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hello: MMUVE IT! Australia Council InterArts Grant
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The Australia Council has announced a $30,000 grant for artists working within MUVEs. I'm hoping the Babelswarm project been responsible (is some small way) for their recognition of virtual worlds as legitimate artistic locations. The grant aims to give Australian artists the opportunity to creatively and critically explore interactive, virtual worlds, with a particular focus on the body and interfaces facilitating 'mixed realities'. The grant allows for a collaborative team of up to three artists (including a digital visual media practitioner) to develop inter-disciplinary artwork in a MMUVE of their choice. With more than 73 million participants in online games and social networking sites such as EverQuest, Legend of Zelda, Second Life and World of Warcraft (to name but a few), and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Wiimote, an opportunity exists to develop an innovative artwork engaging embodied users in a highly networked environment. Read more here...
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archive: Homo Ludens Ludens opens on the 18th at Laboral, Gijón, Spain.
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Following the success of Gameworld and Playware, Laboral brings you Homo Ludens Ludens
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial presents HOMO LUDENS LUDENS, an international exhibition and symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives and a speculation on the emergence of the “Homo Ludens Ludens”: the contemporary playing man. What does it mean “to play” and to be “a player”?
The goal of this Symposium, organised jointly with The Planetary Collegium, is to provide the framework for contemporary play, to highlight its interdisciplinary nature, and to show the multifaceted reality of our present-day entertainment society.
ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN THE EXHIBITION: John Paul Bichard, France Cadet, Derivart, Devart, Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi, Ge Jin, Vladan Joler, Radwan Kasmiya, John Klima, La Fiambrera Obrera & Mar de Niebla, Danny Ledonne, Valeriano López, Ludic Society, Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand, Martin Pichlmair & Fares Kayali, Brian Mackern, Larry Miller, MIT Lab - Drew Harry & Dietmar Offenhuber & Orkan Telhan, Molleindustria, Julian Oliver, Orna Portugaly & Daphna Talithman & Sharon Younger, Personal Cinema & the Erasers, Rolando Sánchez, Alex Sanjurjo, Gordan Savicic, Axel Stockburger, Silver & True, Román Torre, David Valentine/MediaShed (ft. Methods of Movement), Volker Morawe & Tilman Reiff, William Wegman.
I'll be exhibiting my own levelHead there (it's first public appearance, gulp). It'll be on show with other work by artists above for 5 months.
Read on for more about the accompaning symposium. Looking forward to seeing some of you there next week!
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hello: Fine job for talented map builder with GTKRadiant skills
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Kora, of Workspace Unlimited, writes:
Workspace Unlimited is currently looking for a freelance map builder to
create architectural models and 3D content with GTK Radiant for the Quake 3
game engine. One of the next ongoing projects will start in April-May 2008
and will be showed in a museum in June 2008.
For more information about us please visit:
www.workspace-unlimited.org
If you are interested in collaborating to our team you can contact us
through the contact page of our website at:
www.workspace-unlimited.org
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Babelswarm is an inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life exploring the possibilities of literary, music/sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within virtual worlds. The installation is launching in sunny Lismore, NSW on April 11th, 2008. I'll be posting a SLurl to our work blog on the day so you can join us in first- or second-person mode.
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Sometimes people come up with some idea that is so fucking excellent you wonder how on earth you survived without it. Dylan Fitterer's Audio Surf is one such game. Players set the background audio for the game by uploading music they actually like. Their favourite songs then determine the shape, speed and mood of the game. Surf Rock just reached a new level of insanity.
Audio Surf runs in Valve's Steam, a Win digital distro/management platform for games.
Via infosthetics.
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hello: Sabotage your Retro this Sunday
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Christian McCrea writes in to point us to RetroSabotage, a site doing the rounds today.
In his description "Reworked classic games to destroy original contexts or defy expectations, a bit of a coin-operated Negativland. Playing a reverse form of Breakout causes massive synaptic failure".
