Ji Han Lew's Game.Art Work..

Ji Han worked on some concept art for a video game in which the user controlled a zombie early on in the class, before shifting his focus towards a video he made utilizing a camera mounted atop a toy car that was pushed alongside an 8' long, hand drawn landscape.

Jennifer Hom's Game.Art work...

Jennifer spent her time in the class developing concept art for a humorous, historically based video game called The American Way.

The main character, Jing:



must escape from a sweatshop in NYC's Chinatown district (circa 1950's);

on the way saving relatives (Wing and Moi) in the sweatshop:





and defeating the boss, Mrs.Jones:

Patrick Lewis' Work from the Game.Art Class...

Patrick, a Junior in the FAV (Film, Animation, Video) department spent time developing concept art for a video game in which the gamer would control the Big Bad Wolf, battling through various Fairy Tale Landscapes and story lines.





For his final he made a puppets of 2 characters from his game, the Big Bad Wolf and a sheep.

The 1,000,000,000 Point Game

By Paul Stokstad
Computer Games Magazine

A billion points. They once said no man would run an under-four-minute mile, and it was done. They said no man would ever break Babe Ruth's home run records, and it was done. They said no man would ever scale Mount Everest, and it was done. But to score a billion - count'em - points at an arcade game! That has never been done. Now there is a feat that is truly impossible. Well, on January 17th, the impossible became possible.

It didn't happen overnight. Actually, it happened over two nights, from 2:00 on Sunday afternoon to 10:45 in the morning on Tuesday, January 17th. That's when 17-year-old Tim McVey of Ottumwa, Iowa nearly collapsed with relief after playing the arcade game Nibbler for 44 hours and 45 minutes. His score - 1,000,042,270 points. Tim was, and still is as we go to press, the only person on earth to score a billion points at an arcade game.

What does it take to score a billion points? Sure, you've got to be a terrific player. You've got to have whip-like reflexes, superior peripheral vision and the strategy to beat all strategies. But you've got to have more. For one thing, you've got to get motivated.

One night Tim McVey strolled into Walter Day's Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa and noticed the hush of attention surrounding Tom Asaki, whom you may remember as a member of the Think Tank that beat Ms. Pac-Man (see Computer Games, April). Tim asked what all the fuss was about, and somebody explained to him that Asaki had been playing the game Nibbler for two days on a single quarter and that he was up to 770 million points. McVey was shocked. He had never heard of anyone getting a score that high. Tom Asaki was hard at work on his quest to be the first person in the world to score a billion points. Asaki failed, but he inspired McVey. He had never even played Nibbler, but wanted to give it a try.

Tim quickly became addicted to Nibbler and started nibbling away at the top scores at the game. Tim and Asaki, both chasing the same dream, started spending a lot of time together and comparing notes. Sometimes they would play a game together, switching off every ten million points. Gradually McVey began to memorize the secret codes on the board that tell you how many men you have left. This is significant information on Nibbler, because you can die out by having too many men as well as none at all.



No matter how good you are and how slick your strategy, you can't even score a lousy million points unless you can marathon. Marathoning means having the endurance and stamina to play for long periods of time. It's not uncommon for a guy to collapse with exhaustion in the middle of a marathon game, or for his bicep muscle to just spasm up and call it quits. A few months ago, a guy named Chris Emory was marathoning Q*Bert at Twin Galaxies and he fell asleep three times in the middle of the game. Each time he nodded off, his friends picked him up and threw him in the shower in the back of the arcade. Mark Klug, who holds the world record at Pole Position, got so tired during a game that he rested his arms by driving the qualifying laps with his feet. Running a 26-mile marathon race almost seems easy compared to staring intently into a little glowing screen for two days, concentrating the whole time.

