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South Korea also crowd sourcing intelligence – via game

June 30, 2009 /

South Korea’s normally clandestine intelligence agency is running an internet game challenging citizens to spot real North Korean spies and uncover communist moles.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service is running the game on its website, challenging ordinary citizens to keep a close eye on people who praise the communist North.

It also asks people to dob in anyone taking photos of sensitive military bases, those who stick up pro-North Korea propaganda, and even anyone who covers their mouth when they talk.

The spy agency is offering laptops, cameras and game consoles to 200 winners.

ABC: Game challenges Koreans to spot real spies

(Thanks m1k3y)

Create your own video games with new DS game making game

May 11, 2009 /

Once you draw the objects that you’ll want to use in your game, you can jump into the programming tool, which asks you plain-language questions about what you want your objects to do. For example, when I put my main character dog Otis onto the screen, the game walked me through these steps:

1. Which frame of animation should I start out displaying?
2. Where should I be? Should I be alone, or attached to another object?
3. Should I be placed in exactly one spot, or in some general area?
4. Where/In what area?

Wired: Game About Making Games Takes Nintendo to New Heights

Wired: Made in Ore’s Game Design Process, Explained

Bolo Bolo board game

March 15, 2009 /

bolo bolo board game

At last a game with a future we can pursue: a new world with new qualities. A world without daily work routines, traffic jams, bureaucracy, deforestation, and hunger problems. A world with more exchanges, more experiences, and more human interaction. Better improvements can not be hoped for: more money and more consumption, yet more renunciation. Improvements today which are more friendly to life will produce more cultural riches, and more exchanges between all. This is all with a minimal burden on the environment and a maximum amount of self-determination. Put an end to the monopoly!

You choose a new homeland, a new Bolo. Every Bolo has a special way of life and is nearby. The organization of your chosen community needs you to bring it goods. You obtain distinct items during the course of the game. Any surplus produced in your own Bolo is trade able with other players. Every exchange offers a new experience. Also, every visit to another Bolo brings new knowledge.

Which Bolo should be judged to be first? Last can quickly become first, as when someone has attained a new innovation, it can quickly be shared with the rest of the collective through visits and the cultural exchanges that result!

—

bolo’ bolo is game designer / Anarchist P.M.’s second foray into political board games, with his first being the cult tile laying favourite Demono. bolo’ bolo is based upon the book of the same name which lays out P.M.’s ideal society based upon sub-communities, each autonomous, with an economy fueled by trade.

Game components are in both German and French, and are rather archaic with the ‘cards’ being coloured paper with black ink style drawings, absolutely nothing like Demono’s more lush visuals.

The basic idea of the title is that each player represents one of the “bolos” on the board, each of which specialises in the production of certain things, and which needs certain others, which is accomplished via trade.t

More info and pics: BoardGameGeek

(via OVO)

$12 computers already on sale in developing world

March 13, 2009 /

playpower 12 dollar computer

The $12 computing system itself defies conventional expectations of what a computer today should be. The soul of the Apple II and a geek microprocessor favorite of the 1970s, the 8-bit 6502 processor is the heart of these computers. It is small enough to be contained within a full-size keyboard and sold for mere dollars. The keyboard also has a slot for game cartridges, and is usually sold with a mouse and two game controllers. Many of these systems are currently on sale as “TV computers” in Bombay, Bangalore and Nicaragua. They are often packaged in boxes emblazoned with unlicensed cartoon art (Mario, Spiderman) and misspelled English (“Lerrn compiters the fun way!”) and are bundled with games that would likely be copyright violations in the United States. And like the early home computers sold in the United States, they plug into a TV screen for display. […]

It’s an ambitious project and one that requires just a tad of youthful optimism to pull it off. Dodge a pothole in China or India and you are likely to bump into the carcass of yet another ambitious attempt to bring low-cost computing to the developing world. The MIT Media Lab-backed One Laptop Per Child project planned to bring $100 computers to those in need. That project has never been able to achieve that price point, although OLPC cofounder Mary Lou Jepsen said Tuesday here that more than a million of the project’s XO laptops had been shipped to kids in more than 30 countries. Recently, Indian government officials made an announcement of a $10 “computer” that proved to be a dud.

Full Story: Wired

Powerplay’s web site

Games as work

January 15, 2009 /

This is “human computation,” the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter.

Odds are you’ve already benefited from von Ahn’s work. Like when you type in one of those stretched and skewed words before getting access to a Yahoo email account or the Ticketmaster store. That’s a Captcha, which von Ahn developed in 2000 to thwart spambots. Or there’s von Ahn’s picture-labeling games, which have lured thousands of bored Web surfers into tagging 300,000 photos online — doing it so effectively that Google bought his idea last year to improve its Image Search engine.

Full Story: Wired

(via mathpunk)

Games as work

January 15, 2009 /

This is “human computation,” the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter.

