Who is B-Ma

Bill Murray pen doodle

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:32:00 -0400

Bill Murray pen doodle

NES MUSIC BOX ULTRA (asa)

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:41:00 -0400

I call it Nes music box, it’s basicly a Nes experience simulator, you can change cartridges and listen to the theme songs, and now you can do other stuff as well.. I recommend watching the new show on channel 5, I heard it’s radical!

PLAY

"I enjoy seeing what happens when I make something I don’t fully understand, with little conscious..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:11:37 -0400

“

I enjoy seeing what happens when I make something I don’t fully understand, with little conscious thought involved. I don’t make from a position of craft, except perhaps in the oldest sense of the word.

Playing around with hypertext mechanics is fun because you can’t rely on traditional tools or ways of thinking, which is good because I don’t particularly like puzzles. Most of the crunchy bits in my games are just crystallizations of narrative, emerging and receding interfaces–a system for traversing your lover’s back or a crowd turning into a flurry of links.

The purpose of a puzzle is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.

Many games are designed on the principle of the hover hand, an embarrassing disavowal of this intimate relationship. And furthermore they are designed to connect with the worst in us, a bloodless, sexless part of our brain where nothing can surprise us, where “Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected.”

So I think a lot about transferring emotions from one body to another–I try to make every word count so people can experience my stories at the rate I’m feeling them, like a heartbeat, so we can be intimate, so there can be as little separation as possible.

And it could be said that I’ve developed a kind of language anorexia where I’m acutely aware of the words I generate as if they were an extension of my body and I feel unwell if they are corpulent, imprecise, I can’t sleep. I have beaten the physical form of this but the intense need for spareness still lingers, fighting the words which are part of my body because words never stop, they grow like cells, that “resisting organism of the word”.

Seeing my own words is bizarre to me, like looking at stalactites or some other frozen accretion of an ordinarily fluid thing. My friend Erin said, “it can be very hard to maintain what is called “writerly control” when with every passing second, words on the page feel different.” I agree.

”

- Porpentine - Emily Short interviews Porpentine

BABYCASTLES: Babycastles Staff Picks: Slave Of God

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:49:25 -0400

BABYCASTLES: Babycastles Staff Picks: Slave Of God:

gamedesignerben:

I want to tell you about this game called Slave Of God. It’s by a guy named Stephen Lavelle who also made the puzzle game English Country Tune. He’s the kind of guy who will make a game and just call it whatever.

Slave Of God is the sort of game that makes some…

"What would a nonexpressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:59:34 -0400

“What would a nonexpressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet’s ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”

- Craig Dworkin

"Constant [Nieuwenhuys]’s megastructures … would be populated by homo ludens - man at..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 11:57:54 -0400

“Constant [Nieuwenhuys]’s megastructures … would be populated by homo ludens - man at play. In the New Babylon, the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic responsibility would be discarded. The post-revolutionary individual would wander from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations … [where] deductive reasoning, goal-oriented production, the construction and betterment of a political community - all these were eschewed.””

- Sarah Williams Goldhagen (2006) ON ARCHITECTURE

“Starseed Pilgrim is a game about tending a symphonic...

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:40:00 -0400

“Starseed Pilgrim is a game about tending a symphonic garden, exploring space, and embracing fate.”

Utterly mystified by Starseed Pilgrim, by @droqen - epiphany after epiphany. A game for the patient and persistent. I am only peeling back the outermost layer of the onion now.

“You are a gardener, tending to empty noise and empty space to fill them both with colour. You are a refugee, building your own world away from the spreading darkness. You are an explorer, discovering new places, new rules, and new fascinations. The universe is bigger than you know.”

Fascinating non-spoiler write-up below.

“Again, try again. Again. Again. Try again. Failed. Try again. If at first you don’t succeed, try a million times again. Don’t worry about the entropic heat death of the universe, it can’t possibly take that long. You’ll get there eventually. All roads lead to Rome. Just hope you’re not on the longest possible shittiest road to Rome. Keep the faith. Keep trying. Keep devoting the hours. God is in the code. And suddenly: let there be light.”

Photo

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:19:26 -0400

Knocked this out last minute last year as part of our GGJ...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:06:00 -0400

Knocked this out last minute last year as part of our GGJ ‘12 team portrait. In retrospect I kind of like it.

"I wonder instead whether the work is trying to exclude itself from “gameyness.” By and large, these..."

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:46:00 -0400

“

I wonder instead whether the work is trying to exclude itself from “gameyness.” By and large, these are games about people who lack power and lack control. The message gets across because games have always been about agency; gamers are used to having power and control, and to have the game itself deny it is a wake up slap across the face.