Walter Day has observed that the better arcade game marathoners seem to be physically big guys. There's no scientific data, but big guys just seem to be able to stay awake and alert longer. Tim McVey is just 5'8", but solid. There's one more factor that goes into a billion-point game - the game. Tom Asaki didn't pick Nibbler because he liked the game so much. Actually, it's a fairly mediocre game. But it is a high-scoring game. Nibbler has what Walter Day calls "the highest points per hour threshold" This means that you can score a lot of points in a relatively short amount of time. Asaki considered going for the billion on Robotron, but it occurred to him that it would take about a week of nonstop play...with no sleep. Some games make it impossible to score a billion. Q* Bert, for instance, causes strange things to happen. Five separate people have reported that after playing the game for long periods of time, they would start hallucinating! The configuration of cubes, like an optical illusion, would invert or turn inside out, making it impossible to keep track of what was going on.

So Tim McVey had all the ingredients: he's a great player, he's strong, he's got the stamina, he's got the right game and he knows all the tricks to play it. Tricks like building up 127 extra men by level 99 and then leaving the game, letting the snake circle the board automatically. When you do this, you get 12,000 points and you lose a guy. You will lose as many as 20 men in just ten minutes, but you get to take a little break that your body needs to survive such stress. Even master arcade game marathoners have to go to the bathroom once in a while.

There's one more attribute a master marathoner needs-persistence. Nobody, not even Tim McVey, scores a billion points the first time out of the box. You make dumb mistakes. You have a bad day. Worst of all, the machine dies on you. Consider Tom Asaki's history of persistent nibbling. . .

First try: Scored 838 million and lost his last man after 40 hours.
Second try: Scored 707 million and lost by getting over the maximum 127 men.
Third try: Got to 793 million, and then the joystick broke. Attempts to fix it short-circuited the machine and Tom's score.
Fourth try: Scored 120 million and the machine broke again. Asaki: "I just had to sit there and watch my men die."

Asaki never reached a billion. When McVey took the baton, his luck wasn't much better. . .

First try: Scored 168 million, then somebody hit a circuit breaker at the arcade and the score was erased.
Second try: Scored 403 million and was too tired to go on after 22 hours.
Third try: Scored 113 million and the joystick died on him.
Fourth try: Scored 716 million and lost his last man after 31 hours.
Fifth try: Scored 410 million and the screen blanked out. It is suspected that someone pulled the plug intentionally.
Sixth try: Scored 208 million and a circuit breaker erased the score.
Seventh try: Bingo-a billion points! Persistence paid off.



Something must be said for the value of encouragement-for those unsung heroes who don't score a point but slap you awake every few hours and stick slices of pizza into your face so you don't fall over with hunger. In Tim's case it was Bill Mitchell and Chris "Tempest" Ayra, who stayed awake the entire 44 hours with him and kept him psyched up and nibbling away at the billion. So what happens once you've got the inspiration, skill, endurance like a tank and a little help from your friends? You go out and nail the billion, that's what. McVey rolled along for the first 800 million points like nothing was going to stop him - no mechanical failures, no human errors. But suddenly a friend burst into the arcade with a certified letter claiming that somebody else had just scored two billion at Nibbler! McVey was crushed. What's the use of going for a billion when somebody else has already hit two billion? Psychologically defeated, he lost some of his men, but he kept on playing. A closer reading of the letter revealed that it was a two-man team that had reached two billion-one played while the other slept! Encouraged, McVey pushed on toward 900 million.

People are going for high scores at Twin Galaxies all the time, but when McVey started closing in on a billion, the local news station got excited and rushed a camera crew over to record the event. McVey, already exhausted and losing his supply of men, had to fight off the glare on the screen caused by the blinding camera lights. By the time he reached 990 million, he only had six men left.

Human beings have a way of doing the impossible when the pressure is on. No doubt you've heard stories of women lifting up Volkswagens when their children were trapped under them. Tim McVey, despite his fatigue, the lights and the ten million more points he needed, summoned up all the reserves of energy he had left. In those final minutes he actually won four more men, giving him ten, and when he completed a board with 999,950,950 points, he stood back and watched the bonus points ring up... 1,000,042,270. Then he walked away from the machine.

For his efforts, Tim McVey won a free Nibbler from the game's manufacturer, Rock-Ola. He also received the key to the city of Ottumwa, Iowa, which proclaimed a "Tim McVey Day" the next week. Now Tim is waiting for someone to break his record, and he says, "No matter what they get, I'm going to break it back." Until that happens, he's gunning for another goal - the first person to play an arcade game for 100 hours straight on a single quarter. According to Tim McVey, "I want to die or fall off my chair."

