is that it assumes that both De Stijl and Taito constructed their representations purely as visual tableaux — in other words as just a bunch of pretty pictures —, instead of looking at the material, conceptual and historical visual languages and logics that might have led them there. In the case of Qix, it would probably be far more instructive to compare its geometric abstractions to early MacPaint software, and Bill Atkinson’s visual algorithms that made it possible, especially since these routines would go on to influence gaming history via Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set. To begin with, both Qix and MacPaint were built as profoundly raster images, and both use similar algorithms for “painting” in their geometric forms. But more importantly, much of Atkinson’s work, like that of Qix, was not only an attempt to find an algorithmic method for interactively constructing visual output, but to do so within the constraints of a Motorola 68000 microprocessor using 128kb of memory.

MacPaint, Macintosh, 1984 & Pinball Construction Set, Bill Budge, 1983

And again, we can see even in these early days of MacPaint, that in order to construct the computer image in a visually compelling way, Apple’s marketing machine opted to look back to previous techniques of image construction, here the japanese wood cut, and not to that of the photograph.

Pixel Clouds

The ultimate goal of Proteus, I suppose, is that of aesthetikos, i.e. sensation, or perhaps more accurately the experience itself of human sensing. In other words, we are talking about aesthetics in the Kantian sense of a search for beauty — via the senses — that eventually discovers itself in the limits of its search (cf. Sublime). For, the overall effects turns out to be indeed highly romantic, something akin to a multidimensional interactive 8-bit rendition of a Turner-esque tone poem.

While playing Proteus recently, I found myself in a curious situation. I was high up atop one of the hilly peaks of the island, watching as night began to fall and rainclouds emerged below. As I descended down from the hill and onto the rain-soaked plains, I suddenly found myself awash in a pure sea of color that originally felt like a visual glitch: while I could still move somewhat, it seemed that any direction just led me to more colored polygons rendered as flat shapes. For a few moments, I even imagined that the game engine had crashed and I started to reach for the ESC button to get myself back in control of the machine. But then, slowly, I began to realize that I had merely descended down into the level of the clouds themselves and was swimming in the middle of their visually depth-less space. Anyone who has flown in a plane knows this de-spatialized zone while traversing the clouds: there is no focal point or point of reference and everything feels atemporal and ethereal. Essentially this is what happened to me looking through the little portal of my computer screen, the same logic taking place on a purely representational level of pixels that refused to figure the depth contours of the objects in space. Finally, I just leaned back and watched as abstract geometric shapes of treetops re-emerged only to be submerged again in swaths of color as waves of clouds chased ever more waves of clouds. It was a profoundly pleasureful oscillation between recognition and disorientation, one of the key ingredients to many successful works of at. Eventually the cloud formation began to recede from my point of view, and the three dimensional perspective of the landscape re-emerged, re-aligning the simulated first-person perspective of my view portal onto a three-dimensional landscape.

The beauty of the moment had something to do with what the art-historian Hubert Damisch calls the théorie du /nuage/ or theory of /cloud/. The term /cloud/ is written with two slashes in order to reconstruct in text the odd, receding nature of clouds from realism and perspective and their re-apparition within the tableau in the form of a semiotic signifier, almost like a placeholder or an asterisk. Clouds in classical painting are the limit of perspectival representation, the resistance of aesthetics to the mere logics of mimesis and perhaps even of representation. Whatever the case, it is the limit of the realism model of aesthetic forms (cf. Cory Archangel’s Super Mario Clouds).

This limit of perspective within a three-dimensional simulator takes us back to Battlezone and its visual, artifactual, limits. And this limit speaks to one of the fundamental problems confronting video games today, beyond the problem of figuration and by extension the problem of figuring the human face. This representational limit of the /cloud/ in Proteus is what we could call the limit of realism as a model for what simulations, and therein gaming, seek to achieve.

Taken to its limit, these clouds of Proteus have their cousin in a wonderful little game built by two lifetime members of the glory days of the Atelier Hypermedia: Pascal Chirol and Grégoire Lauvin. In their collaborative piece NEVERNEVERLAND Color Suite, a 3D simulator and a joystick open up a landscape of nothing but infinite gradients of color:

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The need for death in gaming is multifaceted. The cynical argument, largely based on the arcade experience, might describe death in gaming as an economical equation: in order to make more money, games needed to provoke death as quickly as possible in order to get to the next “insert coin”. But death in gaming has been with us practically since the beginning, or at least since 1962′s Space War, long before the video game arcade phenomenon became an economic reality.

A less cynical, more narratological reading of eschatology and gaming might look at death as a question of motivation: by introducing death into the game, a certain internal dynamic is created, which in turn heightens the gameplay and structures the temporal form of the game itself. Given that the player will eventually die (from inaction, from inattention, from error, etc), the goal of the game becomes that of survival. The “game over” screen provides some sort of closure to the game and proposes — albeit post facto — a redefinition of the initiating act of the game: “I want to play” has now been translated within the gameworld into “I want to live”.

A third approach would be to look at the material substrate of gaming itself: video games are played on machines and machines, eventually, break down. To quote Felix Guattari: “Machines are instilled with a desire for abolition. The emergence of the machine is accompanied by failures, catastrophes, and death which haunts it. La machine est travaillé par un désir d’abolition. Son émergence est doublée par la panne, la catastrophe, la mort qui la menace.” Chaosmose, Éditions Galilée, 1992, p.58. From this perspective, we could see the figure of death in gaming as an extension of this fatal impulse of the machine. The figure of death would be an attempt at sublimating the machine’s death drive into a poetic form — a form upon which a game world might be built.

