Clare Townhill

PS3 Home

Interesting first videos and reactions from a newborn 'Home' Player. Good links for the interested here from Futurelab.

Getting Emotional About Gaming

I know that this isn't fresh off the upload blocks in YouTube terms but it's new to me. It's a great video containing bright and inspiring ideas.One of the fears of psychologists and the public at large pertains to the disassociative effects of gaming, our inurement to violence, killing and atrocity. The idea of reconnecting gamers with emotional experiences is brilliant. I look forward to seeing if and how this develops.

Mystery on Fifth Avenue

Here is another post inspired by last week's Playful Event. I was tempted to call this post 'Rekindling of Faith' which is the feeling I had after hearing Eric Clough talking about his architectural-puzzle-wonder on Fifth Avenue in NY. Eric was commissioned to apply his architectural and design talents to create a 'non-cookie-cutter style apartment' for the Klinsky-Sherry family. What followed was this:

1. The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky-Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home.

But not all at once. One of the things I love about this is the patience, the ability to hold back, wait:

Finally, one day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr. Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:

We’ve taken liberties with Yeats

to lead you through a tale

that tells of most inspired fates

in hopes to lift the veil.

The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that contained a beautifully bound and printed book. The book led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.

 

3. A rectangular panel in the den and guest room opens to reveal acrylic slices, far left, that fit together to form a cube. When the chamfered magnetic cube lodged above the slices is dragged over the 24 panels on a nearby wall, they open.

4. Behind the panels, large white letters laser-cut into teal blue acrylic spell out the words of a poem written years ago by Steven B. Klinsky, the apartment's owner, for his wife, Maureen Sherry, and their children.

5. Decorative leather molding stamped with letters in a hallway can be popped out and wrapped around a rod removed from the foot of Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky’s bed so that the letters on the coiled leather spell out a clue.

Here's something else that I love about this story; here's a little piece from the full NYT article:

'Another evening, Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky were lying in their custom-made bed when a rod running along its foot snapped off. “I’m thinking, What the heck kind of cheap bed is this?” said Ms. Sherry, who phoned Mr. Clough the next day.

His response, which might have taken a less adventurous person aback, was that she take a wait-and-see attitude, that the bed bit was part of a larger “story” and that all would be revealed in good time. Oh, and he told her to just snap the piece back into the bed.'

And she did.

6. Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.

7. Millwork panels in a hallway were designed to look like Le Corbusier’s Modular Man and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Puzzle pieces hidden in one fit together to make a key that opens the other.

8. In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”

9. Photographs of the apartment’s original interiors have secret writing on the back that reveals the number of salamanders in the apartment. The salamander is a motif that is part of the puzzle and appears throughout the apartment.

10. Door knockers on opposite walls of a hallway initially seemed pointless. They can be removed and joined to create a crank that opens hidden panels in the dining room sideboard.

11. The custom-made sideboard has hidden panels on either side that can be cranked open to display keys and keyholes.

12. When the correct keys are used, hidden drawers are revealed.

13. The drawers contained acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle. The answers to the crossword puzzle led to the panels in the guest room, behind which were the words of the poem.

14. The children’s bedrooms have radiator covers with poems written specifically for each child cut into them in code. The Caesar Shift cipher in the bedroom of the oldest child, Cavan, was broken by a friend.

All pictures taken from the NYT slideshow 'Cracking the Code'. Full 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' article and narrative here.

Bloody wonderful.

Arcade: Stage One

New fun in a nascent stage at the BAC. I'm waiting for my slot in the Basement this Friday. Here was the first assignment to gain entry:

Dear (Codename)

Here are the asks we make of you to complete Stage One of the Arcade experiment.

* Please describe, with words and/or pictures, the first place - real or imagined - that comes into your mind when you read the phrase 'underground space'.
* Please create a digital image/photo of a childlike sketch of 'a house with a cellar beneath it'.

Please send these to e.speckle@playbeards.info by midnight on Sunday 18th May. Stage Two of the Arcade will open on Monday 19th May.

For further explanation of these asks, please visit arcadestageone.wordpress.com

Thanking you

Edmund Speckle

The picture above and the following text are my rather hurried contributions:

‘Underground Space’
The first underground space I remember as such was encountered deep within two gnarled and ancient oak trees growing from a bank near the house of my grandmother. I pushed my way in between the roots and sat in the soft clay dust and dry leaves holding my favourite toy cat Henry, hiding from the rest of family walking up the lane behind me. The smell of dampness, earth, the feeling of concealment; the thrill of being unseen; hearing them call my name; amusement turning to faint panic. The sound of my own breath as I hugged myself into fierce invisibility.