Machinima

Kirsten was asking about Ninja Gaiden last week, you should definitely check this out.

SUPERMARIO SLEEPING(with butterflies), is an Art Machinima movie by Miltos Manetas. It is made with SuperMario for Nintendo 64 and it was first shown at the exhibition'Fatto in Italia',(Made in Italy), at the ICA, in London, 1997.

It has been show all over the World in many gallery and Museum exhibitions.

This work is a signed edition of 3, courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York.

Guitar Hero...

This video get insane at around the 3 minutes and 20 seconds mark:


On Monday, I expect one of you to be able to do this:


Or at least this:


Which came from this:

Ken Levine, president and creative director of 2K Boston

Friday, September 14, 2007; 2:52 PM

The following is a transcript from a portion of the interview @Play Columnist Mike Musgrove of the Washington Post had with BioShock's lead designer Ken Levine. Levine is president and creative director of 2K Boston, the game studio that made the video game BioShock.

Mike Musgrove: While playing BioShock, I sometimes paid attention to the story, and sometimes ignored it. Does it bother you that some people may blast through the game and ignore the storyline -- or is that a valid way to play the game?


Ken Levine: I think that's a completely valid way to play the game. I think most great works of popular fiction have to work on a couple of levels. You look at Lord of the Rings or The Matrix, you have to have your giant monsters and you have to have your great explosions and people can go to the movies and enjoy those movies for those elements.

But what I think makes those things enter the cultural zeitgeist is, they work on another level -- whether it's The Matrix with these existential themes or Lord of the Rings as an extensive meditation on the meaning of power and how it affects people.

That's what separates those films from other works in the genre, they have this underlying element and I think you find that in all really popular genre stuff, that there's usually something else going on there, and, really, that's what draws me.

However, I'm perfectly comfortable with the guy who plays through the game -- in fact I really enjoy watching people play through the game -- who are really just there to shoot stuff in a cool environment.

But what I find quite often what happens is that one of the reasons we tried to tell the story visually so much - that's why the world of Rapture is so visually revelatory of a story... we wanted to draw people in who never thought they'd be interested in the game as a meditation on governmental regulation. It's hardly something you can pitch as a video game: "Come play our game about a pseudo-objectivist style Utopia!" That's not exactly going to get butts in the seats...

I think one of the reasons the game is having the impact it's having is because it has themes beyond the monster stuff. But, you gotta deliver on the monster stuff.

Mike Musgrove: When you're making a game, do you come up with game design or a storyline first?

Ken Levine: The short answer is: Game design first... You have to get the gameplay stuff right and the story has to complement the gameplay.

I think that quite often you have a lot of frustrated screenwriters or novelists making videogames and so they're quite insistent on forcing the audience to soak in every aspect of their narrative from A to Z and learn every proper noun and every character's name and every relationship.

With BioShock that wasn't our goal, our goal was to put the stuff there for the people who want it, and there's an incredible amount of depth, but we really wanted people to be able to play it and... if they didn't want to deal with this deeper story, they didn't have to. But they can't help absorbing some of this stuff through the visuals of the world.

Mike Musgrove: Can you cite any influences for BioShock from other games, or movies or books? I feel like the Shining was in there?

Ken Levine: I saw the Shining when I was 9 years old. It pretty much set my notion of how to do horror properly, that it has to be connected to character, that horror is about loss at the end of the day. A fear of losing things that are important to you is what drives horror-- not a monster in the closet, but losing the things that you love. To me, that's what Rapture and the world of BioShock is. That's why Rapture had to be a beautiful place at once, that it had to be this fallen glory and all these lives had to be incredible and had to hold so much promise. The fact that they fell apart had to be a tragedy or there's just no horror there.

I think that great masters of horror like [Stephen] King understand that you have to love the characters in order to fear for them to lose what they have...

