The program for the Come Out & Play festival is finally available - highlights of originality (for me) are “3001 - a new kind of collaborative musical gameplay” where players participate to a musical performance via cell phones - I remember vaguely an art performance employing the same principle, but I ll have to check. The innovation is that each cell phone controls an avatar on the screen and the avatar’s movements determines the music - uhm - really curious about that.
Otherwise we have the classic (human) “Snake”, Bocce games to discover the city of Amsterdam, virtual soccer, water gun fights, Pong projected on a building (in 2006 it was Space Invaders), street tagging, three photo hunts, a spy game, outdoor puzzle game with lasers (! I want to see that!), a game set in virtual Africa (last year it was virtual Bagdad). I was pleased to see that at least one third of the creators of these games were women, then it is true that cross platforms game production attracts creators from both sexes while single platform (PC/PS2 etc) attracts mostly male creators because all the existing productions show a strong gender connotation. Anyway, gender issues are not the topic of this blog, they are the topic of the factory blog, the official blog of Factory Girl, regarding women and games, take a look (a bit of cross advertising

Mediacity - Situations, Practices and Encounters will take place in Weimar, Germany, 18-19th January 2008
the call is not just for papers but also for architectural projects and media art projects, all to explore how “the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practiced through the use and presence of new media”.

Very cool. Deadline 1st October 2007 for extended abstracts

Organized among others by Frank Eckardt and Kostantinos Chorianopoulos (I mention only the ones of which I read something, sorry) the angle should be very interdisciplinary, and that’s what we need.

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conference, event, locative media, pervasive games

“Creative Minds United Against Global Warming” was the slogan I wrote on last year’s Christmas cards, I never thought it would become a competition, with a juicy prize of 500.000 euros..
Born from the union of the Dutch Postcode Lottery and PICNIC network, the same organization behind the Cross Media Week, the Green Challenge is a competition to create a product or a service to help fight climate change. The idea must be realizable on the market within two years. In addition to the prize money, the winner will receive expert coaching and support for the implementation of the idea.
Deadline for entries is August 30
Help save the world!

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, cross media, event, pervasive games

Some fun moments during the Pergames conference came with the testing of Shame Station, an interesting student game project.

Shame Station lets you command via joystick another human being via a headset with a commands display inside, transforming the person into an avatar, and making him or her to perform actions we wouldn’t normally do, “shame free”.
The goal of the project was to show how guilt (and conscience of our acts) where in the end related to our own body’s actions, and a joystick would relieve us from guilty feelings as long as the shameful actions where performed by someone else’s body. Interesting enough, the body-avatar was also relieved from all responsibility because of his or her being “remote controlled”

In Salzburg the only shameful action performed unfortunately was the simple spraying of innocent spectators with spring water, see a picture

Anyway the whole experience made me wonder about the utility of commanding an avatar, or being an avatar - in our role-demanding and role-shifting society in how many situations it would be nice to be free from the responsibility of our actions, either performing them directly either leading someone else to do what we don’t want to do personally….

Technorati Tags: affective research, locative games, pervasive games

Create your own locative game and organize it at the second edition of the “Come out &Play” festival in Amsterdam, within the Cross Media Week (September 21-29)
Games of the previous edition included spy games, sonic pong (! I have to ask how they did that!) make your own picture puzzle and conquer the city making phone calls.
These are great times for creative people…

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conferences, cross media, locative games

Preparing for the apparently ubercool conference about locative games in Salzburg, featuring seminars from the swedish IperG, wizards of locative games (I wonder how many people in the world actually play locative games, and I wonder where can I find statistics) and many more I absolutely don’t know about. Really looking forward to it.