NYU Announces No Quarter: An Exhibition of Games

On May 6th, starting at 5pm, the NYU Game Center will be hosting a reception for No Quarter: An Exhibition of Games.

No Quarter consists of four games that explore the possibilities for social play in real-world environments, to imagine a new arcade that generates complex, surprising, and playful interactions in the public setting of a gallery space.

Three of the games were commissioned specifically for the exhibit:

Raging Hadron is a two player competitive game by independent game designer Mark ‘messhof’ Essen that combines swashbuckling swordplay with 8-bit psychedelia.

Deep Sea is a graphics-free, audio-only game about the terrors of deep sea diving by sound designer Robin Arnott.

Recurse is a manic game of twisting bodies, quick reactions, and physical feedback by game designer Matt Parker.

The exhibition will also feature 16 Tons, a four-player game of strategy and negotiation by the team of Game Center faculty Eric Zimmerman and architect Nathalie Pozzi, which was created for the Art History of Games Conference.

One of the goals of the Game Center is to support the New York game scene and to encourage experimental and innovative work by local independent game designers. To pursue this goal we intend to commission small-scale games on an ongoing basis. We believe that games, like other creative forms, can thrive outside the context of commercial development.

Please join us then on May 6th for a reception featuring all of these games and a chance to meet with their creators. The event is open to students, faculty, and the general public.

Food and wine will be served.

After the reception the games will be on display in the Game Center lobby through June 4th.

721 Broadway, 9th floor, New York, NY 10003

A Casual Revolution one of Five Essential Books on Video Games

In The New Yorker, Jamin Brophy-Warren lists A Casual Revolution as one of the five essential books on video games. In good company with Huizinga, Caillois, James Paul Gee and Tom Bissell.

To combat the idea that the only people who play games are teenage males and housemothers, Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution” is a deftly argued and thoroughly researched recommendation. With the advent of the Nintendo’s Wii and social games like FarmVille on Facebook, video games of many shapes and sizes have become standard fare as swaths of previously ignored players now find themselves with controllers in hand. The result has been a muddling of the archetypes of “hardcore” and “casual” players. Juul, the visiting professor at New York University’s Game Center, paints a world of middle-aged women trying to kick fifty-hour-a-week-video-game habits and young professional men only clocking a few hours a week on their Xbox 360s before shuttling off to their cubicles.

NYU Game Center Announces the Spring Fighter Tournament

Upcoming event here at the NYU Game Center:

On April 17th the Game Center will be hosting Spring Fighter, its first Street Fighter IV tournament.

The Spring Fighter tournament will some of the best street fighter players at NYU and around New York and a prize will be awarded to the one player who can push their way through the double-elimination tournament and take the top spot. All are welcome and there will be food available to the participants and anyone else who comes to cheer on their favorite fighters.

Only 30 spots are available in the tournament so to sign up and participate please email gamecenter@nyu.edu with your name and contact information. If the tournament is already full you’ll be put on a waitlist and contacted if spots open up.

The Game Center will be providing controllers for each participant, but if you prefer to use an arcade stick or other type of special controller you’ll have to bring your own.

Spectators are welcome! We hope to see you there!

The Spring Fighter Tournament
April 17th at 2pm
721 Broadway, 9th Floor, New York, NY
RSVP: gamecenter@nyu.edu

Video Game-playing Pig

I’d heard stories about pigs playing video games, but it turns out there is actual video footage to be found.

In this slightly condescending program about animal intelligence, go to 2:31 to see Hamlet, the video game-playing pig!

Hamlet appears pretty adept.

Weirdly, the game played is remarkably similar to one of the balance tests in Wii Fit, where you also have to move an object on top of a bluish rectangle. I don’t know what that means.

Tablets are Dead (history tells us so)

Behold the cover of the latest issue of Wired:

Behold the article “How the Tablet Will Change the World“.

Compare to another Wired prediction, from 1997. The browser is dead and will be replaced by “push” technology:

This is not to say that the iPad will fail.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s this: If something is on the cover of Wired, it’s future is in serious jeopardy. Iridium. The Long Boom. Sega.

Perhaps this is what Wired is: Current trends, extrapolated to the max, made into the strongest possible predictions about the future.

Game Developers Conference 2010 as told to Twitter

Back from Game Developers Conference 2010 and trying to get my bearings like everybody else.

On the heels of my twitter map of GDC 2009, here is a word frequency map of this year’s conference. I think they give a decent picture of what was going on if you weren’t there.

Monday: Day before GDC

Anticipation before the conference starts.

Tuesday: Tutorial and summit day 1

Social games loomed large, as did Facebook, FarmVille, the iPhone, Android, and indie games.


Wednesday: Tutorial and summit day 2

While social games and tutorials were still happening, this was completely overshadowed by the announcement of the PlayStation Move controller.


Thursday: Day 1 of main conference

The expo floor opens (“booth”), Uncharted 2 is big, and the award show dominates.


Friday: Day 2 of main conference

Sid Meier’s keynote, parties, more expo booths. Harmonix, FarmVille. @pocketprotector wins the prize for most tweets.


Saturday: Final day (3) of main conference

Phaedrus’ aka Will Wright’s “surprise” talk takes a lot of space. Mass Effect.

Sunday: Post-conference

A great time, PlayStation move (again), Gabe Newell, time to go home. “See you guys next year.”

Notes:

  • Thanks to Mike Edwards for providing the captured tweets.
  • I have deleted all occurrences of the quite frequent “game”, “games”, “gdc” and “rt” as they did not add any information.
  • “PlayStation Move” on Wednesday is a hundred times more frequent than I would have guessed from going to the conference. This is probably because we are more likely to tweet news items than casual conversation.
  • Made using Wordle.