Fight Club was an inspiration. There's a scene in Fight Club, there are several scenes in Fight Club where, the second time you watch [there are] totally different meanings than the first time. I love movies like that, because the narrative doesn't just mess with the characters' minds, it messes with the viewer's mind and that's something I wanted to accomplish in BioShock.

Mike Musgrove: Do you believe video games are art? Do you regard BioShock as a piece of art?

Ken Levine: Honestly, to me that's a bit of a remote conversation. To me, all I care about is, does it work, does it impact an audience? Is baseball art? Baseball certainly drives people emotionally and gets people engaged, people follow it. But is it art?, I don't know.

Is BioShock art? I don't know and I guess I sort of don't care. That argument tends to be more about turf wars. And this happens with every new media. Movies, when they came around, there was an argument: Are they art? Comic books, are they art? Video games, are they art? It's always the same path. There's a push back from the old guard who have turf to protect, because, you know once you're art, you can be serious. But I don't really care about being serious. I don't care how people regard me, if I'm an artist or not, all I care about is are they being moved by what we're making.

Mike Musgrove: What are the advantages, or limitations, of video games as a storytelling medium?

Ken Levine: One thing I think we learned making BioShock is that you have a storytelling device that doesn't exist in any other [medium] and that's your environment. So much of the story of BioShock is told by what we call mise-en-scene. You just asked me if video games are art, I can tell you that video game designers are as pretentious as any artists, [to use] terms like mise-en-scene!

It means "to set a scene" and so much of the world of BioShock you can tell what happened here by looking around you and exploring the world and that sense of discovery in film you know the camera has to drive the mise-en-scene and the director has to drive it.

There's something awesome about the discovery process that the player goes through when they play the game and they can sort of discover little stories -- sometimes they're out of the way and sometimes you get a story that a lot of people may not have even seen or sometimes you're able to put together some narrative clues just by looking around the world and exploring the world. I love that. There's no other media can do that...

That opportunity doesn't exist in other media and it's a really exciting place. I think if we've done anything in BioShock, we've sort of pushed that notion down the road a little bit, which is, you can tell a story without words that is unique to each viewer.

April 2004 USC Press Release

Video Games Become Fine Art

A front page article in the March 26 Los Angeles Times asks the question as to whether the new digital world of video games should be receiving the same critical attention as fine art. While some question whether there is a deeper meaning to games, others disagree. Chris Swain, who teaches game design in the Interactive Media division here says, “There were lots of filmmakers in the early years who also felt what they were doing wasn’t art, that it was just entertainment. “ Ultimately, film became legitimized as an artistic medium, and Swain says the same will happen with games. To bolster that argument, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting its first ever video games exhibit in May entitled “Into The Pixel.” The article also notes that USC offers the country’s only academic program focused on the artistic elements of games and is now supported by the recent Electronic Arts grant. Swain says that “games are the literature of the 21st century.” Another Interactive Media instructor, Tracy Fullerton says that if games are art, they deserve the same intellectual scrutiny as music, theater or dance. “At some point, I hope we will cease to be fascinated by the technology of games, and the questions will shift from how something is happening on a screen to why.”

While finishing up their grad work at USC’s Interactive Media division, a few students came up with the concept for the game Flow, which is linked on the sidebar of the blog. I recommend each of you plays Flow for a few minutes, as we will be discussing it for a while during our next class session. See you Monday.

-Quint

"It's cool to be able to create the kinds of games we play..."

THIS, is an article on pitching video games from the blog ars tecnica.


When (if ever) you get tired of reading stuff for this class remember you could be elsewhere... I think this place:



Has some openings... or this one...



As long as you don't live in Texas or massachusetts...

Paul B. Davis (Beige)

A founding member of the Beige collective, Paul is a nerd and a gentleman trapped inside the body of a 29-year-old from St. Louis who's lived in London for three years. Like most creative types, he has a range of projects on the go, including some Vice-related music bits. He also teaches Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Did you know he once released a record called "Enter The Mystical Faggot"?

Vice: When you get up in the morning, how do you decide whether to do art or music?
Paul: Usually I get worried about which one I'm sucking at. I worry that I do too many things not that well, rather than doing one thing really well, which is easier for a career. So I guess it depends if I need to finish a music project or if I have an idea for an art piece, then I'll do that. It's best when the two come together.

