The Frankenstein MAME cabinet — it's alive!
It’s cool enough to build your own MAME (multiple arcade machine emulator) cabinet – imagine having thousands of classic games ready to play. Mix in a little monster-movie magic and some steampunk styling and you have yourself a fantastic toy, albeit a pretty large one.
The only thing I can think of that it’s missing are some Tesla coils – now that would be a show-stopper!
See the project at Frankencade (via Gizmodo).
Gaming Great Jane McGonigal Challenges the Industry: Make People Happier
Along with the usual news and excitement of the Game Developers Conference, going on this week in San Francisco, a speech by gaming guru Jane McGonigal stands out for one reason: She challenged game designers to actually make gamers happier.
McGonigal, the self-described "game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being" and one of the 20 Most Important Women in Gaming, planted the seeds for GDC speech on her blog Avant Game. "Reality is broken. Why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?" But if you think the argument is just another run-of-the-mill criticism of the violence, tension and attendant gore that pervades most videogames, then you’re going to be sadly disappointed.
Instead, McGonigal has a set out a sequence of design challenges to future gamemakers run to the heart of what a game could be about: entertainment, boosting human happiness, and having real-world impact.
She explains that games can "fix" broken reality by making artificial reality "happier, smarter, more engaging, and more resilient." Given that some of McGonigal’s previous projects have involved "World Without Oil"–a simulation intended to brainstorm and thus potentially avert a future post-peak oil crisis–McGonigal also foresees that over the next decade, game designers will become the "architects of extreme-scale collaboration" In particular, it’s an important part of future games design to create "diverse massively-multiplayer communities [that] tackle real-world, open-ended problems." It’d be nice to think we could game our way to a solution to the world’s issues, wouldn’t it?
Here are McGonigal’s five challenges:
- If you could: Make one person measurably happier. Who would it be, and what game would you make for them?
- If you could change: What one person does every day, or how one group thinks about one thing. What would you change, an how would your game do it?
- If your game could get: 100 people to do one thing online. What would it be, and what would it add up to?
- If you could make a game by: Embedding one micro-controlled board or one sensor in one physical object. What would it be, and how would you play with it?
- If you could make a game that: Connects two unlikely communities to do one extraordinary thing together. Who would it be, and what would they collaborate on?
It’s inspirational stuff, a pleasant intellectual contrast to the mindless hard-fragging first-person-shooter games we’re all familiar with. And its hard to argue with. The challenges are typified in McGonigal’s online global game "Top Secret Dance Off," which challenges participants to complete dance "quests" and e-mail in digital footage of themselves in action. The game relies on the principle that "dancing together = happy … humiliated together = even happier." Check out the compiled video of some entrants for the recent Dance Quest 3: Dance In a Crosswalk. It’ll make you smile.
Original article: Fast Company.
The brave new world of open-source game design
When Acclaim Games publicly unveiled its Rockfree project, a free-to-play, web-based riff on the rhythm genre, last November, it did something unusual. It invited gamers to play an early version of the game so they could weigh in on the project as it was being developed.
That may not seem like a drastic move to the beta-shrouded web world, but for game makers it is another sign that the long-standing barrier between the game maker and game player that was set up to protect the profitability of projects is crumbling. One unintentional slip — or one public demo gone wrong — had always been enough to ruin a game’s prospects. As the video game marketplace grows ever more crowded, however, community engagement is increasingly being viewed as an invaluable tool. Just as the industry’s behemoths waited for startups selling virtual items to succeed before adopting such a business model, the old guard is slowly moving to engage directly with its communities.
Read the full article at GigaOM
Amazon launches casual game download service
Amazon.com is jumping into the digitally distributed games market with its straightforwardly titled, um, "Amazon Game Downloads." The service begins its beta today and offers 500 casual titles for under $10 each. During the initial launch week, full versions of Jewel Quest 2, Build-a-lot and The Scruffs will be available to download for free.
Read the full article at Joystiq
Zerg rush week: UC Berkeley opens StarCraft class
We’ve seen colleges, in an effort to coolify their stuffy catalog, offer classes that use video games to explain academic concepts, applying a chocolate coating of gaming fun to help the pill of education to go down easier. What we like about a new StarCraft class being offered at UC Berkeley is that it’s just that: A class to help you be better at StarCraft and enjoy playing it more. Really.
From the course description: “What may look like complex topics are just ways we want you to think more deeply about the game to derive a greater satisfaction from playing. Furthermore, this understanding should have applications in real life, to further synthesize new information from limited inferences.”
Read the full article at Joystiq.
