If you haven't read this - Jason Rohrer's Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War | Magazine

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By Jason Fagone

"Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs. He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He doesn’t own a car or believe in vaccination. The 33-year-old works out of a home office, typing code in a duct-taped chair. He takes his son Mez to gymnastics and acting class on his lime-green recumbent bicycle, and on weekends he paints with his son Ayza. (He got Mez’s name from a license plate, and Ayza’s by mixing up Scrabble tiles.)

On the morning of February 24, Rohrer took a break from coding and pedaled to the local Best Buy. He paid $19.99 for a 4-gigabyte USB memory stick sheathed in black plastic. The next day he sanded off the memory stick’s logos, giving it a brushed-metal texture that reminded him of something out of Mad Max. Then, using his kids’ acrylics, he painted a unique pattern on both sides, a chain of dots that resembled a piece of Aboriginal art he had seen.

The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.

Rohrer unveiled Chain World at the 2011 Game Design Challenge, held on March 4 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The design challenge is essentially a contest: Three game designers compete to make a videogame that does some crazily ambitious thing that a videogame is not supposed to be able to do, like tell a love story or win the Nobel Peace Prize. The designers get about six weeks to come up with a concept or prototype based on a theme chosen by the organizers, and then they get 15 minutes to pitch it to a live audience. Whoever receives the most applause is declared the winner. The challenge is a way for the best minds in the field to flaunt their chops, as well as a marker of how rapidly games have evolved. When game designer Eric Zimmerman launched the first challenge seven years ago, a videogame was typically made by a team of artists and coders at a large company like Electronic Arts; it had guns and 3-D breasts, and you played it on a PC or a console. Today there are numerous indie game festivals where people like Rohrer—auteurs who work solo or in small groups and whose games might be conceptually innovative, personal, or simply bizarre—discuss how videogames can become the great art form of the 21st century.

The challenge is the one place where people from the two sides of the industry meet every year to battle as equals. The winner of the inaugural challenge, in 2004, was Will Wright of SimCity/Sims fame; his love-story game twisted an ordinary World War II shooter into a “first-person kisser.” Last year’s champion hailed from the indie world: Jenova Chen, the designer behind the trippy, zenlike games flOw and Flower, took the prize for a concept he called HeavenVille, a sort of stock market that measures the social currency of dead people...."

Art=life=art...U.K. Prime Minister Suggests ‘Pre-Crime’ Blocking of Social Media | by Olivia Solon via Wired

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British Prime Minister David Cameron has told Parliament that he is investigating whether to stop people communicating via social networking sites if they are known to be planning criminal activity.

He said to the House of Commons Thursday: “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

In the statement he released to the media before he spoke to Parliament, he also said: “when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.”

When he was later challenged to increase the headcount of police on the streets, he replied that the focus should be on whether “to give the police the technology to trace people on Twitter or BBM or close it down” before talking about police resources.

He added: ”The key thing is that the police were facing a new circumstance where rioters were using BBM — a closed network — so they knew where they were going to loot next. We’ve got to examine that and know how to keep up with them.”..."

Fascinating Kickstarter Multimedia Project: Strange Attractors: NonHumanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities by Encyclopedia Destructica & Suzie Silver — Kickstarter

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

"Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities
A nearly 300 page, full color book and DVD containing art, writing, and film that envisions the sexualities of beings that may some day be encountered - if not in outer space than at least in our dreams! A joint publication by Encyclopedia Destructica and the The Institute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality, this project will publish the work of 69 artists, writers and filmmakers who have created an amazing range of expressions that expand our conception of the possibilities of alien life forms and the nature of sexual desire. Strange Attractors straddles the line between a speculative scientific exploration and a work of artistic imagination and creativity.

