The Cinekid festival was great - fantastic choice of films and seminars, and the main area at Westergasfabriek was lovely, a real children’s heaven (or maybe parents’?)
The area devoted to educational projects featured, together with chemistry, physics and biology, a preponderance of projects related to climate change and global warming (I wonder why….)

virtual tennis can be played indoors

here is how it feels to live at the North Pole

here is the “Climate Casino”

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

“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

Another main feature of Pergames and ACE conference is what I would like to call “participatory fitness”, that is technology-mediated sociable situations to exercise together.
The recent proliferation of “sociable fitness tools” is perhaps unrelated to the mild success of EyetoyTM: Kinetic, pseudo-game to exercise with your Playstation, and maybe is rather dependent from the latest fashion of motion detection devices.
Anyway, Pergames features a number of “networked exertion games”, like “Breakout for two”, cross between soccer and the computer game “Breakout”. Both players kick a ball against a physical wall, where is projected a lifesize videoconference image enabling the players to interact with each other (why should people play soccer indoors instead of simply meeting outside, I don’t get) - “Airhockey over a distance” repeats the same concept, of two players separated each with an airhockey table, and “PushN’Pull”, in which two remote players are basically pulling the same exercise bar in opposite directions (the two exercise bars remotely communicate data about strength and direction); “Table Tennis for Three” enhances the concept involving remote players, while “Jogging over a distance” offers social joggers a “jogging together experience” although geographically apart, via headphones and devices to track the joggers’ speed. “Fitness Adventure”, from another research group, tries and combine location based games with fitness, enhancing sociability and the opportunity for face to face interaction.

The common tract of this new generation training projects compared to the Playstation is SOCIABILITY; the main goal is to do something (in this case fitness) and do it together.
Some try to connect persons living in different places, as the web does, others try and organize LOCAL GROUPS, in the style of web 2.0, a virtual stratagem to create connections in real life.

As usual, new technologies supply to insufficiencies in (western) society to provide aggregation sites and motives - when will all these “sociable systems” be noticed by State organs, like for instance social security, and be employed for public use?
The social potential of pervasive, locative and mixed reality games is huge, I want to read more from the Convergence Consortium at MIT and see if Jenkins and the group actually talk about a “participatory revolution”, although the word “revolution” is not so hot anymore.

Technorati Tags: conference, location based games, participatory, social interactive television

another great chance to ponder about the interrelation between cross media structure and games, and another call for papers that I am going to miss:

“The Future Play Conference focuses on three main themes. The first theme, future game development, addresses academic research and emerging industry trends in the area of game technology and game design. The second theme, future game impacts and applications, includes academic research and emerging industry trends focused on designing games for learning, for gender, for serious purposes, and to impact society. Finally, the third theme, future game talent, is designed to provide a number of industry and academic perspectives on the knowledge, skills, and attitude it takes to excel in the games industry.

Future Play addresses these issues through exciting and thought-provoking keynotes from leaders in academia and industry, peer-reviewed paper sessions, panel sessions (including academic and industry discussions), workshops (including design, technology, and career workshops), and exhibitions of posters, games, and the latest game technologies and supports from industry-leading vendors. The highlight of the games exhibition is a peer-reviewed competition of games in three categories: Indie Games, Serious Games, and Student Games.

For Future Play 2007, Algoma University College teams up with the Ontario University Institute of Technology to bring you some of the most thought provoking and talented people in the gaming world today.”

Submission deadline: June 30, 2007

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conference, event, 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