..and he's right, playing the ghost in PacMan produced a new and disturbing kind of vertigo while simultaneously invoking total distrust of my hands..
Cheers Christian!
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I had to nick the title from the parent article, it was simply too good. Here's the background story the game Fuel of War is set:
Sometime in the near future, gas will cost about $20 a gallon. It gets worse: China and Russia will form a military alliance that threatens the security of the United States and Europe. Amid hunger, water scarcity and power outages, the two sides will go to war. Soldiers will descend upon bombed-out cities and abandoned villages, where rusting appliances and old car engines litter the streets. Games like this are disturbing yet somehow honest. They recycle existing fears instead of inventing new sources for them. The terrible awareness that the apetite of the modern world is out-of-control - the fear that the once infinite sphere we live on is drying up - points to a kind of panic that only needs a uniform and a sub machine-gun to feel right at home within a nationalist geo-strategic, island-mentality..
We might ask why the play isn't built around sustainably solving the problem of a lack of oil, looking at other fuel sources and/or coming up with infrastructural changes that privilege other modes of transport. Perhaps that'd be too abstract, it just wouldn't speak to the fear.
Thanks go out to pix for the link. Click here for reccommended reading on this topic.
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archive: Wafaa Bilal's political game censored.
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We've written before about Wafaa Bilal's piece Domestic Tension. His new work, Night of Bush Hunting, has come under significant antagonism.
Tom Sherman, of Syracuse University writes:
Iraqi-born Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal interviewed after his show called Virtual Jihadi at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was "suspended" and he was shut out of the arts building. The art piece consists of a hacked video Al Qaeda video game called Night of Bush Hunting. The artist inserted himself as a virtual suicide bomber as a way of referencing his own anger and despair over his brother and father's death during the American occupation as well as the anger and despair of Iraqis who have lost control of their lives.
YouTube has a few interviews that will help get you up to speed on the issue.
It seems however that things have recently turned even worse for Wafaa. To cite an article at GamePolitics.
"Following his RPI expulsion, Bilal's Virtual Jihadi exhibit was moved to the nearby Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy. On Monday night, a local Republican political figure, Robert Mirch, led a
protest against Bilal's work outside the Sanctuary. Mirch, by the way, also happens to be the Public Works Commissioner for the city of Troy. In that capacity, he is responsible for enforcing building codes."
Many thanks to Tom and Christian McCrea for the updates, found on the Empyre list.
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hello: Rhizome Commissions Deadline
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Rhizome writes to let us know of an upcoming deadline for their commissions program. 
Rhizome Commissions Program
Deadline for applications: midnight, March 31, 2008
We support: New Media Art, by which we mean projects that creatively
engage new and networked technologies and also works that reflect on
the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms.
Commissioned projects can take the final form of online works,
performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made
for the context of the gallery, the public, or the web.
Amount: 7 commissions in the amount of $3000-5000
Guidelines and application forms can be found here.
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By using the scripting interface, math functions and text input fields, a clever person of questionable sanity repurposes MS Excel as a fairly capable 3D graphics engine. Read the full - and very detailed - article on Gamasutra.
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hello: Gary Gygax moves on
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Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, rolled his last d20 on Tuesday.
I'm sure a great many of you will agree (A)D&D was/is one of the richest interfaces to the engines of imagination. It certainly had my mind exploding for several years, leading to merry geekery such as Call of Cthulhu and a healthy dose of Paranoia.
Cheers to you Gary.
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hello: Brody Condon tonight at The Influencers, Barcelona.
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Hmm, we're a bit late with this one..
Nonetheless, if you're in Barcelona (or know someone who is) tell them to head down to the CCCB tonight (!) to see Brody talk at this years edition of The Influencers.
Read all about it here.
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hello: IndieCade: Call for Submissions.
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IndieCade is a very open-minded festival of independently produced games. It's brought to you by people that believe in the medium at both a grassroots and academic level. As such, they've dedicated years to the study and promotion of it as a rich platform for creative investigation.
Below is a call for proposals for the next event in Seattle, America. Indiecade promises a well curated, well thought out festival program with a focus on truly divergent and experimental approaches to game development and play. Better still, your work may get to go on the road for a year, touring in some high-profile settings..
Call for submissions—IndieCade: International Festivals of Independent
Games @ Open Satellite, July 10-13, 2008
Game artists and designers from around the world are invited to submit their work. IndieCade welcomes independent interactive media of all types, from art to commercial to academic, from ARG to abstract, from serious to shooter. Entrants will also be considered for year-round international
showcase exhibitions.
Submissions Close Midnight April 11, 2008 PST. For more information and eligibility details, and to enter, visit www.IndieCade.com
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archive: Breakthroughs in Wii Hombrew Scene..
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It looks like the Nintendo Wii itself (ie not the WiiMote and a PC) is well on its way to becoming a platform for creative exploration. Here's a summary of recent events to this effect.
- Here's a HOWTO for running hombrew code on the Wii using a GameCube SD card adapter.
- A SNES emulator has been released for the Wii and runs in "pure 100% Native Wii mode" (!link may be suffering from heavy traffic and/or seems temporarily broken. I'll keep checking up on it)
If you hear of any strictly artistic or experimental applications being developed for the Wii using these new tools, be sure to let us know!
Brought to you via /.
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hello: Mysterious company seeks gamer brain donors
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Please excuse the shamelessly misleading title. They just want to log your brain activity while you play games. It seems perfectly harmless and clearly points to some very scary interesting new technologies on the horizon.
Say them:
Emotiv’s world class team of brain research scientists is famous for their ground breaking discoveries and technology. They are currently research human emotions during multimedia interaction and are seeking volunteers to join them at their Pyrmont harbour side office to partake in this exciting project Participating in Emotiv’s current experiment involves relaxing on a couch whilst playing a new video game and having electrical profile (EEG) of your brain taken to determine your brains activity during different emotional states and mental tasks The recordings are taken using a 100% safe and pain free wireless headcap of sensors Here's the company website. Originally found here.
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GDC08 Update: Independent Loving for all.
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Looks like a good year for indie developers at this year's GDC.
First up is a "free to use graphics engine" from Sony going by the name of PhyreEngine. Apparently they are releasing complete documentation, "70+ samples" and "full source code and artwork" of sample game templates. Games known to have already used this engine include flOw, GripShift and DiRT. It's for use on desktop computers with build the PS3 as a build target (it seems). We have no idea of what license this will come under but wow.. a big step by Sony. Read more about it here.
Insomniac have announced they're opening up a whole heap of 'utility code' to developers: things that cover "common chores with benefits like memory management templates, debugging utilities, and other basic functions that every developer has a need for when making a game" to quote the article. The project goes under the name Nocturnal Initiative and seems to be just one of several big pushes toward indie-loving this GDC.
Finally it seems Microsoft (in an attempt to outlove the competition?) has released XNA from the shackles of the exclusive club as part of their - a tad misleadingly dubbed - "Youtube for games" initiative. This means that from this Autumn any XBOX360 owner can play XNA games without needing a gold-card. There's more to it than this of course. Best you go RTA.
Big thnx to Chris for the heads up.
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Paper: Avatars and the Invisible Omniscience
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My Masters research project is officially complete and passed. If you're studying virtual worlds, surveillance, or art as proposition than grab yourselves a copy and go crazy (I know I did). Many thanks to the Selectparks team for their support and encouragement over the past few years - it's been a great trip, and a privilege to be associated with such fine minds. Thanks also to the 500+ gamers who took time to fill out my questionnaire and help focus attention where it was needed. You all rock. I'll be posting links to the associated artworks soon.
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hello: Condon's Performance Modification (Nauman)
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Brody Condon is looking for dancers to help re-enact computer game death animations for his new work Performance Modification (Nauman). Auditions are happening Sunday January 27th from 2-6pm in LA (that's like... right now). The final work will be shown February 2nd.
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hello: Inclusiva-net: Just 10 days left to submit your project.
