CoinLab Attracts $500,000 in Venture Capital for Bitcoin Projects

Seattle based Bitcoin startup CoinLab secured a $500,000 investment from various investors such as Silicon Valley firm Draper Associates and angel investor Geoff Entress. CoinLab is an emerging umbrella group for cultivating and launching innovative Bitcoin projects.

CEO Vessenes said ‘if there is a currency that can trade around the world, it’s semi-anonymous, it’s instant, it’s not controlled by government or bank, what’s the total value of that currency? The answer to that is, if it works, it’s gotta be in the billions. It just has to be for all the reasons you might want to send money around the world.’

This type of talk is common from Bitcoin enthusiasts but apparently seasoned investors are starting to agree.

Forbes explains the details of their business plan but in short it has to do with tapping the GPU mining potential of gamers, more specifically gamers of free-to-play games. This would add a new revenue stream for online game companies that are trying to provide free games profitably.

The phrase “Forbes explains the details of their business plan but in short it has to do with tapping the GPU mining potential of gamers” evoked this nicely barbed reply from girlintraining (1395911):

So ‘in short’, they’re going to trojan a video game and turn a bunch of PCs into a botnet to generate bitcoins. But because it’s a business doing this, and not some teenager in his mom’s basement, they’re going to make billions instead of go to jail? That sound about right?

If any other kind of software you ran was doing something in the background other than what you wanted to do, it would be called malware.

– Source

Point well made: business or malware? Or both?

About Bitcoin:

Bitcoin is a decentralized electronic cash system that uses peer-to-peer networking, digital signatures and cryptographic proof so as to enable users to conduct irreversible transactions without relying on trust. Nodes broadcasttransactions to the network, which records them in a public history, called the blockchain, after validating them with a proof-of-work system. Users make transactions with bitcoins, an alternative, digital currency that the network issues according to predetermined rules. Bitcoins do not have the backing of and do not represent any government-issued currency.

– Bitcoin @ Wikipedia

Naturally, anything to do with the power of money — what I might call “using symbols to make real things obey your will” — is divisive, contentious, and far too complicated to summarize in this blog post.

Is Bitcoin a good thing, a bad thing? A revolution in economics, the byproduct of misplaced good intentions, a barefaced scam? Outright lunacy by fogheaded idealists?

All of these have been proposed; I don’t know the truth, and leave it at that for now.

Avi Solomon recently interviewed Miller for Boing Boing:

Avi: What surprised you the most in your work with the kids?

Charley: Kids are typically naturals when it comes to game design and it’s easy to understand why: they know what’s fun and all they want to do is playtest. But what might surprise adults is to know that most children these days are able to wrap their minds around complex systems. That might be thanks to the amount of gaming kids are able to enjoy these days.

Avi: What is the best place to start learning about game design?

Charley: To be a designer, you have to be a player first. Start by playing a variety of games and try to deconstruct the experiences. Start asking yourself questions about why the designer choose certain elements and thinking about how systems are working together to create the dynamics of the game. That should get anyone nice and confused but hopefully stirred to know more.

– Game Design with Kids: An Interview with Charley Miller

“Quasi-Objects” regards data actualization, the production of biologically non-functional organisms and ecosystems as transient output of an operative practice: aesthetics of process…

lorenzooggiano.net

I find these forms entirely fascinating, and practically begging for game design applications.

The forms are computer generated. I have no further details, nothing about the software involved. But just from looking at these still photos, I can see algorithms at play which would make a terrific Boss Battle in a first-person shooter … The Blob meets The Matrix ….

Somebody ought to make a game based on these principles. They really should. I would pay to play such a game, and then pay more for the source code.

Via Boing Boing, via but does it float.

The D&D bracer is a fairly quick, fun, nerdy LilyPad project. The final product is a wearable bracer with a display that will randomly generate numbers between 1 and 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, or 100 in response to arm movement, so it can effectively replace all of the dice in your bag for a D&D session. It can also serve as a decorative costume piece to get you in character!

This is an intermediate LilyPad tutorial. You can expect to do a fair amount of sewing, moderate crafting, and you’ll need to be able to upload code to a LilyPad arduino board. You don’t have to write the code, it’s been supplied for you. However, if you want to practice or play around with it, there’s room to customize.

– Sparkfun Electronics

Via Boing Boing.

Art has proved a fecund source of game ideas. Tetsuya Mizuguchi was inspired by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky to create Rez; Ken Levine drew on the Art Deco movement for Bioshock; Uncharted co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand looked at the works of Victorian painters such as David Roberts and Caspar David Friedrich for the exotic locations that Nathan Drake discovers. And countless dungeon designers have looked at the complex works of MC Escher and Giovanni Battista Piranesi for their labyrinthine environments.