Playing Mind Games

The stella success and rise of the Wii (20 million handsets and climbing) has made it clear that gamers are ready for new ways interaction. Good article in a special Tech Feature NewScientist this week on the growing use and interest in software similar to EEG in the development of new gaming interactions and experiences:

TWO players sit across a table from one another, staring at a small white ball on a track between them. Both are wearing headbands and concentrating, trying to nudge the ball towards their opponent. All they can use is the power of thought.

This is Mindball, an addictive "mind game" in which the winning strategy is to remain as focused and relaxed as possible in the heat of battle. The ball rolls away from the player with the calmest mind, as measured by sensors on their headbands.

NewScientist: Next Generation of Games Will Be Mental

An End To The Ceasefire?

Browsing through the British Gaming Blog's highlights of 2007 I'm having a real struggle trying to justify to myself how I can go on without the purchase of a games console. Specifically a Wii. On a personal level my obsessive streak plus the ability to get truly terrified by the more gruesome games should be reason enough to steer clear; and yet, on a professional level, the sheer scale and growth in the market, not to mention the scale for continuing growth, makes it a nonsense that I or on anyone else in the industry don't play. Hmmm. While I'm tussling with this, have a drool over the wonder of Super Mario Galaxy:

And yes, I know that living a game vicariously through clips on a website is somewhat missing the point.

Glorious Gaming

As is often the way a conversation with Alistair sent me scuttling for the Google search bar. There are some wonderful and exciting things going on in the world of gaming: Chipuya - the Japanese avatar creating shopping and tresaurehunting ARG that rewards its predominantly female games players with tokens for their real world shopping in the Shibuya Shopping Mall. Chipuya Town is a Flash-based 2D version of real-world Tokyo youth hotspot Shibuya that users will be able to navigate around and interact in with avatars. The offering also features a virtual currency system which can be redeemed for avatar clothing as well as interior goods for avatar rooms, and according to the press release for mobile content such as full track music downloads, too.
I've just really enjoyed listening to the Gaming Academy on Radio 4 - the games in development are available to play at Dare To Be Digital. Good stats on UK gaming too via the BBC: UK gamers spent 3 billion dollars this year, up 25% on last year:

Last week more than £87.9m worth of games were sold, setting a new record.
Paul Jackson, director general of industry body Elspa, said games were now "truly mass market".
"Videogaming is enjoyed by everyone, young and old, male and female," he said.

The prognosis across all the major titles is a consensus that gaming is in its 'golden age'.

Brain Food

I've been meaning to blog this for ages. So here it is. A vocab testing and building game that rewards knowledge with the donation of rice to the UN Food Programme. Brilliant.
www.wfp.org
www.freerice.com

'Once Upon A Time, Life' & Interactive Nanotechnology

Now, you may not think that nanotechnology and badly dubbed cartoons have much in common. Oh yea of little faith. A recent post on Futurelab about three games designed allow the exploration of nanotechnology reminded me of my favourite cartoon from the 1980s. 'Once upon a time, Life.' As a child I was always up wincingly early. Luckily for my parents I quickly discovered the joy of early-morning tv: 'Once Upon a Time, Life' was on Channel 4 at about 6am. I vividly remember an episode about a little boy with leukaemia who received bone marrow from his brother; as an adult I'm both a blood donor and on the bone marrow register. I'm pretty convinced that my weakness for medical dramas of all flavours (plus the misguided notion that this in someway gives me somekind of medical expertise) is all attributable to OUATL. I've just downloaded the NanoMedicine module to play with. I'll let you know.

Nanomission: Downloads

Mushiking Hunt

I treated myself to an English newspaper (3 bloody euros 60) this morning to read whilst I ate my breakfast. I love this article about the Japanese video game, beloved of six-year-olds, which is having a disastrous consequences for the stag beetle. But "how?" I hear you exclaim. Read on:

With their shiny black shells, twitching legs and spiky black antlers, stag beetles are an unlikely item on a list of highly prized luxuries. But now, a rare breed is in danger of hunted to extinction for the entertainment of six-year-old video-game players in Japan.

The craze has been driven by Mushiking (Insect King) a video arcade game in which small boys fight one another with digital stag beetles.

Much like the owl-frenzy which gripped the globe during Potter-Fever demand for the types of beetles used in the game (different species have different battle moves and strength rating, a kind of beetle trumps - the arcade machines dispense collectible cards) means that a million beetles a year are being imported into Japan, where they are sold on internet auction sites for as 40,000 yen (170 squid). The king of Mushiking is Lucanus cervus akbesianus: a six antennaed beast of a stag beetle known in entomological (and latterly amongst Japanese gamers) circles for its territorialism and fierce fights to the death. Unsurprisingly, this is the beetle put under the most iminent pressure of extinction by the craze. As this is in the dead tree international edition, I couldn´t find it in Times online, but I did find these:

Japan Probe: Japanese Fans Driving Turkish Stag Beetle to Extinction

Yahoo! Asia News: Japanese Appetite for Stag Beetles Causing Extinction Threat

The hunter stalks his prey...