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*Spoiler alert: you probably shouldn’t read any further if you haven’t played the games “Passage” (Free/Cheap, Mac/PC/Linux/iOS) or “Journey” (~15€, PS3). Especially Journey. Read at your own risk.

While many video games represent death within their gameworld, or use death as a mechanism for the gameplay, there are three games in particular that employ death as the central raison d’être of the game:

Jason Rohrer’s 2007 conceptual/indie gem “Passage“

Tale of Tales 2008 art-game meditation “The Graveyard“

That Game Company‘s latest (and greatest) creation “Journey” (2012).

Long story short, all three of these games represent a character advancing towards his or her death.

In Passage, a young man in a highly pixellated two-dimensional gameworld begins at the left side of an open maze and advances towards old age and death on the right side of the maze. During his passage from left to right the spritely blond-haired man evolves into a balding gray-haired old man who limps his way to his final steps. Early in the game he can choose love (or not) with a young woman who will age with him throughout the rest of the game. Their coupling makes the game more poignant, especially the ending, but renders certain movements more difficult within the various passages of the maze.

In The Graveyard, we embody an old woman visiting a graveyard. The game is played in three-dimensions, using the standard aesthetic of real-time engine based rendering, albeit with the nice touch of a black and white palette. Like Passage, the game is short and spatially limited: the old woman can move forward or backward on a short path leading up to a church and a bench where she can sit down. As she rests, a song about nostalgia takes over the game, and (in the paid version) ends with the death of the woman, slumped over on the bench.

Within the world of “indie gaming”, Journey is a Sony-funded super-production/mega-blockbuster behemoth, especially when compared to the one/two-person auteurs of the two previous games. Even if That Game Company, the creators of Journey, remain a relatively small studio, the production values here are on an entirely different scale. As can be expected, there is more or less a traditional game here, full of beautifully rendered levels to explore and tokens to collect, and even an extremely subtle use of networked multiplayer gaming. But the title is a thinly veiled manifesto — precisely in the vein of The Graveyard and Passage –, on the possibilities of gaming as a medium for sensitive experience (aisthetikos) beyond the goal-oriented mechanics of traditional gameplay. Here too, the player advances on a path leading unambiguously to their death: inevitably, inexorably, and joyously. And once this goal of the game has been more or less removed as a form of strategy, or at least relegated to a mere point of reference, the game switches into a more symbolic realm.

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There this great moment at the beginning of the filmed dialogue on Arte TV between game designers Chris Crawford and Jason Rohrer, filmed at the Independent Games Festival in 2009. While discussing Passage, Crawford begins by suggesting that the significant bit of the game comes from the introduction of a relationship between spatial navigation and metaphor:

“What is, I think, most important about your approach is that you’re taking the idea of spatial navigation — which has always been done too damn literally —, and suddenly turning it into metaphor. And then exploring, well, what kind of metaphors can be explored with spatial systems?” — Chris Crawford in “Au coeur de la nuit : Jason Rohrer et Chris Crawford“; Arte TV; “Durch die Nacht mit…“; episode 61; July 2, 2009; 08:40.

Like the figure of death, the history of spatial design in video games is as long as the history of video games itself. In many ways, the form or shape of a video game world, and the way in which that world is mapped onto its display, is so determinate to the game in all its aspects that it becomes more or less conflated with the game itself.

When Super Mario Bros. was released for the NES in 1985, it used a form of spatial representation — sideways scrolling –, which had already been explored extensively by a multitude of games before it (cf. Defender, 1980; Scramble, 1981; Pitfall!, 1982; Moon Patrol, 1982; etc.). So while Super Mario Bros. did not invent sideways scrolling, it nevertheless added a significant novelty by equating this left-to-right movement with not only the advancement of the game strategy (survival), but additionally with the advancement of the game narrative. In Super Mario Bros., this left-to-right movement is not only about advancing the player, it is about advancing the story itself. Taking much of its inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Super Mario Bros. allows players to flip through various episodes of a story about a character (Mario) tumbling down the rabbit’s hole (here, a pipe) simply by moving from the beginning of the chapter (left) to the end of the chapter (right). What used to be a mechanism for survival (ex: Moon Patrol) or exploration (ex: Pitfall!) is now a journey of discovery.

Many games, especially the “on-rails shooter” sub-genre such as Resident Evil (1996-), are in many ways a continuation of this tradition: as the player advances throughout the (highly linear) game-space, episode after episode of the narrative unfolds. Newer games, such as Red Dead Redemption, attempt to break the narrative into pieces and scatter them throughout the game, allowing players to explore other aspects of the gameworld before irreversibly advancing the more linear form of the narrative. In some senses, this form of exploration is nothing more than a superposition of parallel linear threads on top of the main linear thread of narrative. One can obviously imagine that eventually game designers will be able to write these threads in such a way as to interrelate with one another concurrently. Generative storylines have also yet to be fully exploited in game design. But currently it appears that we are circling round-and-round the end of cul-de-sac of contradiction: classical narrativity wishes to be linear, or at least to be explored linearly, while algorithmic machines desire structures that are more emergent, with bifurcating forks of expansive parallelism. The machine loves multiplicity, whereas narrative experience desires linearity. It is almost as if we’ve reconstructed in video games the figure of the brain itself, especially its’ serial vs. parallel contradictions.

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A few weeks ago, at the Atelier Hypermédia, I was exploring the use of boolean values as “flags” with some students: we were looking at how to detect certain types of activity by setting up an interrelated series of boolean true/false variables that could flip from false to true and vice-versa depending both on changes in the environment and the states of internal variables. Our example was a simple object on the screen: a student wanted to know how to program a single-fired action when the object entered into collision with either another object or the player (via mouse or touch, whatever). As we explored various situations, we eventually were confronted with an fairly straightforward behavior that left most of us stumped and took about a half hour of collective experimentation and debate to code. The behavior itself is of little importance here; it had something to do with an object splitting into two when touching another object. What is important is the fact it took us about a half an hour to describe how one simple “state” would affect a subsequent “state”, and that we were debating it with the code sitting in front of us all as a group, as if it were some sort of enigma that required solving collectively.