– Keith Stuart @ The Guardian

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) Foundation awarded 30 students with scholarships for the 2011-12 academic year recently. The purpose is to expand educational opportunities for aspiring game designers and impassion the next generation of industry innovators. Totaling $90,000, 15 college students currently enrolled in video game-related programs, as well as 15 graduating high school seniors aspiring to pursue a degree in video game design or development received scholarships ….

This year’s grantees hail from a diverse collection of 21 colleges and universities from across the nation, including DePaul University, Rochester Institute of Technology, George Mason University, and Drexel University. Additionally, this year’s recipients have academic and artistic concentrations in a wide array of video game-related fields, consisting of computer science and programming, software engineering, graphic design, animation and digital entertainment ….

The wide spectrum of schools and concentrations reflects a growing trend among institutions of higher education to offer video game-related programs ….

Generating over $25 billion in revenue in 2010, the video game industry has proven to be one of America’s fastest-growing business sectors ….

– Game Industry News

Congratulations to the recipients!

See also Entertainment Software Association Foundation.

The overall aim is to compare the dynamics of evolutionary versus Monte Carlo search methods for game design, and to gauge the usefulness of the computer as a creative collaborator in the game design process.

The ideal game system to test these ideas would be:

• Tightly constrained and with a small, clearly defined rule set.
• Simple enough that most of the rule combination space could be searched.
• Complex enough to provide a range of interesting games.
• Small enough that its board state would fit into a single integer (for efficient implementation).
• Novel enough that its search space was largely unexplored.

While I was looking for such a system, abstract gamer Tom Gilchrist mentioned a concept from Japanese aesthetics called shibui. Shibui objects balance simplicity with complexity; they may initially seem deceptively plain, but will reveal hidden depths and become more interesting the more time is spent with them.

– Cameron Browne @ BoardGameGeek

See also Shibui @ Wikipedia.

These images have a playful quality — playful about violence — which makes me think about game design, and the pleasures of violent videogames.

CUT magazine: ‘Soft Guerilla’

A series of weapons made from harmless materials for a feature article centred around the topic of ‘Guerilla Gardening’ and ‘Yarn Bombing’.

Photography: Sam Hofman

– Kyle Bean

I am particularly impressed by the game JoelE invented to demonstrate his thesis:

To explore what kind of effect secondary military objectives have on games, I made a simple game that can be played on a chess board. Here are the rules:

• 1s can move 1 space
• 2s can move 2 spaces
• 3s can move 3 spaces etc.
• Green spaces upgrade from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc.
• Each upgrade space can be only used once per piece.
• To take a piece, move into it.
• The game is lost when all pieces are gone

Here is a picture of the starting position of the game:

If you guys want to try this game, and see how the upgrade spaces affect it, you can play on a chess board, using pawns for level 1, horses for level 2, bishops for level 3, queen for level 4, and king for level 5. You may need to improvise if you run out of pieces.

– JoelE @ teamliquid.net

This is brilliant: re-purposing a chessboard as logic analyzer for computer game strategies.

Tom Armitage recently posted some interesting observations on landscape architecture and game design:

Above the village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds, stands Broadway Tower. It’s a three-story-high structure, with three turrets: a folly which the Arts and Crafts movement would later use as a holiday retreat. And yet when it was built, in the 18th century, its purpose was not to be an attractive tower to overlook the village.

Rather, it was designed to look good from 22 miles away, from the grounds of the Earl of Coventry. Lovely as it is, its real job is to be a romantic piece of background scenery on the horizon.

It was built by the architect James Wyatt, under the supervision of Capability Brown, who was perhaps the foremost landscape architect in English history. Brown’s work reshaped gardens and grounds into carefully designed views for the owners of houses, and defined what landscape architecture itself could be.

We talk a lot about the influence of architecture on game design …. We can all see the influence on games of a medium in which geometric form and structure is used to influence behavior and manipulate the movement of people through space. It feels like there’s an obvious comparison between architecture and the design of three-dimensional game levels.

But I think landscape gardening is perhaps a much more interesting comparison point for the structure of game spaces, and one that is oft-neglected.

Landscape architecture shapes the behavior and intent of its observers without walls or markers. Instead, it focuses on surprise and delight: as your eye follows the gentle slope of a path down to a lake, it should feel like you discovered this. It feels like a coincidence of marvellous proportions, a secret that you discovered, that the eye is led so gracefully. In fact, it’s a carefully designed experience.

This reminds me of how game design — not just spatial design, but the designs of rules and systems — can shape player behavior.

– Tom Armitage @ Kill Screen