While science fiction literature and film have often touched on alien sexuality, these encounters are almost always represented as between a human and a humanoid alien. Gender is almost always portrayed as binary even when it is homosexual. Sexual encounters consist primarily of engagements between two beings. Inspired by Kepler’s (kepler.nasa.gov) voyage into deep space on a quest for earth-like planets, this project has gone beyond male and female, beyond queer, beyond any notion of gender, beyond the anthropomorphic to erotic possibilities as vastly varied as the universe itself. Discover what kinds of sentient beings, what types of sexualities, how many erogenous zones and types of erotic pleasure might exist out there in the universe!..."

read more on Kickstarter

Halo8's EtherFilms Taps HTML5 as Transmedia 'Film Disrupter' |excerpt via Wired.com

By Scott Thill

August 10, 2011

“EtherFilms will turn films and comics into hyperlinked worlds of story you can interactively navigate based on your interest,” Matt Pizzolo, Halo-8 president and Godkiller comic creator, told Wired.com in an e-mail.

“That means jumping from an animated film to the digital comic that tells a character’s origin or extending an interview in a documentary, or even jumping to a different documentary altogether for further insight on a topic,” he added. “So film is a just vessel through which you navigate the content world. The universe grows like a wiki, which fundamentally alters the experience of watching films or reading comics.”

Announced last month at Comic-Con International and debuting online in the slide deck above and Vimeo clip below, EtherFilms is slated to launch in early 2012, although Pizzolo is cautiously optimistic that Halo-8 will have a functional prototype in time for New York Comic Con in October.

Because its architecture is HTML5-based, EtherFilms will initially work on personal computers and mobile devices like Apple’s iPhones and iPads, as well as gadgets running Google’s Android operating system. But Halo-8 wants to extend EtherFilms to Xboxes, set-top boxes and AppleTV, with the ultimate goal of producing a “platform-neutral and device-agnostic” service akin to an indie Netflix.

EtherFilms will let viewers merge Halo-8's Godkiller 2: Tomorrow's Ashes, due later this year, with its predecessor Godkiller, as well as the forthcoming illustrated film based on Hack/Slash.
Images courtesy Halo-8 Entertainment

Pizzolo presented EtherFilms as a “film disruptor” at Comic-Con International alongside actress Brea Grant (Dexter, Heroes), Hack/Slash writer Tim Seeley and Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods director Patrick Meaney. But EtherFilms is actually more of a media enhancer, one that aligns the parameters of film and comics consumption with technological innovation.

“Reading comics page-by-page on an iPad is lame,” said Pizzolo, who with Halo-8 partner Brian Giberson is also writing, producing and directing the forthcoming documentary Ctrl + Alt + Compete. During preliminary interviews with The Guild’s Felicia Day and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell for the documentary about startup culture, Pizzolo became inspired to launch EtherFilms.

“The technology has its own demands, and audiences are forcing the shift,” Pizzolo said. “Paper comics sales have dropped so low that pretty much every publisher has revised its business model to treat comics as an incubator of film and TV deals. Meanwhile, adoption of digital media is growing exponentially.”

The same rethink applies to film and television, which is currently working out the kinks of what Pizzolo calls the new “tent pole-or-Netflix” normal. The next generation of artists are likely going to have to create in many mediums to stay relevant, which is where the nonlinear EtherFilms platform comes in, said Pizzolo.

“It can help support new art, because the format demands forward-thinking new content created by broad-minded artists,” he said. “Videogames benefit from the fact that technology keeps innovators at the forefront, whereas a new film competes directly with 100 years’ worth of studio movies available for free on Netflix. You can’t sustain innovation in an ecosystem with such entrenched oligopolists. That whole environment needs to be disrupted.”

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Nice Post from Randy Matheson: Syfy Channel Weaves Twitter Into Haven Storyline

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Excerpt:

"On the Syfy Channel’s popular show ‘Haven‘ the citizens of a small Maine town are affected by a wide range of supernatural afflictions dubbed ‘The Troubles’.

Starting Friday, August 12 the show’s characters will face a new challenge as they be interact on Twitter with a mysterious stranger who seems to know a little too much about the secrets of the town.

The seven-episode story-arc will feature events that play out both within the show and through the Twitter profiles of brothers Vince (@VinceHaven) and Dave Teagues (@DaveHaven), owners of the Haven Herald and the unknown someone tweeting as @ColdInHaven...."