Anyone who has sat bewildered in front of their television for a half an hour of Lara Croft trying to figure out how to advance the game, should just about now be recognizing the scene. When you pull off the various layers of representation of bodacious ponytailed scientists in dark caves with molten lava, waterfalls, rock formations and dynamite, the player is essentially looking at the same complex interrelation of true/false boolean variables that we were looking at when structuring our code. In other words, a Lara Croft game is just a series of interrelated true/false switches that the player has to enact in the right combination in order to unlock a new series of true/false switches.

##########################################################################
# RSG-SMB-TAB-1.1                                                        #
##########################################################################

How to Win "Super Mario Bros"                Nintendo Entertainment System

WORLD 1 - LEVEL 1

                               +----------------------------------+       
  Key:     < = Left            |                                  |       
           > = Right           |    ^                             |       
           ^ = Up              |   <>                   O   O   |       
           v = Down            |    v    select  start     B   A  |       
           B = B button        |                                  |       
           A = A button        +----------------------------------+       


< ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
^ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
v ------------------------------------------------------------------------
B --------------------------OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
A ------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Alex Galloway’s “How to Win Super Mario“, a listing of left/right/up/down/a/b button combinations are printed out in text files organized by chapter (“World 1-1″, “World 1-2″, “World 1-3″, …). If these “how to play Super Mario” instructions look just as obscure as artist Ben Fry’s “Dismap” visualization of the Super Mario Bros. code itself, it is precisely because in many ways the two forms (gameplay vs. game code) are simply different forms of representation of the same algorithmic substrate. In order to play a game, we need to understand something about the algorithmic, and even machinic, structure of how the game was constructed. Playing a game requires a certain process of exploring the game code in reverse, reading it on the player’s end of the equation via the render engine, even if the player knows little to nothing about how pointers, variables, and if/then structures work. But from a purely experiential/intuitive perspective from within the game, the successful player of Super Mario knows exactly how these very-same structures work in order to actually play the game.

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The principle criticism of back-in-the-day text adventures (circa 1977-) was the tedium of this logic of interrelated boolean switches the player had to unlock in order to advance in the game: open mailbox, get letter, open letter, read letter, drop letter, close mailbox, go north, look, pick up shovel, dig hole, get gun, shoot self in head.

Here is a map from the first commercial textual adventure game hit, “Dungeon” (later renamed to “Zork”), where we can see the complex interrelations of one room to the next and the objects they contained:

— Click for hi-res: Dungeon Map, by Stephen Rost, taken from “You May Be Eaten By a Grue”

In order to play the game, players had to map out all these interrelated rooms along with the objects they contained and discover how they were all interconnected. While the unwrapping of this maze/puzzle could indeed lead to storytelling (“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.” – cf. Grue), for the most part the player was simply trying to poke their way around a hopelessly complex maze and find the right combination of non-sequitur commands.

From the documentary, “Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary“, interactive fiction writer Dan Shiovitz:

“It’s like, you ring a bell and kick a dog a bunch of times, and it starts crying after you ring a bell a couple of times.”

While Shiovitz was originally criticizing the absurdity of mazes in interactive fiction, his description is equally apt in describing the absurdity of interactive narrative at its most basic level. Most of the time, the author as well as player are simply trying to unlock a series of boolean switches in the right combination, in order to advance to the next chapter of the story, i.e. the next set of boolean switches in the code. While puzzles are interesting in and of themselves, and can indeed contain interesting opportunities for storytelling, in the case of interactive narratives we seem more to be playing with the machinic structure that made the story possible, than the story itself.

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Most interactive storytelling, whether it be in the form of a 3D first-person shooter or a 2D sprite-based platformer, evolves directly out of the data structures originally designed by Will Crowther as “Colossal Cave Adventure“. This original “Adventure” was based on a map of a real cave, the Mammoth Cave system of Kentucky. Crowther’s idea was to equate each item of data to another data item via a spatial relationship: item “a” is connected to item “b” via the command “north”, which in turn is connected to item “c” when item “d” is present at item “b”. By using the real cave as a map for the data, he was able to create potential walkways that players could use to move from one datapoint to the next as if traversing the successive grottos within the cave system. It was essentially a representation for navigating a datafield, much like the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer offers their own representation via folders and subfolders. By situating data items as points on a map, one could move around the data as if moving around in space. It was upon this foundation, using data points as map points and placing narrative excerpts at each data point, that contemporary interactive narrative was built.

From this idea we get text adventures, such as “Zork“, point-and-click adventures such as “Day of the Tentacle“, maze-monster first-person-shooters of the “Doom“/”Quake” variety, and more poetic propositions such as the “Zelda” series of adventures, or “Ico“. While many of these games contain story, character, landscape, dialogue and all sorts of choices and actions that must be enacted to evolve the narrative, they are still fundamentally structured around finding the location of the next switch that will lead to a new series of switches. At the beginning of the game “Ico”, the player must first climb up a series of ladders, find the right windows to climb out of the castle and then back in again, enabling safe passage to a platform close enough to jump onto a cage that will then lower a trapped girl to the first floor where she can safely exit. Once all of these tedious tasks have unravelled, some dialogue ensues, and the story moves on to the next task at hand which is also the next piece of narrative cue. Unfortunately, from a purely literary perspective, such pulling of levers and pushing of switches embodies all the poetic charm and substance of searching for a missing hardware driver buried deep within an external hard disk.

