A link for the new year: Wired indicates ARGs as the future of advertising.
Our hope is that ARG art form, still in its infancy, won’t become quickly swallowed by mainstream commercial productions, to create standard series of puzzles and mysteries… a post from Matteo Bittanti’s blog, entitled “The post-gameplay era”, quoted an interesting remark about mainstream videogames, and how the actions in them are often cloned from one another:

“In the past years, however, we have seen an enormous growth in the kinds of stories games try to deal with. Gameplay, on the other hand, has not evolved (or it may have achieved its absolutely perfection and there is no room to evolve further). In fact, I would argue that in essence, the gameplay of virtually all AAA titles is the same, even though their stories are vastly diffferent. Tomb Raider plays the same as Bioshock plays the same as God of War plays the same as Gears of War plays the same as Assassin’s Creed. Gameplay has become a standardized formal layer on top of narrative worlds that vary greatly”. (Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales)

I thought I was the only one to find mainstream videogames “all the same”, attracting spite from both players and programmers, accusing me of being too literary or, worse, female (!). Glad I found some back up out there.
Anyway, let’s hope this won’t happen to ARGs, whose main attraction was (ok, still is) the imagination and creativity behind…

A new version of Freedom Fighter ‘56 game, educational game based on the Hungarian Revolution, includes a graphic novel based on the game’s story. The publisher is Lauer Learning, although I think the creative work is by The Inspiracy. The books “56 stories” contains 56 personal recollections of the Hungarian Revolution, with original photographs, sketches, an original map, timeline, and glossary.I wish I had these sort of things at school…

Now you can be a desk activist too: with a few clicks you can demonstrate online for human rights on the new platform released by Amnesty International. Just add your avatar to the virtual square to demonstrate your involvement. Can it really be that easy?Anyway this was just a campaign to publicize the Human Rights Day on December 10. In Dutch only./news courtesy of Adverblog

Brand targeted praying to have millions people pray for your brand - ?I thought Christvertising (God bless your brand, the caption) worth mentioning - believe it or not./news courtesy of Adverblog

Somebody weird (the source mentions “one of the Perplex City guys”) connected a Z-machine interpreter to a Jabber IM bot. In case you missed that, the Z-machine is the reader for most of Infocom’s text adventures, still used by many in the Interactive Fiction community. Jabber is an open XML protocol for instant messaging, used by Skype and Google Talk for chat. To play Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, message “!startgame” to prakbot@jabber.org. Have fun.

What is a “twittory”? Apparently it is a story developed by a large number of persons (in this case 140) using Twitter, each person being allowed one tweet (a maximum of 140 characters).While the concept it is all but new (did you ever play that game, “Exquisite Corpse”, literary pastime of noble origins invented by the Surrealist, where you each had to write one line of a story?) the idea of using Twitter, a social network with particular (aesthetic?) restrictions, is engaging.With regards to the “publishing” phase, The Darkness Inside will be podcast at The Podcast Network, and later turned into a machinima.Angela Thomas underscores the educational potential of such a proceeding, encouraging tutors to employ it in classes.I wonder instead about the “political” (a hundred brackets around the word) implications, if the theme of the collaborative storytelling were something real that we would like to change. It would be only a literary exercise on paper, while on social networks everything would acquire the status of a statement. Or would it?uhmmm…/news courtesy of Angela Thomas

Technorati Tags: cross media, participatory, social networks, Web 2.0

Being a Mac fan, with some occasional doubts, I found this list of future projects from the omnipresent Apple quite engaging(source: Mac Life).here is the iCar, complete with iSight and iTunes of course;the iEye, super digital camera with embedded editing options;and the iProtection, an Apple-branded stun gun.And I thought this strip from Wolff and Morgenthaler was funny!

Technorati Tags: futuristic

I HAVE to post about this : a Christmas tree Pacman-style and Pokemon decorations (from Geekologie) - we want more!

Want a Better World? Build a Better Game! Social Impact Game Contest 2007
The Values At Play project is now accepting submissions to its first Social Impact Games Contest! Values At Play is a three year investigation of social values and games. Selected contest entries will be archived and available for public play in the Values at Play Game Library. (courtesy of GrandTextAuto)

After the success of World Without Oil, a new website is addressing collective intelligence to help with environment and sustainability, thanks to the WWF together with the World Conservation Union (IUCN), and Nokia.The website is Connect2Earth, we could call it a “theme” social network, focusing on user generated content from young activists (what about the old?!) - active from February. Connect and enjoy.