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If you've been dreaming up a project bridging digital networks and physical space - and need help bringing it to life - here's a solution: come to swinging Madrid, Spain, for two weeks and see it realised and exhibited in a high-profile setting with the help of a team of experts and collaborators.
The 2nd Inclusiva-net Meeting: Digital Networks and Physical Space will take place from 3 to 14 March 2008. There's just 10 days left to submit your projects. Hint: this is an ideal opportunity to rapidly prototype that mobile, Alternate Reality or Mixed Reality game project..
Read all about it here and make your submission!
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archive: Gamerz 02 opens in Aix-en-Provence, France.
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Gamerz 02, an exhibition of game and game-related art, opens today in Aix-en-Provence, Southern France, and will be on show until the 27th.
The show has a lot of new names and some interesting work, from traditional sculpture through to fully fledged art-games.
Artist's featured include: Dardex Mort2faim, Quentin Destieu, Romain Senatore, Sylvain Huguet, Paul Destieu, Benjamin Cadon, Sylvie Reno, Servovalve, Guillaume Stagnaro, Antonin Fourneau, Manuel Braun, Sidabitball, Confipop, Jankenpopp, Damien Aspe, Pierrick Thébault, Pierre Andrieux, Philippe Coudert, Pascal Silondi and Stephane Kyles.
Disclaimer: sadly my French is far too hairy to brave translating the announcement text. My present Spanish company currently feels similarly reluctant. Head over to the site and have a crack at it yourself.
Big thnx to Walter for passing us this link.
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SimCity source code released under the General Public License
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 As the title suggests, it's now possible to legally make, sell, redistribute, exhibit, archive your own games based on the andmark 80's classic, SimCity, under the terms of the GPL. As "SimCity" is trademarked, the project has been renamed MicroPolis and as such is available for download under that name.
From the announcement:
There's been changes to the original system like a new splash screen, some UI feedback from QA, etc. The plane crash disaster has been removed as a result of 9/11. What is initially released under GPL is the Linux version based on TCL/Tk, adapted for the OLPC (but not yet natively ported to the Sugar user interface and Python), which will also run on any Linux/X11 platform. The OLPC has an officially sanctioned and QA'ed version of SimCity that is actually called SimCity. EA wanted to have the right to approve and QA anything that was shipped with the trademarked name SimCity. But the GPL version will have a different name than SimCity, so people will be allowed to modify and distribute that without having EA QA and approve it.
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hello: WoW Artist-in-residence
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Ars Virtua have announced an artist-in-residence program for creative types working within World of Warcraft. The $400 stipend will be granted January 21/22 with applications due on the 15th. Eddo Stern is one of four jurors conducting in-world interviews. Via Networked_Performance. Orginal article here.
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archive: 24C3: Console Hacking and Corrupted Blood
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Welcome back!
I spent the latter part of the last year in Berlin at the 24th edition of the excellent Chaos Communication Conference. There were a gazillion talks crowded out by several thousand hackers (or would-be hackers). Here are two talks that stood out in relation to our interests here at SP.
The first talk was actually a 'lightning talk' called "The State of the Wii" and needs little description other than this is the first time the world has seen homebrew code running on the Nintendo Wii itself, with full input from the WiiMote. In other words, this is the beginning of fully fledged Wii games made for the Wii, running on the Wii with full access to the console's hardware.
See the above video of Ben Byer ('Bushing?') and co giving an early demonstration of this landmark feat. Here's an interview with the exploiter himself.
See also this one hour lecture on console hacking by legendary hacker Felix Domke and Michael Steil. Around 1000 people turned up for this talk following the great success of last year's lecture.
Earlier on in the conference Florian Burckhardt - co-author of the somewhat unsettling educational comic Disease Detectives - gave a lecture on the arcane topic of Modeling Infectious Diseases in Virtual Realities.