Like with your acclaimed album, The 8-Bit Construction Set?
Exactly. With The 8-Bit Construction Set I was able to merge conceptual stuff with a usable tool because there were weird art bits on the record. So I'd get emails back from DJs saying it's great – Mixmaster Mike was playing it – and then I'd get an email from a museum saying they wanted to exhibit it. In terms of the art/music thing, that did both.

Sounds smart. Where did you go study?
I went to Oberlin in Ohio. Basically all the people that I still collaborate with now went there. Two of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were in my class, Brian and Karen. I saw Brian last time I was in Chicago and he showed me his tour bus and he was excited because the previous group that had used that bus was Journey.

Video art and computer art – what's the difference?
The market for video art is 20 years ahead in terms of artist recognition and sales. When we were exhibiting our first shows, if we said it was new media art or computer art, no one cared. But if we called it video art, using the computer game as a readymade, then they'd love it.

What's with the B?
The B stands for Benjamin. There are so many Paul Davises and the B is for Google searches.

video interview:



text based interview via VICE

Cory Arcangel (Pt.2)

While searching the Youtube I just found the complete Mario Movie by Cory Arcangel in collaboration with Paper Rad...







On the other hand, this is also the Mario Movie...



Linkage: Look over on the right... check out Cory's blog.

...More to follow...

-Quint-

Cory Arcangel (Pt. 1)

I talked about Cory Arcangel during class... here is some of his work. You guys have 2 essays about him for the next class session. He is supposed to be speaking at Brown University in the Spring. I'll let you know more when I know more... he's young (under 30) and was in the Whitney Biennial in 2004 (when he was even younger...)...

Super_Mario_Clouds:




Naptime (_2002), Hacked Super Mario2 NES cartridge. Programmed music by Paul B. Davis.



I Shot Andy Warhol (_2002), Hacked Hogan's Alley NES Cartridge.



Objective: Hit Andy Warhol whenever he pops up, while avoiding hitting the Pope, Flavor Flav, and Colonel Sanders. The last couple seconds of this video clip are from the portion of the game where your goal is to knock the falling Campell's soup cans across the screen.

Mario Movie (w/Paper Rad)



Linkage: Cory's 2006 show at Team Gallery's Soho Space

Retro Gaming Makes a Comeback... In the Low Budget Documentary Scene At Least...

These are 3 newer documentaries about the retro gaming scene. I only had the opportunity to see the King of Kong, which, came out this Summer. Depending on how we’re doing on time later on in the course, we will be checking it out after its release on the 29th of this month.

King of Kong:



8 bit documentary:



Chasing Ghosts:

abstract.course.description

RiSD wonderfully left my course out of the hard copy winter course catalogue... so here's the synopsis of the course that was supposed to be in the catalogue... basically if you're into gaming, or contemporary, non-art-jargony artist writings, take the course. For now, feel free to glance around this blog, if this is the kind of thing you're into, you should enroll...

Wikipedia defines “game” as a structured or semi-structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes also used as an educational tool; Game:Art is a hybrid course combining theoretical readings with a studio art practice. Using games as a conceptual starting point, students will make work that responds to readings and screenings by artists and writers such as DJ Spooky, Cory Archangel, and McKenzie Wark. Emphasis will be placed on the parallels between the structure and layout of video gaming and the structure and goals of the personal art-making process.

We will also read writings by the following:

Alex Galloway
Seth Price
Dario Robleto
Grant Kester
and
Nicolas Bourriaud

The goal of the course isn't to make the greatest art ever. It IS to learn something about the way you go about making art, to have fun, and to learn something. A lot of people at art school forget... this is supposed to be fun.

virtual.boy

Virtual Boy was Nintendo's only big failure. How big? pretty big; the guy who created virtual boy also came up with gameboy and metroid... and they still fired him after the virtual boy's horrible flop...














-How many times can this schmuck say the word, "cool"???

video.games.timeline

game.boy

mario.brothers.feet.