Odds are you’ve already benefited from von Ahn’s work. Like when you type in one of those stretched and skewed words before getting access to a Yahoo email account or the Ticketmaster store. That’s a Captcha, which von Ahn developed in 2000 to thwart spambots. Or there’s von Ahn’s picture-labeling games, which have lured thousands of bored Web surfers into tagging 300,000 photos online — doing it so effectively that Google bought his idea last year to improve its Image Search engine.

Full Story: Wired

(via mathpunk)

Mattel Mindflex – brainwave “levitation” toy?

January 6, 2009 /

mattel mindflex

Mattel’s keeping mum about the technology behind its Mindflex game, but – according to several online sources – the game requires the user to wear a headset equipped with sensors that measure brainwave activity.

This ‘activity’ is then used to guide a small foam ball through an obstacle course of hoops, which can be customised by the gamer.

It’s still unclear how the ball is kept in the air throughout its journey around the obstacle course. Some reports have claimed that a fan’s used, whilst other sources have said that Epoc-esque technology is the key to Mindflex’s power.

Full Story: Register Hardware

(via Grinding)

What’s wrong with ARGs and how to make them better

December 29, 2008 /

args are story games

ARG company Six to Start‘s CEO on the problems with ARGs and how to make them better.

Don’t have enough players
The people who play are weird
The people who play have no money
They’re not mainstream
We make games for the hardcore
We’re too expensive
We don’t scale
We lie (“this is not a game”)

His basic suggestions:

No more:

* viewing source code
* “de-stegging” (which, to be honest, sounds a bit like tea-bagging, and you don’t want to know what that means if you don’t already know)
* waiting for stuff to happen
* breaking codes
* breaking more codes
* making use of esoteric knowledge (for no apparent reason)
* viewing more source code
* solving stupid puzzles (for no apparent reason)
* (encouraging me to) buy stock in UV torch companies (because of above stupid puzzles and esoteric codes)
* more waiting; and importantly
* not telling me what to do

And more:

* short, snappy, fun gameplay (which may be entirely appropriate in the context of a longer, less snappy and more involved arc)
* stuff like what 42 Entertainment did with Last Call Poker: which was embed the game of Poker, something a sizeable proportion of the normal human populace understands, into a game that not many people understood
* stuff like what Jane McGonigal did with The Lost Sport, which was create a playground game that anyone, anywhere, could play, any when. Ignore all the rest of the stuff for The Lost Ring like the amnesiac sportspeople, that’s just a red herring. Ignore the blog network too, that was just a diversion. And the classy, expensive trailer video. Just concentrate on the game. You know, the fun bit.
* Oh, playtesting. That’s good. Because, you know, you’re making a game. So test it. Just like you’d test your user interface.
* use proper game design. That means thinking and not going “Well, I guess if we just ROT-13 this piece of text, then it’ll be fun!”
* make your games repeatable. A non-repeatable live ARG (ie one that starts at one time, runs for a period of time, and then finishes and is only really playable while it’s live) is the equivalent of investing a sizeable proportion of money on a big budget prime-time tv show that you demand everyone watch at the same time and can’t record to watch later. In the world of I WANT EVERYTHING NOW, that’s known as Being Stupid.
* Oh, and be social. You know, with your friends.

Full Talk: Six to Start

(Thanks Public Individual)

Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome – Skilluminati Research

December 2, 2008 /

The reason I opened this with the Nick Douglas joke — aside from the fact I thought it was funny — is the fact that all of the best content from the Superstruct project grew outside the original petri dish. Most of the best brainfood wound up growing on the Tumblr platform, which makes sense…I would especially recommend The Gupta Option.

In fact, the Superstruct information works so much better on other platforms, I’m kind of confused why they’d take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place. Check out the Reconstruct Ning page — it handles every aspect of usability and information design better than the actual site. Much like the Obama campaign, the best thing to come out of Superstruct is the community that it created. To me, that’s awesome enough to still give Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio and the rest of the folks at IFTF credit for a job well done.

Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome // Skilluminati Research.

Army Launches $50 Million Videogame Push

November 24, 2008 /

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command is getting ready to pour $50 million into videogames that’ll help troops get ready for combat.

Development won’t start until 2010, Stars & Stripes reports. The games themselves wont be ready until 2015. By then, the U.S. military will be in its eighth decade, using games to prep troops for war — starting with primitive, 1940s flight simulators bought from a Coney Island amusement park.

This isn’t the Army’s first stab at developing games, either. In 1999, the Army teamed up with gaming and Hollywood pros to found the Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles; it’s become one of the world’s most advanced schools for simulation-building. 2002 saw the debut of the wildly-successful shoot-em-up, America’s Army, developed by the military as a recruiting tool. In 2004, the Army set up a videogame studio in North Carolina. Last year, Training and Doctrine Command opened a new office for gaming.

Full Story: Danger Room

See also: the military-nintendo complex

Previously:

America’s Army: Free Video Game, Social Engineering Tool, Surveillance Platform

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