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*Spoiler reminder: stop reading this if you haven’t played any of these games.

The beauty of Passage, The Graveyard and now Journey, is that none of this peeking and poking matters any more. Passage truly began the trend with a powerful opening volley: here is a game in which you will lead a character to his death. And while this goal is not explicit at the beginning of the game, it is part of the beauty of realization that takes you over when playing the game. When demonstrating the game last week to the Media Design students, one of them — upon realizing the fatality (note that I did not use the term “futility”) of the game as the player starts balding and slowing down his gait –, exclaimed “c’est horrible!” His reaction was unambiguously emotional. Teeny pixelated graphics with a dorky 8-bit retro soundtrack, and yet a game can still evoke a sentiment of inevitability. It’s just a funky little pixelated representation on a screen, nevertheless “c’est horrible!”

Journey follows this formula fairly closely, to such a degree that I wonder in what way the former influenced the later. If so, it certainly would be a nice touch. We know through interviews with Journey’s central designer, Jenova Chen, that he definitely is looking at fellow games and gaming history with an informed eye, but so far I have yet to see a direct causal relation.

Whatever the case, Journey is very much a similar affair. At the beginning of the game we are simply a voyager who picks up a scarf in the desert. In the distance, framed in a sweep of the camera straight out of that pivotal desert scene in Indiana Jones: a mountain beckons us, clearly inspired by aforementioned Hollywood classics, but almost certainly as well the Mount Fuji woodblock prints by Hokusai.

The landscape is gorgeous, the simulation of the sand beneath your feet subtle and totally pleasing; we are experiencing an aesthetic audiovisual convergence reminiscent of grandiose cinematography on the scale of Nestor Almendros in Days of Heaven or Caleb Deschanel in Black Stallion (we’ll still have to wait for rendering shaders on the level of Sven Nykvist on The Sacrifice, but I am now hopeful).

Unsurprisingly, all of this subtle and-yet spectacular beauty takes place within a highly stylized rendering queue. I say unsurprisingly because it is only in embracing the artificial nature of the image construction that 3D simulation will find its way. We are clearly in the realm of animation, illustration even, and far from the realistic renderings that occupy more and more of the gazillion-dollar 3D shooter blockbusters currently on sale for $75 at your local supermarket. Perhaps, and this might be due to the algorithmic nature of the image, my cinematographic references should instead be harking back to the history of animation, and not live action. For it looks as if we are inching ever closer to the visual plasticity of a Brothers Quay production, à la The Comb or The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Again, not quite, not even close, but one can always hope.

From this luscious tableau, we begin our journey from desert to mountain. The sophistication-in-simplicity argument comes from the translation of Passage’s 2D left-to-right narrative mechanics into Journey’s 3D near-to-far construction: the next “goal”, which is more the next “step” on your path, is often a barely perceptible building or outlying natural structure that acts as a beacon leading you forward. Amazingly, the mountain itself acts like a character in the story, through mere shifts in lighting and humidity levels which interact thematically with the evolving storyline and landscape to evoke different “moods” as we progress: at first ominous, then distant, ethereal, massive, brooding, violent, festive, and ultimately, ambiguous.

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I won’t linger any further into the journey itself because it is not really important to what is, I hope, shaping into my central thesis: namely that by removing the tedious goal posts as the motivating factor of a game and replacing it specifically (and quite explicitly given the title itself of the game) into the space in-between — i.e. into that aesthetic field where the gameplay can unfold –, the game designers have further evolved a narrative language that was originally suggested by Colossal Cave Adventure, re-articulated in Super Mario Bros. and then Zelda, and finally brought into the more literary realm of figure and metaphor via Passage.

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One of my favorite cinema sequences comes from the third chapter of Akira Kurosawa’s end-of-career tone poem, “Dreams”. The dream is entitled “The Blizzard” and depicts a group of exhausted explorers climbing a mountain ridge in a snowstorm, haggard, nearly extinguished, and clasping to their last breaths. The scene is interminable, and often shot with a telephoto lens from the side so as to further flatten their gasping faces into the underexposed terrain that visually engulfs them. All we hear are their panting breaths, and eventually their complaints amongst one another. No back-story, no character motivation, just the sound of desperate breathing and a vague image of faces dragging their bodies through the blizzard.

There is a moment near the end of Journey (although not quite at the end), when two voyagers, ours and the voyager accompanying us, are similarly pulling our heavy bodies up a snow-covered mountain. Our gait is troubled, weighed down by fatigue. We carry on, ever more laboriously, into the headwind. Eventually our body gives out, the controls disconnect from our persona who keels over, face-first, into the snow. It is a moment of inevitability, of loss of control, and yet everything about the scene feels just right. It is progressively clear to the player what is about to happen and yet we advance into the snow nevertheless, resigned to whatever the narrative is holding out for us. In a medium that tends to prize interactive mastery above all else, this loss of control from within the interactive realm comes as a refreshing relief. This is not some pre-rendered cut-scene superimposed into an interactive fiction; this is the interactivity itself leading to its own extinction as a sort of accomplishment. Exhausting gameplay.

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The second time I played through Journey, I was lucky enough to experience a lovely little poetic moment right at the end the game, as the two travelers approach the abyss. For those that have played the game (*at this point, it’s your problem if you have never played Journey and have herein spoiled any future experience of it), you will know that by pressing one of the buttons you can make a little melodic chirping sound, allowing you to communicate via very rudimentary means with your fellow traveller. So it was precisely at this point, just before the abyss engulfed us, that my fellow traveller and I decided to stop, not at first but eventually, in a back and forth choreography of following each other’s lead. At some point, we both simply decided to stop, just standing there before the abyss, the obvious ending point of the game. We had already travelled to this point and given that the game is cumulative, much like Passage, there is no real going back, even if one would want to. So in order to prolong the experience and simply take it in, we both at some point, through subtle character body-language, decided to just stop. At that point ensued several minutes of dialogue:

“Piou piou?”