Effectively, these are games as rhetoric not games as dialectic, moving against the fundamental current of gameness. And the rhetorical move is “destroy everything,” as Porpentine put it in her GDC13 session with Terry Cavanaugh on indie games.
Overall, to me it feels like it speaks to a conflicted relationship with games. The creators of these works do not want to be excluded: it is their medium. At the same time, the aesthetic argues for un-gaming things.

…

Games are uncomfortable with themselves, and not just on the level of “what are our narratives.” But actually on the level of “what are games for?” We see our tools taken up by crass moves into marketing and monetization, we see the craft we developed being used for manipulation, and we start asking ourselves whether everything we do is manipulation, whether we are fundamentally crass.

…

All in all, I wonder whether fundamentally we as a community are doing a bit too much ranting. In the games and in the aesthetic and yes, from stage at GDC. Oh, I don’t mean in the literal sense of strident complaint. I mean in the metaphorical sense of holding forth. Games have had nothing to say for so long that I worry that we have collectively concluded that “saying something personal” is what makes them worthwhile art.
Ranting is a rhetorical device. It’s unidirectional. Yes, it’s all part of a larger conversation, of course. And sometimes we need to speak loudly to be heard, especially if we are from a marginalized group. But fundamentally it is hard to listen when everyone is loud, and the aesthetic of control is all about the player listening, and not getting to speak. Fundamentally, these design moves are about impositional narrative, not about the narrative the player constructs. Imposing a narrative, a norming, a worldview – I thought that is what we were ranting against. Running away from attempted engagement – I thought that is what we were ranting against.

”

- Raph Koster

The beginnings of several days worth of very lively debate.

notationnotes: Fractal.Invaders :: Jared Tarbell

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:36:57 -0400

notationnotes:

Fractal.Invaders :: Jared Tarbell

cofastaffdiscuss: This week in class I’m asking students to...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:51:14 -0400

cofastaffdiscuss:

This week in class I’m asking students to consider John Cage’s elegant description of ‘experimental’ below. I want them to think about Cage’s understanding of experimentation as they work towards developing their own definition or understanding of experimentation - and how to implement it usefully as part of their creative practice.

John Cage argues that the term experimental should be understood:

‘not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown.”

– John Cage, ‘Experimental music: a doctrine’ (1955) in Silence: The Lectures and Writings of John Cage, London: Marion Boyars, 1978, reprinted 1999, p.13

Image via (and you can listen to the William’s Mix recording too!)

viseratops: Atari ST glitch from ANI GIF 2.1: Jeff Donaldson...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:15:22 -0400

viseratops:

Atari ST glitch from ANI GIF 2.1: Jeff Donaldson (noteNdo)

2012 in design notes, pt 2

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:30:44 -0400

2012 in design notes, pt 2

2012 in design notes, pt 1

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:23:26 -0400

2012 in design notes, pt 1

Nothing like a good old fashioned post-it playtesting (at...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:59:29 -0500

Nothing like a good old fashioned post-it playtesting (at Brothersport HQ3)

We Make The Weather

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 23:24:03 -0500

We Make The Weather

English Country Tune broke my brain. Recommended. animatedscreenshots: English Country Tune

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:07:23 -0500

English Country Tune broke my brain. Recommended.

animatedscreenshots:

English Country Tune

danielrehn: Fax & Frankering for Folket by Jacob Sikker...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:03:04 -0500

danielrehn:

Fax & Frankering for Folket by Jacob Sikker Remin, Raquel Meyers, and Goto80 (2011, DEMOTEKET). Otherworldly transmissions with genuine, 20th-century technology defects.

Most images were made by Raquel Meyers using Commodore 64 text graphics. Others were sent in via the open fax line, mostly by anonymous senders. Jacob Sikker Remin and Goto80 worked on the project with music and other fax aspects. The music was improvised live on C64. The collection is available as a 65-page book and viewable on Tumblr / Flickr.

prostheticknowledge: Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey Fashion...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:18:41 -0500

prostheticknowledge:

Stealth Wear by Adam Harvey

Fashion exhibition of wearable anti-thermal imaging clothing to protect detection from airborne surveillance technology:

Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Privacy Mode continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance. Presented by PRIMITIVE at TANK MAGAZINE HQ will be a suite of new designs, made in collaboration with NYC fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, that tackle some of the most pressing and sophisticated forms of surveillance today. Including:

The anti-drone hoodie and anti-drone scarf: garments designed to thwart thermal imaging, a technology used widely by UAVs.

The XX-shirt: a x-ray shielding print in the shape of a heart, that protects your heart from x-ray radiation

And the Off Pocket: an anti-phone accessory that allows you to instantly zero out your phone’s signal

Accompanying each project will be videos and tests revealing the process behind each technology and counter technology.

More Here and Here