Britain’s Parliament just published a video game that’s meant to give a taste of what it’s like being a back-bench MP. It’s pretty good. WIN, in fact. MP for a Week isn’t an action-filled extravaganza or a feast of beautiful 3D graphics. Instead, it’s an innovative interactive experience that uses good, relevant gameplay and good […]
Read more "MP for a Week – WIN"Why are really good games fun? Here’s an attempt to deconstruct one in detail. PopCap’s Peggle: a Masterpiece of game design. I tend to like a certain kind of game. Half-Life, Call of Duty, Halo . . . See a pattern there? A lot of my friends play similar games. You know – hard-core gamer […]
Read more "Anatomy of Fun: Why Peggle is a Masterpiece"The Norman invasion of England. It seems like the perfect topic to approach with gaming. It’s history, it’s dramatic, and best of all it’s about battles. The game was developed by Preloaded and published by Channel 4, to go along with the drama series of the same title. I’m a huge fan of Channel 4’s […]
Read more "1066 – Game Design FAIL"Tonight I’m in Manchester for the Social Technology Summit, part of the Futuresonic festival. The opening gala event was a chili-and-chocolate mix of performance and prose. The chocolaty bit was provided by Tim O’Brien and Mark Pilkington. O’Brien works at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope observatory outside Manchester, and Pilkington is a musician. For their […]
Read more "Futuresonic, Day 1 – Alien Music, Hacking the Earth"I’ve been having a lot of fun with Spotify lately. It’s a nifty, nifty piece of tech. Finally, someone’s cracked out a business model that works with digital media. One feature that I really like is shared playlists. You can create a playlist and share the address, and anyone with the address can add a […]
Read more "The Great Spotify Experiment"UPDATE: I can’t keep track of all the blog posts, videos and bhotos that have been posted as a result of BeeBCamp2. Should have known that trying to manually catalogue the internet was futile. So there’s plenty below, but for anything posted after 23 Feb 2009, your best bet is here. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: BEEBCAMP 2. […]
Read more "BeeBCamp2 – The Morning After"Here’s a really straightforward example of a game adaptation that works. Some guys at Durham University have used the Source engine from Half-Life 2 to create a fire drill trainer for their department. If you’re a player of first-person shooter games and their mods, this is an obvious kind of good idea. You start walking […]
Read more "Researchers Torch Their Own Department"There’s a nice little internet storm brewing up over Raid Gaza. It’s an uber-simplified real -time strategy game where you play the Israelis. As missiles curl out of Gaza, you respond by building tanks, soldiers and aircraft to blast the densely populated slums. The goal is to get as high a kill ratio as possible […]
Read more "Raid Gaza Makes a Point"There’s a new kid on the block. Meet the latest scion of the Molleindustria family, younger brother of the excellent McDonald’s Video Game and Faith Fighter. It’s Oiligarchy. Molleindustria is an Italian-based group of artists, programmers and designers who are making a habit of creating really interesting games. They describe their goal in stirring terms: […]
Read more "Oiligarchy"This isn’t the first Obama video game, nor does it convey a good editorial point. (Campaign Rush is ahead of it on that front). But it did put a smile on my face. They did turn it around fast, too – it was live yesterday. Play it now, for ten minutes, before Nintendo sues these […]
Read more "Living in a Super Obama World"
Philip Trippenbach 