“Piou piou.”

“Piou piou piou?”

“Piou.”

While I generally try to avoid cinematographic analogies when speaking of gaming (I in fact loathe such uniformed discourse), at this point I’m so guilty of hyperbole that I might as well just suck it up and give in to the impulse: the moment was damn cinematographic, despite the obvious cheesy cliche-ness of it all. The experience just worked, and on an emotional level rare for me when playing a video game. It was an experience which I have only previously known through now canonic, well-worn aesthetic forms such as music, literature, painting, illustration, photography or cinema.

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Popular rhetoric, even within the video game community, gives great weight to the notion of “choice” in interactive narrative, as if choose-your-own adventure texts had somehow given us a heretofore unexploited key to some future form, despite the fact that no one seems to be interested any longer in the format.

Maybe it is just because we haven’t tried enough angles. Perhaps. Count me in on trying all those other angles, and this is in fact precisely what we are trying to do at Media Design and at the Atelier Hypermédia. Some of the experiments students are trying out in this direction are profoundly exciting, in spite of all my doubts.

And I do not doubt that there is indeed something yet-to-be-discovered in branching narratives, but in my opinion we are “digging in the wrong place” if we think that choice (more of it, better choices, etc) is going to enrich our experience of interactive narrative. I do not doubt the intent of games like Mass Effect, which prolong players choices all the way through three super-productions, taking the risk of alienating their players at the end of the game as they try to resolve an infinite series of narrative threads. I wouldn’t know anyway, I have’t even played the game, my students have. But given that the apparent solution to their dilemma is to pull out a Deus ex machina (cf. On the Media, New Endings) à la “it was all just a dream”, I figure my long polished reticence on this subject (15-years and counting) is still well founded.

To further flog the comparison-with-cinema horse, Robert Altman never felt the need to wrap all his intersecting narratives into a tight little package.

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In the novel and subsequent film “Sophie’s Choice”, there is indeed a scene involving a profound choice that a woman has to make in order to save her child. And while this choice is indeed harrowing enough to be recounted and still retain something of its power, it is ultimately in the pregnant pauses between the lines that the true force of this choice is felt in the narrative realm. In the film rendition, it is on the infinite white screen of Meryl Streep’s face that we project all the horrors of her unbearable choice. The context of the choice itself is merely the frame upon which this face hangs. This we have known ever since the days of Lillian Gish in “The Wind” or Renée Falconetti in “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc“. More recent film-makers understand this perfectly as well, for example Quentin Tarantino in the “La Louisianne” scene of Inglorious Basterds: we know going into the scene what the stakes are, and most of all we understand the strategic details of the narrative plot (underground bar, offset alcove with an eavesdropping nazi, etc); it is ultimately the dialogue as they intersect the faces, the how and not the why, the adverb and not the verb, that unpacks layer by layer the tension of the 25-minute scene. The whole thing is harrowing and entirely bad-ass, two descriptors that gamers would love to use to describe their games, and yet the entire weight of the scene hangs in the balance of the length of an vocal inflection.

Lillian Gish, The Wind, 1928; via Bouchards

Unfortunately for gaming — at least for the time being –, there is no equivalent to the face of Lillian Gish, especially when it comes to 3D attempts at realism such as Call Of Duty. Everything must be constructed by hand or through code. Motion-capture isn’t there yet, just watch any recent hollywood film. As a result, games are currently relegated to wide or medium shots of battle scenes, or over-the-shoulder renderings such as in Gears of War.

While photography, too, was a originally an affair of landscape before moving in to portraiture, photography nevertheless has a natural relationship with the real, a relationship that algorithmic machines have not yet developed with the physical world and the bodies that inhabit them.

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Given these limitations, I find it encouraging that a new generation of game designers are beginning to experiment with the form of gaming on a level not only of narrative complexity, but also of narrative subtlety, perhaps even maturity. We obviously still find ourselves in a significant dichotomy between the games sitting on big-name physical/digital store shelves, and the more independent/auteur fare that often has to play the distribution game at the margins, via Flash-based websites, etc. But this has always been the case with previous media forms. Solutions are out there and the landscape is currently shifting anyway.

Most importantly, it would seem the new generation wants to attack the issue of a more diverse narrative language in gaming. And while death seems to be one of the easier targets, it has been a central trope of the medium since nearly its origins, so why not. In any case, it unambiguously shifts the focus of the game back into the aesthetic and emotional experience of play. By removing all the goals, and keys, and puzzles to unlock, we settle in to a type of narrative where wider themes can be explored.

Case in point, a recent exchange between Brooke Gladstone and Sebastian Janisz on the excellent On The Media:

— BG: Your game was about depression, and this was the game that for me most fulfilled the goal, if that was your goal, to summon-up what it feels like to be depressed. There is the metaphor of beating your head against the wall. The second you get through to a new place, the same arduous process of beating your head against the wall begins again, or beating your head against various objects with little, very minor, spatters of blood, lest you forget that this is painful. And the whole thing feels very lonely.

— SJ: Thank you. That really sounds a lot like what I would have hoped someone might get out of the game.

— BG: You picture your own death. Or did I just… Spoiler alert!

