games Archives | Page 7 of 8

Taggames

The Blame Game The Blame Game: The Dark Side of Alternate Reality Games?

August 28, 2007 / Klint Finley

That’s the cover of my 2nd book – Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games – used in conjunction with an article theorizing about a possible connection between ARGs and the sudden, mysterious deaths of two young and apparently quite talented artists, Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.

I guess if I were only interested in selling books I’d be happy, as the prominent placement of the cover on this Dreamsend blog and the subsequent interest and coverage it has generated has resulted in a surge of sales in both this and my first book. But under these conditions it just doesn’t feel right. I’d rather not have the sales created by this blogger’s insensitive and often just plain stupid speculation about the deaths of these two people.

Full Story: Alterati.

Update: See also This Alterati article.

Lonelygirl15: The End (Or the Beginning?)

September 8, 2006 / Klint Finley

ARG Net has an update about lonelygirl15 (Previously on Technoccult).

The letter from “the creators” is incredibly lame. To quote New York Times blogger Virginia Heffernan:

I don’t know what to add, except UGH at the “it’s not lies or a coherent mystery; it’s all a fascinating artistic jeu d’esprit” idea. I think Jayson Blair might even have tried that one.

In fact, I’d rather that The Creators were more serious–more mysterious–more even, hm, Thelemic about it all. I mean that, whatever their ideology or frame of mind, I wish they showed more heart for the actual stuff of the videos; I don’t quite see, for example, how sloughing off Bree as the “magical faerie spirit in all of us” (or whatever that was) is going to win them any allegiance over here, where Bree–the character AND the live being playing her–were what originally excited us.

In other words, I didn’t set out to see a big art experiment. I set out to get to know Bree. And it’s not fair to make it sound as if that’s an infantile motivation for looking at the vids, or as if higher minds would understand that the lofty call of filmmaking qua filmmaking supersedes the draw of a fictional character.

Dickens was careful not to tell his crazed, besotted fans: “Little Nell’s not important! She’s just everygirl! It’s me! I’m a WRITER! And the novel is a NEW FORM!”

lonelygirl15 – Thelemite?

September 3, 2006 / Klint Finley

The white-hot spark of a YouTube user named LonelyGirl15 has set the dry timber of the summer Internet community ablaze. Ostensibly the video blog of a teenaged American girl named Bree, the 23 videos posted so far have chronicled a budding romance with a boy named Daniel, but there’s a twist: Bree’s family is very religious, she is home-schooled, and she has pledged a “purity bond” with her father. Even stranger is the fact that Bree’s religion is never named, and in fact on various comments on YouTube she has said that it is not mainstream – “We’re not Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or anything like that.” There’s also a mysterious picture of famous occultist Aleister Crowley on Bree’s bedroom wall, above a candelabra which she’s vehement that Daniel not light. And wait – that Crowley picture is new – it used to be something else (could that possibly bear a resemblance to Baphomet?) A dark twist, indeed.

Full Story: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Magickal RPG

December 1, 2004 / Klintron

I don’t really get into RPGs anymore, but this looks interesting:

The Swing is in RPG (Role-playing Game). The basic premise of The Swing is that Reality is like the swing of a pendulum. Sometimes it swings in one direction; sometimes it swings in the opposite direction. Sometimes reality is dragons and faeries, sometimes it lasers and computers. The Swing is about making your game into what you want it to be. The Swing is designed around the thought that a person?s WILL can shape reality. A character?s WILL can shape the game, the world and all those within.

(via Xiombarg)
What was the name of that RPG that was based on Burrough’s Interzone stories?

Update: Seems the link to this is dead, but here’s a review of the game

Connect the dots

October 30, 2004 / Klint Finley

Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?

Camera phone movie

$200 digital film

Machinima

3D gaming on cell phones

Voodoo

DIY video projectors (or and commercial portable projectors)

Red | Blue

Wireless future

Open Source TV

Surrealist and other Beautiful Games

September 2, 2004 / Klintron

Anne has remixed A Book of Surrealist Games and adapted it for the web. It’s quite wonderful.

creating new superstitions

COME UP WITH A NEW SUPERSTITION.

examples:

When passing a police station, sneeze loudly to avoid misfortune.

Keep the bone of the first sardine eaten in the year to ensure no money worries.

Surrealist Games.

The Hidden Mysteries of Chess and Playing Cards

August 25, 2004 / Klintron

History of the west’s two favorite games.

There are two types of games which provide the most commonly-used gaming metaphors, and those are chess and the playing cards. These are the games most commonly played in the Western world throughout the last five centuries, familiar to any school child: one a game of strategy, the other a game, mostly, of chance. Research indicates, however, that the two systems of gaming may in fact have had a common origin.

Tracy Twyman: Work with the Square and Compass: The Hidden Mysteries of Chess and Playing Cards

(via El Centro).

Interesting collaborative game

April 30, 2004 / Klint Finley

I’m quite interested in the possibility of using games to get work done, and here’s a quite interesting application. Boing Boing explains:

The game throws up an image in a Java applet, then asks you and an anonymous “partner” elsewhere on the net to type in keywords until both of you have a word in common — IOW, until you and a stranger can agree on a good label for the picture. Presumably, this is being added to a metadata database for the purpose of cataloguing all the images on the net. Neat idea.

Editor’s note: sTaRe was a blog that ran from at least mid-2002 until at least late-2003. I was a guest editor there for about six months in 2003 before the site shut down. I posted a list of all the links I shared there below before the site went away.

Uncle Roy All Around You (site gone, check out the Wikipedia entry)

34n118w

Supafly

Landscape as Interface (cancelled Evergreen program)

Yukinori Yanagi

Tribe 13 (old homepage for the Tribe 13 gallery in Seattle)

Kris Kuksi (old homepage of artist Kris Kuksi

Memo to Barbie: You Aren’t The Only Model Ken Knows

Knock it off with the trucker hats already

Reefer gladness: Drug users in the next office and atop the corporate ladder

I Can Believe It’s Not Real Absinthe!

Bleeding Edge of 1983

New kid’s theme park simulates real-life

Geonotes (virtual graffiti)

1,000 Journals

The Dullest Blog in the World

droplift project

Not so tranquil

December 12, 2003 / Klint Finley

All I can do in this game is spin around in circles and get sea-sick. Maybe it would be better if I had a normal mouse instead of a trackball. But it’s an interesting concept:

From the server… The TQworld servers customize a unique game and soundtrack based on how well you’re playing. You’ll never play the same game twice and no two players see the same levels.

…to your computer… Your customized game experience arrives instantly through the internet and into the tranquility Game Browser on your computer. The data that’s sent for each level is quite small and you won’t have long “loading…” delays like other on-line games. This small burst of data only occurs between loading levels. tranquility doesn’t require a continuous net connection while you’re playing.

…to the subconscious. This is where the our magic happens. As you play tranquility, you’ll subconsciously synchronize with the visual and audio patterns.

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind