A creative mix of art will showcase the talents of Champlain College students, alumni, faculty and staff during the 18th annual South End Art Hop on Sept. 10 and 11, 2010.

Showing during the weekend … a movie featuring Game Art student work from Amanda Crispel, Champlain College’s program director of Game Design, and Game Art and Animation.

Champlain College’s Emergent Media Center will showcase its new online game Breakaway, a collaborative project with the United Nations and Population Media Center and its Google Map project in partnership with the City of Burlington.

– Champlain College Partners With South End Art Hop @ Champlain College

Trailer for Breakaway! – Chapter Two:

– Warren Spector, keynote speaker at PAX 2010

Warren Spector is lead developer of Epic Mickey, a videogame that is “part of an effort by The Walt Disney Company to re-brand the Mickey Mouse character by moving away from his current squeaky clean image and reintroducing the mischievous side of his personality.”

Screenshots from the opening sequence: the sorceror retires for the night …

Mickey faces the consequences of his actions:

I was fascinated by Fantasia — especially The Sorceror’s Apprentice — at an early age. So yes, I’m curious what Epic Mickey has to offer.

When we weren’t planting beans in the former back yard, or digging mold out of the attic insulation, we had to do rehab therapy. This was our prisoner consciousness-building encounter scheme. The regime made us play social games. We weren’t allowed computer games in prison: just dice, graph paper, and some charcoal sticks that we made ourselves.

So, we played this elaborate paper game called “Dungeons and Decency.” Three times a week. The lady warden was our Dungeon Master.

– Link

Students who may have been scolded by their parents for spending too much time playing video games are turning their passion into a promising career, thanks to more universities offering degrees in video game design and development.

The Entertainment Software Association reported last week that 300 American colleges and universities are offering courses and degrees in video game design, development, programming and art this academic year, a nearly 20 percent increase over last year.

– Johanna Thompson @ Ashland Daily Tidings: August 24, 2010

Images:

• Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia, Einzelblatt, Szene: Henricus de Alemannia vor seinen Schülern by Laurentius de Voltolina
• Pac-man

Out in the game design blogosector, Kirk Hamilton makes an interesting connection between Inception and in-game tutorials:

Inception’s Usability Problem

For me, Nolan’s dreamjacking caper was the film-going equivalent of sitting through a videogame that is all tutorial and no play.

For those of us in the gaming set, one of the coolest things about Inception is its narrative set-up. Here is a videogame movie that isn’t based on a game, it’s simply … a videogame movie. In other words, rather than adapting an existing game’s story a la Prince of Persia or Hitman, Inception presents an original story built on the fundamental tenets of videogames. It’s a tale of people transporting their consciousness into a construct where notions of life, death, time and identity become quite different than in the waking world. So I suppose it’s appropriate that the film’s biggest shortcoming feels so fundamentally game-y in nature.

I found Inception’s script to be an overwhelming stream of unfettered information the likes of which would be inexcusable in a modern-day videogame. For the entire run of the film, characters do nothing but deliberately, forcefully explain and expound upon the ever-more-complex rules and systems that Nolan has designed, leaving the audience no room to actually internalize any of it.

– Kirk Hamilton @ Gamer Melodico

Charles Webb follows up on these ideas with some observations about how the Architect is what game designers would call a Level Designer:

The Film Inception: Architects Designing a Game

Watching the much-talked-about Inception, I couldn’t help thinking about the overlap between the movie and level design, the aspect of game development involving the creation of in-game environments. I was not the only one. Reading this very interesting take on Inception from game development blogger Kirk Hamilton’s site [see above], I was struck again by how the role of the architect (or would that be Architect?) should have instead been that of a level designer. Hamilton’s piece looks at the movie in gaming parlance (and finds it lacking), it’s reliance on tutorial (the frequent explanation of the rules) putting him off from the narrative. What I found interesting, however, was how quickly one could jump from a discussion of this movie to one about games.

… In the modern parlance, shouldn’t Ariadne’s role [the Architect] more appropriately be given to a level designer? I wonder if this was something Nolan had in mind when writing the script for the movie –- he seems to be someone very cognizant of games, rules, and play, and must have some interest in those people who create the mechanics of each. My reading of Ariadne’s role in the film throws in language like “enemy encounters,” “spawn points,” and “critical path.” Indeed, as with a game, the characters are occupying goal-centered worlds with known sets of rules. If anything, a subtext of Inception, relevant to game and level designers, is how play can be impacted negatively when the rules are upset dramatically and frequently.

– Charles Webb @ Conducive Chronicle

Interesting points all round.

I’m a big fan of in-game tutorials. I got a lot of pleasure from Half-Life and Half-Life 2, in part because the tutorials were fun in their own right.

It’s for real; the Chinese are building it:

The idea is to make use of the space between regular-size cars and bridges, thus saving construction costs as well as minimizing congestion impact by allowing cars to drive underneath these jumbo buses.

– Richard Lai @ Engadget.com

Awesome!

Via Slashdot.

Andrew Wade has created — or discovered, if you prefer — a self-replicating pattern in Conway’s Game of Life. New Scientist reports:

Dubbed Gemini, [Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape’s length but, made up of two constructor arms and one “destructor”, plays a key role. Gemini’s initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete.

As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.

The “offspring” is identical to its parent, but it has shifted up and slightly to the left — another first for Life: every other known pattern moves along one of the eight compass points, but Gemini travels across the grid in a north by north-west direction.

– New Scientist

Via Slashdot.

Conway’s Game of Life @ Wikipedia

I first encountered Conway’s game in my late teens, which is to say the late seventies. It fascinated me then, and it still has a certain magical hold over my imagination.

From the comments:

What I take away from the article is that Bioware can make games like that because they have a proven track record of making games like that financial successes, but that a development team with a less powerful resume probably couldn’t get it done. Not because the team wouldn’t be up to it creatively or technically, but because in the current market, management/investors wouldn’t have enough faith in an unproven team to let them take the time to do it right.

– Mongoose Disciple

And:

Of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.

And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who’s only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn’t give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there’s a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.

It’s not even a matter of “get off my turf” as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it’s great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn’t enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.

– Moraelin

Game Seeds — a “card game created by Utrecht School of the Arts, Monobanda and Metagama to help game designers brainstorm both character design and entire games, by playfully combining their specific mechanics.”

Via Brandon Boyer @ Boing Boing.