“Personal Video Games“, On The Media, March 30, 2012

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For another reading of Journey, try Ian Bogost’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Game Studio“

We are currently building a lot of game prototypes as part of our Ünterplay project at the Media Design department of the HEAD —Genève. A lot of these games require sprites of some sort. So here is a simple demo project showing how to integrate ofxSprite into a basic OpenFrameworks project for iOS. This same technique should also work fine on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, as the only other dependency is ofxAssets.

1. Start with a copy of a basic EmptyExample from the OpenFrameworks examples folder

2. Download the ofxSpriteManager & ofxAssets addons and place them into your « addons » folder.

3. Drag the two new addons into your XCode project. Delete the references to the « README » files if you want to:

4. If you encouter problems with the « ofxExtras.h » addon, you can safely de-activate it as in the following illustration:

5. Copy the « testApp.h » and « testApp.cpp » files from the SpriteDemo.zip example provided here.

6. Make sure to copy the included « Personnage » folder with the eight PNG images of the sprite. You can obviously replace this image sequence with any sequence of your own, in which case you will need to change line no.24 of « testApp.cpp », using your own file/folder name.

7. Compile and run the example.

Starting Tuesday, Julien Gachadoat and Mark Webster will be in Aix-en-Provence working in the Atelier Hypermédia and the Atelier Sérigraphie for a workshop entitled « Code impressions ». Basically, we will be continuing our explorations of code + print in its various forms, this time via Seriography, by inviting two artists who have already organized similar workshops throughout France (cf. Algorithmes sérigraphiques).

Here is the official description of the workshop (en français):

objectif

Concevoir des affiches et des T-Shirts à partir de formes générés via des algorithmes. Explorer l’aspect génératif du code et comment à partir d’instructions simples on peut arriver à des formes complexes. Confronter les outils de production manuels avec les outils de production procédurales.

contenu

Les atéliers Sérigraphie et Hypermédia invitent cette année Julien Gachadoat et Mark Webster du Free Art Bureau afin d’explorer la confrontation de ces deux matériaux. L’occasion sera donnée de découvrir l’art de la programmation interactive, d’en comprendre les mécanismes grâce au logiciel Processing, environnement de création graphique dédié aux artistes et designers. Des données sonores, visuelles, gestuelles ou issues d’internet seront récupérées, analysées et traitées pour produire des visuels uniques qui, une fois exportés et retravaillés, seront imprimés sur un support textile par le biais de la sérigraphie.

méthode d’enseignement

Les deux premières journées seront consacrées à la découverte de la programmation graphique avec Processing. Elles seront animées par Julien Gachadoat pour aboutir à la création de graphismes prêts a être imprimés.

méthode d’évaluation

Exposition des travaux.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at 15:00 in a short presentation at the Symposium on Art & Research, organized by the Ministry of Culture. My presentation, on the CityMedia project, is part of a series of round-table/lightning-round presentations that have been divided into different groups. Here is an outline of tomorrow’s presentations:

This Wednesday, the Geneva University of Art and Design (Haute École d’Art et de Design —Genève) will be hosting an open house starting around 2pm. The two departments of the Master Design (Media Design & Space and Communication) will be showing some of our latest work. If you’re curious, come by and say hello.

Here are some highlights of the type of work we do over in the Media Design side of the program.

Geek Run, Maria Beltran, Emilie Tappolet, Raphaël Muñoz

Rep.licants.org, Matthieu Cherubini

Dog & Bone, Max Mollon

Reactive Walls, Workshop by Camille Scherrer & Sigma6

Édition expérimentale Digital + Paper: Workshop by Anette Lenz & Étienne Mineur

BodyDouble Workshop by Douglas Edric Stanley, HEAD —Genève, Mapping Festival + Lift Experience

Écran-Image-Objet, Workshop Mobilizing by Jean-Louis Boissier, Dominique Cunin

Still Life, Clovis Duran, Nicholas Rivet

Scolu, Leïla Jacquet

Ünterplay Workshop, Annelore Schneider & Douglas Edric Stanley

A few weeks back I taught a workshop on generative graphics as part of a cross-disciplinary « semaine de tous les possibles » (week of possibilities) at the Geneva University of Art and Design. The workshop combined students from the Master Media Design and undergraduate students from Visual Communication. We worked mostly in the realm of print, introducing code into traditional book design and/or poster design. For example, the books were generated directly in Processing using the PDF Export library to generate multi-page booklets.

Les 100 mots les plus utilisés dans le petit livre rouge de Mao by Yann Anspach, Roger Guindon and Laetitia Sejmowski

Whole generation by Pierre-Alain Schilling and Jakub Svehla

Roue du Dharma by Kim Andenmatten, Amandine Baud and Annja Müller

Alice by Emily Bonnet, Angela Cardona, Marta Revuelta and Marie Rossi

Sisyphe by Lucas Bertinotti, Gention Cenko and Jimmy Roura

Le livre rouge de Jung by Laura Couto Rosado, Patrick Donaldson and Camille Rattoni

Kaleidoscope by Nadezda Suvorova

stop_pattern_ornamentation by Julia-Garcia Skrenbneva

Mapping by Camille Dedieu

« Photo/Nykto » is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the « Unterplay » project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. It is a game for nyktophobes and photophobes. It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back.

Photo/Nykto was developed by Douglas Edric Stanley using OpenFrameworks.

I was recently given a copy of this book on Processing by Liang TAN. This is great news as Liang was an invited instructor during the 2009-2010 academic year at the Atelier Hypermédia where he studied Processing (amongst other things) and participated in the Mur Communicant/CityMedia project. While I don’t (yet) read Chinese, I was able to more or less read the book by studying the code and gleaning information from various keywords ; it’s not an expert book, more of an overview of Processing and probably would be a decent introductory text for students starting out with the environment. At least it does get into Classes/objects near the end and has some nice sections about Arduino, libraries and so on.