His talk takes the premise that populated MMO's like WoW make useful environments for investigating the outbreak of plagues. His thesis is this:
Disease modelling is essentially a virtualisation of reality that tries to gain insights into hitherto unknown inderdependencies and to simulate intervention scenarios. In 2005, courtesy of its creators at Blizzard Entertainment, the ancient Blood God "Hakkar the Soulflayer" unleashed a devastating plague, "corrupted blood", upon a totally unprepared population of avatars. Unintentionally, the digital "black death" spread to cities and depopulated whole areas. The epidemic could only be controlled by shutting down and restarting the game world, a measure unfortunately not available in the "real" world. However, other measures such as quarantine or improved treatment are available in the real world and can be simulated by disease modelling.
While that all might sound a bit serious the talk has some hilarious moments and great in-game footage of the famous Corrupted Blood plague being unwillingly (and willingly) spread by players.
I've archived the 24C3 footage of the event here for posterity. It'll play in VLC.
Enjoy!
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On b/h of the SP team, thanks for a super year!
(see you next digit)
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archive: WiiMote Wizardry: Johnny Chung Lee (multi)strikes again.
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Here Johnny Chung Lee genially describes his most recent magick: an interactive multi-touch-surface built from a projector, light-pen and of course, WiiMote. The kind chap also provides us with a software download..
Keep up the good work Johnny: we can only hope you won't be 'disappeared' by Microsoft Research. We've posted Johnny's WiiMote Fu here before.
Via /.. Original article here..
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archive: Primitive Collections Field
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This sounds exciting; Tommy Stockel has a new exhibition opening in Second Life of Land Art works that would be otherwise too difficult to recreate in real life. One of the defining characteristics of Land Art is that it is constrained by the physical characteristics of the geological materials from which it is made, and is vulnerable to change under the influence of natural weather and time, but free from these qualities in VR Stockel is able to output more imaginative sculptures in what is effectively the same medium; in this case Second Life's free-found prims rather than rocks and dirt.
Where land art was also seen originally as a rejection of the gross superficiality and commercialisation of mid twentieth century artistic culture, Stockel has re-imbued his superplastic virtual Primitive Collections Field with textural qualities of real world processed natural fibres like paper and cardboard, drawing in and reappraising the meta-physical, philosophical aspects of Land Art as much as he does the physical. Land Art may claim to be natural, but like paper and cardboard it is still a processing of nature.
The exhibition opens tomorrow on the 20th of December and runs until the 24th of February 2008.
Read more about the work on the press release at
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajk882kkkkrd_183ft7ncnfq
And visit the work at Boom Pearls land at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Phyllira/169/139/90
Boom Pearls is a series of art works curated in the populated 3D world Second Life.
The invited artists get free access to work within the given frame of the project. This means a world where the users can build, write, script and experience themselves through a 3D universe build by the users.
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hello: Hybrid Toys workshop at Mediamatic, Amsterdam
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Mediamatic writes:
In this concentrated hands-on course participants will develop prototypes for playful hybrid world applications. We will focus on designing physical toys with digital and/or networked components. We'll work with Arduino's and sensors, we'll apply ideas from physical computing, and we'll use the cultural and social possibilities of RFID to eventually build creative and innovative prototypes.
The Hybrid Toys workshop begins January 28 in Amsterdam. Read all about it here.
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hello: Workshop on Cute Media
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While the project page itself is anything but 'cute', the Workshop on Designing Cute Interactive Media promises to be a focused investigation into design strategies for creating emotionally engaging interfaces. The workshop will be set in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of DIS2008. It begins on Feb 24.
Sayeth the site:
The main goal of this workshop is to provide designers with a better understanding of developing ways to enhance the positive experience and effectiveness of interactive media by utilizing the psychological and culturally developed effects of cuteness.
Application submission details are here.
On the topic of emotionally engaging interaction design, is there room for a workshop on Terrifyingly Scary Interaction? Perhaps it's not needed: from the perspective of most audiences the performance anxiety imposed by interactive art seems frightening enough as it is..
