charles stross – halting state
Tag Archives: Gaming
nothing left to do but vandalise shit
For a while I go so into playing Halo, and I mean so into it in the end I had to delete the thing from my hard drive. But that didn’t turn me into a xenophobic, steroid-pumped weapons-crazy psychopathic Master Chief, blasting my way across Melbourne … though everything was a bit pixelated after a 16 hour stint …
So now that the Australian Government Classification Review Board has banned Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, not that I’d probably be able to play it anyway on my old PowerBook, I feel unequivocally compelled to download it illegally, and then go around Melbourne tagging stuff.
Ms Maureen Shelley, when questioned on her decision by the ABC’s Lateline, said she didn’t need proof that video games encourage crime—only that she thought they could.
getting up: contents under pressurered vs blue
A while ago on one of the net-art email lists I subscribe to, there was discussion about performance in video games, using the game engines to create new worlds, or using multi-player and taking a feed from the screen to edit it. This week, Halo 2 arrived and has made more than $100 million in sales already, putting video games clearly in the same realm as block-buster movies.
Not having an X-Box to play it on, but wanting to see some video from it for a Halo-based performance I’m working on, I stumbled across Red Vs Blue. Now up to episode 43, it follows the dim-witted daily life of Red and Blue Teams as they do battle, learn to drive a tank, and generally wonder what they are doing in the universe. It’s a work of genius, up there with the best of South Park or Beavis and Butthead.
From there, I stumbled over to Machinima a giant site of films made using game engines. From the juvenile Red Vs Blue using QuickTime to view, to Blade Runner done entirely in Unreal Tournament 2004′s Matinee. ALl of this is a world of animation that is daunting in its sophistication, yet often incredibly simple in its piggy-backing on the gaming environments and engines.
halo 2 – master chief
i don’t want to be dead, i want to be alive … or a cowboygreat technology crappy game
In a sweatily adolescent application of great technology, Hong Kong’s Artificial Life have just announced the release of a new 3-D game for 3G phones, Virtual Girlfriend, perfect for guys who confuse fantasy with reality, and want their girlfriend to have the responses of a Tamagotchi.
The Virtual Girlfriend is a very innovative mobile game that is based on intelligent animated 3-D characters (avatars) that live in a virtual mobile world. The virtual girls can be contacted and seen using a 3G phone at any time. However, the characters will be involved in different activities during the day, for example, the girlfriend may be in her virtual home or at her virtual workplace or in a virtual bar or restaurant or just shopping with another virtual friend in a virtual shopping mall. The user can watch the characters during these activities and interact with them via the mobile phone. The characters and the game follow a certain daily and weekly schedule which will continuously change and progress over time. The behavior of the virtual characters is based on scientific principles and algorithms inspired by the computer related artificial life sciences and is using artificial intelligence technology to achieve human like behavior and responses.
virtual girlfriend – does my bum look big in this?
virtual girlfriend – hey baby, me love you long timehalo 2 – i love bees
In early 2001, somehow I slipped into the very strange world of A.i. the online multi-player game which was in effect a meme to promote the Kubrick/Spielburg movie of the same name, though had little in common. Over the next few months, I wasted many hours in that world, and in the Cloudmakers Group, trying to follow the game play, reading 100s of emails a day, and somehow as a result becoming totally hooked on web-design or more accurately net-art. I even got a special poster for the game-players with my name on it. Today it started again.
Well a little while ago actually, not like I have checked in to the group for maybe a year or two, but in my trawls across internet-land today, I came across i love bees, which appeared as a blink at the end of the movie trailer for Halo 2, which I was playing until a couple of days ago when 550mhz powerbook just didn’t have the required grunt to keep the fps ticking over, and shortly after having finished all the Iain M. Banks culture books, from which Halo draws many of its themes.
So it looks like the same crew behind A.i., The Beast and The Puppetmasters are at it again. It had an immediately familiar feel, the movie teaser, the hacked websites, even the old crew at cloudmakers are getting excited. If I’m going down the rabiit hole again, it looks like this is the place to go.
halo 2onedotzero in Beijing + Shanghai
China Daily has a piece on onedotzero the festival of digital film making its way to Beijing and Shanghai in the next couple of days, through the cultural Park n Shop of the British Council who manage to bring more art to China than every other country combined. At the same time, the British Beijing Film Festival is on with a bunch of average films that have been available on DVD for ages and represent the bland mainstream of contemporary British cinema, not a UK Larry Clark in sight. The onedotzerofestival schedule isn’t confirmed yet but includes short films, digital animation, developments in gaming, and other work in new media and music video.
onedotzero’s groundbreaking annual festival, returns for the eighth year with ten days of adventures in moving image. the globally acclaimed festival features new forms of moving image across music video, computer gaming cinematics, architecture, motion graphics, new media, feature films and graphic-inflected narrative shorts and documentaries – with a series of panels, presentations, screening programmes and live events. moving image, design, fashion and architecture have been intrinsically connected from the birth of moving image to the present day. onedotzero charts the current creative crossovers and explorations with focused programmes highlighting the excitement of this convergence.
onedotzero digital film festival