This is a pleasant validation for our collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence School of Art with the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (广州美术学院). We are currently hosting our third invited instructor, Hong Rongman, who is also learning Processing as well as electronics and interfacing via Arduino and our own in-house Pinguino platform developed by Jean-Pierre Mandon.

• Arduino Blog
• Boing Boing
• Kickstarter
• Instructables
• City of Sound
• Cool Hunting
• Creative Applications
• Create Digital Motion
• Create Digital Music
• Daring Fireball
• Datavisualization
• Designer’s Review of Books
• Digital Tools
• Écrans
• Étienne Mineur Blog
• ffffound
• Fubiz
• Good
• Graphisme et interactivité
• Ushahidi
• Highsnobiety
• Infosthetics
• 1024 Architecture Blog
• Le collagiste
• Jean Snow
• Encyclopedia Dramatica
• Know Your Meme
• Kotaku
• Makezine
• Merci Georges
• Modprobe
• Motionographer
• Ordigami
• Pasta&Vinegar
• Processing Exhibition
• Rhizome
• Visual Complexity
• We Make Money Not Art
• Wired
• Web Creme

Quelques podcasts (audio/vidéo) :

• Place de la toile (podcast audio)
• TED Talks
• Arte+7 – notamment « Metropolis » + « Tracks »
• Cool Hunting (podcast vidéo)
• Design & Architecture
• Know Your Meme (vidéo)
• Make Podcast (vidéo)
• La tête au carré
• On The Media (podcast audio)
• Radiolab (podcast audio)
• Silence on joue (podcast audio)
• Rien est joué
• Ubu Web (audio+vidéo)

I have no idea how he did it, but Shane Hinton took a typically rambling, 1+ hour interview, and compacted it down to about 10 minutes without losing any of the central arguments. I really wish I had his editing talents. And his choice for an opening rant is pretty funny :-)

In the interview I go back over the whole Invaders! controversy, give some pretentious-art-&#@*%’s perspective for gamerz debating the whole art/game issue, and then tie that in somehow with Antonin Fourneau‘s ENIAROF concept for a contemporary play festival. The transition might not be obvious, but it was in fact Eniarof that first recycled Invaders! and was the reason the piece actually got a second life. The Leipzig Games Convention version was in fact a very late iteration of the piece.

My interview is followed by an interesting essay by Trevor Owens from Play the Past about in-game terminals, and reconstructing (a) history from pseudo-documents in Fallout 3. I didn’t know Play the Past before, it looks like an interesting blog. For fairly obvious reasons, I ended up reading Rebooting Counterfactual History with JFK Reloaded and this interesting follow-up discussion which uncovers an irreverant necrophiliac comment buried in the WAD file of the game : A Revisionist History of JFK Reloaded (Decoded).

I was less impressed with the third story, but whatever. Apparently I missed a chiptune flame war. It would seem that my 8-bit subculture culture is incomplete.

Inspired by the Ludovico Treatment for moral reform, Nyan Cat Therapy uses a camera-enabled Macintosh to fully couple the human gaze to the rainbow-riding Nyan Cat. In order to maximize the full effect, subjects are required to download, decompress and exectute the accompagnying application and position themselves face-forward before their computer. Upon detection of a sustained human gaze, the Nyan Cat Therapy software will activate the enigmatic cat.

For more scientific analysis of the Nyan Cat phenomenon and its various incarnations, please visit Know Your Meme‘s page on Nyan Cat/Pop Tart Cat developing meme.

Inspiré du Traitement Ludovico, Le logiciel de Traitement Nyan Cat utilise un ordinateur doté d’une camera vidéo afin de mieux fusioner le regard humain et les forces énigmatiques du chat-arc-en-ciel, le Nyan Cat. Pour maximiser l’effet, les sujets doivent télécharger le logiciel, le décompresser et l’executer, puis se positionner devant leur écran. Au moment de la détection d’un regard humain continu, le logiciel activera le Nyan Cat.

Citymedia Project & Body Double Workshop – Mapping Festival Profile from mappingfestival on Vimeo.

FILMED AT MAPPING FESTIVAL – GENEVA – MAY 2011
www.mappingfestival.com

The CityMedia system is an open platform for the exploration of public screens and new forms of collective interaction. It uses multi-touch sensors, 3*d body tracking, webcams and internet connectivity to connect people, data, media and objects. CityMedia systems can connect to other CityMedia systems, with the first two exhibited simultaneously in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille during the month of April 2011. The CityMedia Project was exhibited at the Bâtiment d’art contemporain as part of the [Mapping Festival](http://www.mappingfestival.ch) in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2011.

Over the past year, we have been building and experimenting various applications at the Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence and at the Master Media Design —HEAD Genève. We were also joined in the prototyping phase by students and teachers from the Studio Lentigo, ESBA Marseille, the École spéciale d’architecture Paris, and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratives, Paris. Over forty students have built about twice as many prototypes in 10 different sessions dedicated to designing, prototyping and developing uses for and with the system.

There are currently about 25 applications presented in the system, with eventually more to come at the end of a workshop dedicated to Kinect hacking this Thursday, May 26, 2011, also at the BAC. This workshop sold out very quickly, and unfortunately we do not have any more room for extra participants. So please people, stop begging, it’s heartbreaking. You are welcome to come at the end of the workshop though, and watch as will attempt to add any working applications developped during the workshop into the system.

