Video games could be the greatest storytelling medium of our age – if only the worlds of art and technology would stop arguing and take notice…READ MORE: The first great works of digital literature are already being written | Technology | The Guardian
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are popular in video games and let players choose different branching story options. READ MORE: GT | Georgia Institute of Technology | News Center | Georgia Tech Uses Artificial Intelligence to Crowdsource Interactive Fiction
Lionsgate has won a bidding war to adapt Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle series! And not just into a movie, or a television series—but both, and a video game, to boot! This deal sets up the studio to develop the multiple stories from The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear, and various novellas (including The Slow Regard of Silent Things) simultaneously and across multiple platforms. READ MORE: Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind to Be a Movie and a TV Show | Tor.com
Blockbuster releases are homogenising around a narrow range of experiences and it could be driving creative people out of the industry. READ: Video games have a diversity problem that runs deeper than race or gender | Technology | The Guardian
N++, a new video game for PlayStation 4, is the culmination of over a decade of work. Created by the inventers of N and N+ — Metanet Games, the twin dynamos of Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns who helped put Toronto’s indie game industry on the map a decade ago — N++ is not just inventive and pleasing to the senses. It also has the audacity to set itself up as a game that creative users might play for many years to come.
“The whole premise of the project was that we never want to make another one,” Burns told CBC News. “We want this to be definitive, and to last a lifetime.” Every level takes up only a single screen, but that doesn’t mean the game is short. Sheppard and Burns, along with programmer Shawn McGrath, painstakingly created 2,360 levels for N++. READ MORE: N++, the ‘perfect’ video game that took 10 years to complete | Technology & Science | CBC News.
The Purposeful Gaming and BHL project recently launched its first two browser-based video games, Smorball and Beanstalk. Both are designed to offer players a fun online diversion while helping the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) enable full-text searching of digitized materials. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which was awarded in December 2013, the project is exploring how games might be used to entice people to participate in crowdsourcing efforts at libraries and museums. READ MORE: Biodiversity Heritage Library Launches Crowdsourcing Games | Library Journal
Super-interesting! If you are a fan of coding camps and makerspaces this would be a good article to read to get an idea of what’s on the horizon in gaming development, gaming innovations and interactive/social gaming.
From the rise of gamer parents to transparent game design, a step-by-step prediction of how games will be made over the next five years. READ: 16 trends that will define the future of video games | Technology | The Guardian
Researchers think that they’ve worked out why certain men abuse women over the internet: because they suck… at games. According to a study by Michael Kasumovic and Jeff Kuznekoff, the most vocal abusers of women online are the ones most threatened by their presence in the digital sphere. The short explanation for this is because less-skilled men have the most to lose playing games against a woman, thanks to the perceived social stigma of “losing to a girl.” Rather than risk this supposed humiliation, they’d much rather create a toxic environment that’s outright hostile to newcomers. READ MORE: Study: Men who harass women online suck at games (and life) | Engadget
To anyone who was paying attention to video games in the mid-’90s, the term “FMV game” probably still inspires snorts of derision. The handful of titles that shoehorned simple gameplay on top of highly compressed full-motion video (FMV) usually suffered from low-quality sound and images, poor production values, limited interaction options, and ponderous repetition of a few short video clips through multiple plays. The results ranged from mediocre at the high end to some of the worst games ever made at the low end. By the end of the ’90s, filmed, live-action video clips gave way to polygons and animated, pre-rendered sprites as the gameplay and story-telling engine of choice.
But just as failed ’90s experiments in virtual reality are leading to a resurgence in the form today, the FMV gaming failures of decades past are finally being explored with the technology and game-design advancements of today. Her Story is proof that FMV games don’t have to be awful and that filming actors on a set could be a criminally underexplored form for interactive storytelling. READ MORE: Her Story is a compelling new type of interactive storytelling | Ars Technica.
Parents might be happy to know their kids can get a head start in the competitive slipstream of computer programming by doing something they already enjoy — playing video games.
That’s the goal of Server Design 1, a new online course rolled out Tuesday by Youth Digital, a tech education company that teaches kids to code, develop apps, and design 3D modeling. The company’s new program allows kids to create their own worlds, with their own rules, all while playing the popular video game Minecraft with their friends.
READ MORE: Teaching kids to code, using Minecraft’s building blocks | CNET
Note that Youth Digital offers many other online coding and design courses for children – not free though!
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