What’s this? Inspired by Kars‘ and Niels‘ efforts to create weeknotes, I will update this website with (irregular) scheduled notes about my work and what I’ve been up to.
This week I mostly worked on selecting projects and writing copy for the festival and exhibition I am curating, which will hopefully take place in December this year. I’m working together with Iris Peters of Digitale Werkplaats and bArt in ‘s Hertogenbosch and we are planning on having more events during the year at different places throughout The Netherlands.
At the moment we are focussing on getting things together, tighten up the line-up and try for some funding rounds and sponsorships to be able to make it happen. We had a couple of meetings this week and I also worked on the concept version of the website, mostly to wrap my brain around what the event would look like.
On Thursday I went to Utrecht to visit the Dutch Game Garden for the Summer Talk by Kars Alfrink called: Pervasive Games 101. He talked about the projects he worked on at his studio Hubbub to show what he means by “pervasive games” and its diversity. He then talked us through some of his work processes for a couple of the projects. It was really interesting to see how they (Kars works with different freelancers and studios) iterate, how they ‘have to like to play what they create’ and how they involve their clients like the “Belastingdienst” in the process. It was a very informative talk and always nice to hear Kars talk. He put up the slides here.
Games:
On Friday Bennett Foddy, renowned for his games that make your fingers try to say ‘aaaargh’, released CLOP, a browsergame that lets you control the legs of a unicorn using H J K L on the keyboard. The goal is to get to the end. Which is really not as simple as it sounds. Twitter exploded with frustrated players, admiration and people posting screenshots of how far they got, or what kind of ridiculous poses the unicorn got himself into and they sent gifs of their strategies.
Articles
Gamesindustry.biz posted part of an interview with 2k’s Christoph Hartmann. The article headlined with: “Games must achieve photorealism in order to open up new genres says 2K“. This got a lot of heat on twitter, with people referring to Journey, Pixar Studios, animation and games such as Proteus.
A couple of responses:
- “Proteus vs. Photorealism” – by Tom Bramwell (Eurogamer).
- “Photorealism And The Confusing Myths Of Innovation” – by Jim Rossignol (Rock, Paper Shotgun)
- Op-ed: why photorealism isn’t the key to emotional gaming experiences” – by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)
- “Fragging Bambi’s Mum: Photo-realism and the misguided quest for more emotional games” – Richard Corbett (PCGamer)