Jordan Clarke
by Pedro Silva on December 23rd, 2009
Repare-se nos detalhes: luz reflectida nos cubos (HDR), reflexos no chão (composição), movimentação da câmara enquanto cubos animados (camera tracking e match moving). É o que podemos dizer de um objecto de grande beleza estética aliado a uma grande eficiência técnica. Jordan Clarke foi aluno da VFS e tem outros trabalhos de interesse na sua página Vimeo.
Fonte: virtual-illusion.blogspot.com
Videojogos2009 – Conferência de Ciências e Artes dos Videojogos
by Pedro Silva on October 29th, 2009
Decorrerá a 26 e 27 de Novembro próximos na Universidade de Aveiro:
Videojogos2009 – Conferência de Ciências e Artes dos Videojogos é um
evento organizado pelo Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da
Universidade de Aveiro (através do Centro de Estudos das Tecnologias e
Ciências da Comunicação – CETAC.media), pelo Departamento de
Engenharia Informática da Universidade de Coimbra (através do Centro
de Informática e Sistemas) e pela Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos
Videojogos.
As conferências da Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos Videojogos
realizam-se anulamente e são um encontro para promover a investigação
e a indústria de videojogos em Portugal. Esta Conferência de Ciências
e Artes dos Videojogos conta com a participação de investigadores e
profissionais da área dos videojogos para divulgação de trabalhos e
troca de experiências entre a comunidade académica e indústria de
videojogos. Para além disso, destaca-se a promoção da articulação em
espaço Lusófono. A partir deste ano será vinculada uma forte
articulação com a SBGames (Sociedade Brasileira de Jogos) no sentido
de promover a divulgação de trabalhos e troca de experiências entre as
sociedades de jogos dos dois países.
Esta 1ª Conferência da Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências dos Videojogos
é um evento mutidisciplinar, procura contribuições de diferentes áreas
do conhecimento, desde a arte, desenho e narrativa de jogo, a aspectos
da sua computação, bem como o estudo a teorização e a reflexão crítica
sobre as práticas e aplicações no mercado e na indústria. A
conferência procura submissões originais, de qualidade, encorajando a
participação quer da indústria de videojogos, quer da comunidade
académica.
Video Game Classics Brought To Life
by Pedro Silva on August 19th, 2009
Hamburg photographer Partrick Runte has taken Arcade classic and used the geometric shapes to make a “Human Experience”… Check out the pics!
Source: http://thecakeonline.wordpress.com
ICIDS – Interactive Storytelling 2009
by Pedro Silva on July 7th, 2009
FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
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Extended Submission Deadline July 13th, 2009
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*** ICIDS – Interactive Storytelling 2009 ***
2nd International Conference on
Interactive Digital Storytelling
09-11 December 2009, Guimarães, Portugal
Extended Submission Deadline: July 13th, 2009
The Making Of: Pitfall!
by Pedro Silva on June 30th, 2009
Format: Atari 2600
Release: 1982
Publisher: Activision
Developer: David Crane
Pitfall Harry is stuck in the jungle. He’s racing through, swinging from vines, jumping on alligator heads, grabbing treasures and looking for shortcuts. For David Crane, the creator and programmer of Pitfall!, one of the first Activision games for the Atari 2600, the hardest part of the game wasn’t avoiding the scorpions or coiled snakes, it was trying to jam a lot of game into only 4K of memory.
“I loved the technical challenge of designing games on the 2600,” says Crane of Atari’s first console unit. He and his fellow game developers for the much-loved 2600 were more than aware of the restrictions they were dealing with. They would have to write an entire game, complete with graphics, gameplay, sound effects and all the scoring in just 4096 bytes. You could hardly let your imagination run wild with that kind of memory size. “A lot of the game features in those days were not what you could think of, but what you could actually achieve.” At that time, Crane’s complete design philosophy was to first think of a clever and original technical achievement and then to build a game around it.
“The ‘little running man’ was really the technical hurdle,” says Crane. “If you think back to the state-of-the-art videogames of the late-’70s, there were very few attempts at animated figures in games. You controlled tanks, jet planes, Pong paddles and so on because the limited number of display pixels severely restricted the creation of smooth animation. I had developed a realistic-looking human character in 1979 before I had a game idea that needed one. The difficulty was coming up with a game that made sense to have a little running man in it.” For three years, Crane tested the character in different scenarios such as a ‘cops and robbers’ game, but it didn’t work and was therefore shelved.
In 1982, while he was between games, Crane finally decided he would figure out a game for the ‘little running man.’ “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the centre. I said, ‘Okay, I have a little running man and let’s put him on a path’ (two more lines drawn on the paper). ‘Where is the path? Let’s put it in a jungle’ (draw some trees). ‘Why is he running?’ (draw treasures to collect, enemies to avoid and so on). And Pitfall! was born.” The man became known as Pitfall Harry. “This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete. In that era we said we spent 90 per cent of our time writing the last ten per cent of the game.”
…
Source: www.edge-online.com
Read all article here.
Future of Games: The Game of Life
by Pedro Silva on June 30th, 2009
Everyone complains about “e-mail overload” — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game’s artificial currency of gold pieces. They’ll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?
So Reeves’ firm, Seriosity, built a system — dubbed “Attent” — that does this. Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent’s Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it’ll get through. Sure enough, that’s what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.
“What we’ve proven is that games can change behavior,” Reeves says.
We tend to think of videogames as frivolous activities — something we do to kill time, not to improve productivity. But a new generation of designers is taking a different tack: Like Reeves, they’re using the principles of videogame design to transform everyday activities — helping people work more efficiently, use less energy, and get healthier. Turn the world into a game, they argue, and it works better. Give people a competition, and it can transform a dull-but-important task into something exciting.
“Games create drama and excitement,” as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. “We’ve done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life.”
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By Clive Thompson | Read here all article.
Publicidade nos videojogos é 500% mais eficaz que na TV
by Pedro Silva on March 30th, 2009
A publicidade veiculada nos videojogos é mais eficaz que os spots de televisão, segundo um estudo conduzido pela NeoEdge Networks, que concluiu que a primeira garante um aumento de 500% na notoriedade da marca.
Segundo o estudo Online Vídeo Advertising Effectiveness, os jogos online conseguem «melhorar substancialmente a performance e percepção do consumidor».
O estudo foi conduzido em conjunto com a empresa de estudos de mercado Frank Magid Associates e o anunciante Zappos.com.
«Mais de 80% [dos questionados] reconheceu correctamente a Zappos.com como o anunciante que lhes permitia jogar de forma gratuita. E 56% destes ficaram com uma impressão favorável do Zappos.com por causa desta publicidade», referiu a vice-presidente executiva da Frank Magid Associates, Vicki Cohen.
Ainda segundo a NeoEdge Networks, os resultados indicam que os jogadores vêem, ouvem e lembram-se das marcas mais facilmente porque estão a jogar, algo que a televisão tradicional não consegue fazer.
by: Carlos Martinho
Fonte: www.jornalbriefing.iol.pt