While the project was developed principally at the Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence, our students in the Media Design Master at the HEAD did a considerable amount of work in the design and development of the various applications and contributed as well to the design of some important platform components; as a consequence we wanted to show the result of this work in Geneva. Given that there was already this interresting festival dedicated to real-time visualization, and given the amount of body tracking and various other techniques of real-time image manipulation we use in our system, the venue seemed appropriate.

Finally, I will be giving a talk Wednesday afternoon at 16:30 at the auditorium of the BAC, along with Jean-Baptiste Labrune and VJ Fader, moderated by Nicolas Nova. For my part, I’ll be exploring some of the artistic and speculative predecessors to Microsoft’s latest Kinect device, and will finish with the artistic work, research, and collaborations that allowed us to quickly get up to speed with these new devices.

P.S. There are some good pictures of the exhibit over at Pasta&Vinegar: From Hal to Kinect: live visuals, music and body tracking technologies – Mapping Festival Geneva

Le projet CITY MEDIA, né en 2009, est le fruit d’un travail collectif entre développeurs, artistes et opérateurs culturels, réunis par l’envie de repenser la place des médias dans la ville et d’en rendre l’usage plus immersif, plus humain et plus sensible. Celui-ci prend la forme d’un grand écran interactif tactile qui intègre également un système de capture du mouvement, qui peut être activé par plusieurs personnes à la fois, agissant de concert ou de manière indépendante. Véritable plateforme d’innovation ouverte, le City Media intègre une vingtaine d’applications développées par des étudiants d’écoles d’art —— le support de présentation des travaux du workshop mené par Douglas Edric Stanley pendant le Mapping Festival.

I’m amazed at how robust the Amstrad was, some 25 years later. Since BASIC is installed in the ROM, you just have to turn it on and away you go, with the given extra of recording onto a cassette player which ironically probably stores its’ data longer than my CD-Roms I can’t read anymore. Apparently the Amstrad has some easy to access PEEK and POKE for getting sound and graphics going, but I didn’t have the time to fiddle around with it. I’ll have to get myself one and see what I can do with it. The PAPER and PEN commands are easy to learn with a totally cool list of the color table written right there on the device. What does that say about a machine that has the color codes screened directly onto the case?

Archéopterix was there maintaining the exhibit and was worried this little improvisation would dissapear, but actually that’s the whole fun of it. Just code it old-skool : type it back in and press RUN

Celui-ci prend la forme d’un grand écran interactif tactile, installé dans l’espace public, qui peut être activé par plusieurs personnes à la fois, agissant de concert ou de manière indépendante. Ses contenus sont d’ordre informatif, culturels, touristiques, mais aussi artistiques, ludiques… Ce projet est inspiré d’une expérimentation menée à Helsinki. C’est un nouveau média urbain de communication, de service et d’échange entre les habitants et les visiteurs de la ville.

En tant que producteur de ce projet, Seconde Nature coordonne un consortium de partenaires constitué de :  l’ Ecole Supérieur d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence (via son atelier Hypermedia), le Zinc de la friche de la Belle de Mai à Marseille, les villes d’Aix en Provence et de Marseille, et enfin la Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération. La conception des contenus est également réfléchie dans la cadre d’une collaboration élargie avec un ensemble d’établissements d’enseignements supérieur français et étrangers.

A partir du 22 mars 2011, deux prototypes de « murs communicants » reliés ente eux seront installés au sein de la bibliothèque de l’Alcalzar (Marseille) et de la Cité du Livre (Aix-en-Provence).

INFOS PRATIQUES :

Cité du Livre
Du mardi 22 mars au samedi 30 avril 2011 (prolongation possible), mardi, jeudi, vendredi : 12h-18h / mercredi, samedi : 10h-18h
8-10 rue des Allumettes, Aix en Provence / 04 42 91 98 88

Bibliothèque de l’Alcazar
Du mardi 22 mars au samedi 9 avril 2011, du mardi au samedi de 11h à 19h
58 cours Belzunce, Marseille / 04 91 55 90 00

ENTRÉE LIBRE.

PARTENAIRES DU PROJET

Financement : Région PACA / FEDER / Ville d’Aix
Production : Seconde Nature
Réalisation : Atelier Hypermédia / École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence
Étude : ZINC / La Friche
Expertise conseil : FING / Ville 2.0
Soutien : Villes d’Aix-en-Provence et des mairies 1er & 7éme de Marseille
Design : Digital Deluxe
Lieu d’expérimentation : Alcazar Bibliothèque de Marseille à Vocation Régional et Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence et le concours du festival IVIV et le label Lowave.

ÉCOLES ET LABORATOIRES ASSOCIÉS A L’EXPÉRIMENTATION :

Studio Lentigo / École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Marseille
École Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris
École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Media Design / Haute École d’Art et de Design, Genève
Telecom ParisTech (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications)
Avec le concours du Master professionnel  » Communication des organisations « , à l’Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I

We are using this addon for some installations we are preparing for Lift’11.

To install, unzip+copy the ofxTwitter folder into your « addons » folder in OpenFrameworks. Then unzip+copy the TwitterSearch example into your « addonsExamples » folder in OpenFrameworks.

If you start from a new OF project, you will have to drag the following addons into your project usually these are placed in the « addons » folder inside Xcode: ofxHttpUtils, ofxThread, ofxTwitter, ofxXmlSettings.

The example is Xcode (Mac OS X) only for the moment. When I’ve cleaned it up and run it through its’ paces, I’ll release it as a true OpenFrameworks addon via GitHub.

• ofxTwitter.zip -> addons
• TwitterSearch.zip -> addonsExamples

And finally, here’s a practically empty Twitter+Kinect example that requires the ofxKinect addon. There is no interaction between the tweets and the Kinect image sensor. We will be using this base example as a starting point for our projects: Tweenect.zip