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After years of using videogames in training, the U.S Army has decided to set up a dedicated game development studio strictly for the purposes of military simulation and training. Looks like state-sanctioned violent videogames are coming to a disillusioned American kid near you..
Wired has the full report here.
For a thorough breakdown of this phenomenon and its origins, read Ed Halter's book From Sun Tzu to XBox: War and Videogames.
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| Sunday, December 09 | | · | Making music with bots: q3apd 2003 - 2006 now archived. |
| Saturday, December 08 | | · | Wardive: Wireless Gamescapes on the Nintendo DS. |
| Friday, December 07 | | · | ARToolkit and Blender Game Engine |
| Monday, December 03 | | · | The Legendary 6 hour Breakout Hackathon. |
| Tuesday, November 27 | | · | RMIT Games Program Grad Show, Melb.au |
| · | Konstperspektiv Game Art Article |
| Saturday, November 24 | | · | Residency for Game Artists: Subotron Vienna |
| Tuesday, November 20 | | · | Manual Input |
| Monday, November 12 | | · | Using the WiiMote for Finger Tracking |
| Wednesday, November 07 | | · | 50 Greatest Game Innovations |
| Thursday, November 01 | | · | Zero Gamer at the HTTP Gallery, London. |
| Thursday, October 25 | | · | BRODY CONDON: 3 MODIFICATIONS |
| Monday, October 22 | | · | SP wins Open Source award for Creativity.. |
| · | Games Episode of Marcus Westbury's 'Not Quite Art' doco |
| · | Biomodd |
| Tuesday, October 16 | | · | Wolves Evolve Blog |
| Sunday, October 14 | | · | levelHead, a Spatial Memory Game |
| Saturday, October 13 | | · | Blender: Mesh-Modeling to Rendering (Introduction) |
| Wednesday, October 03 | | · | CineKid Game Develoment Workshops at Mediamatic, Amsterdam. |
| Friday, September 28 | | · | PlayWare at Laboral, Spain. |
| · | Escape From Woomera archived.. |
| Wednesday, September 19 | | · | Play! A Live Video Games Symphony |
| Saturday, September 15 | | · | Eddo Stern Solo Show at Postmasters, New York. |
| · | Evaluating User Experiences in Games |
| Tuesday, September 11 | | · | OzCo Second Life Artists Residency Announced |
| Friday, August 31 | | · | Not Possible IRL |
| · | Bio-predictive game engine. |
| Wednesday, August 22 | | · | Tekken Torture Tournament |
| Saturday, August 18 | | · | Level Design As Play |
| Tuesday, August 14 | | · | Wayfarer Live Game Space |
| Sunday, August 12 | | · | IGN asks: Is this the year of the Arthouse Videogame? |
| Friday, August 10 | | · | 50 Really Good Indie Games |
| Tuesday, July 31 | | · | Free Play Conf Melbourne Ticket Giveaway |
| Wednesday, July 25 | | · | DIMEA 07 - Call for Participation. |
| Tuesday, July 24 | | · | Ebert vs Barker: Videogames are not 'High Art'. |
| Monday, July 23 | | · | VIDA 1.0: Artifical Life Competition |
| · | Old school game commercial |
| Friday, July 20 | | · | Low-fat 3D Scanning. |
| Saturday, July 14 | | · | Marketers pulling out of Second Life |
| · | Little Big Good. |
| Thursday, July 12 | | · | Experimental Games feature at E3 |
| Tuesday, July 10 | | · | Basho's Frogger |
| Sunday, July 01 | | · | Seriously Fun. |
| · | Global DoD Sim puts you in the picture. |
| Monday, June 18 | | · | New art game added to archive: Pollen Sonata |
| Tuesday, June 12 | | · | BF announces open-source game project, 'Apricot'. |
| Monday, June 11 | | · | Laboral Game Development Workshops |
| Monday, June 04 | | · | Torrent Raiders |
| Friday, May 25 | | · | SAMD 2007: CFP |
| Wednesday, May 23 | | · | Second Life Artist Residency |
Older Articles
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