It's been about 7 months since I last posted, which is bad of me! But I've never really been much of a regular updater, I'm too forgetful.
Anyway, I've been meaning to write a post about FoWD (Future of Web Design) conference in Bristol at the beginning of September. Unfortunately I can't remember everything I wanted to say about it now. Overall it was a good day full of several talks and a speed networking session were myself and Craig were trying to plug the graduate show for our course, but I don't think we really managed to get much interest.
The most interesting thing that I noticed and really wanted to mention about it (being a bit of a social networking nut) was just how many people there were on Twitter. Right at the beginning of the first talk, which was given by Elliot Jay Stocks, he asked if everyone could send a message through Twitter to say Happy Birthday to his friend and most of the room ended up tapping away into their keyboards or getting out their phones. Then on top of that I noticed quite a large amount of people with some sort of Twitter desktop application open on their laptops. I myself tweeted during the day, making some sort of an account of who was speaking and what they were talking about.
Since then I began my third and final year of my Interactive Media course. We're about a month into that now and working on our Final Major projects and Critical Papers, so I may write a few blog posts over the next couple of days about all of that. But I felt like writing a little bit about the guest lecturers we've had in uni over the last week.
Firstly, last wednesday we were invited to a lecture that was set up for the Games Design course, which was delivered by a guy from Eddo Stern, a company who make games. This is the Eddo Stern website. Personally I didn't actually find most of the work he presented relevent to me. The one project that I actually did find interesting however was one called Darkgame (Link directly to the games' webpage). He explained that basically you and your avatar, who you control, are somewhat disconnected, and the state of each affects the other, so when you are strong your character is weak and when your character is strong you are weak. The idea of the game is to catch the other player and there a robots within the game which affect your senses. The main one of these which he showed was blindness; if you caught a blindess robot the whole screen would cloud over. And in a normal game you would avoid these things, but in this game when you are weak your avatar is strong. So when you lose your "sight" your avatar becomes faster and stronger and sounds become louder for you so you can hear when the other player is close to you. And your avatar can send out a sort of sound detection beam to find out where exactly they are coming at you from. You also have a head piece which gives you pressure whenever your are close to something, I thought that was kind of interesting, but it's really all that natual since you don't actually feel pressure in your head when you're getting closer to something. It's quite a unique game but I don't if games like that would ever catch on in the mainstream market.
We also had a talk yesterday from a couple of people from Tale of Tales. Tale of Tales Website. They create games with unique interaction. Or what they call unique interaction. Perhaps it was the way they explained their games, but most of them didn't actually seem like games to me. They have made something called the forest which is an online multi-person environment, which they call a game. For me it wasn't, for me it wasn't really any more than a digital environment you can wander around with your deer character (which looks like the deer from Princess Monoke), there aren't even any ways in which you can interact with the other "players"; they have to make it all up as they go along. For them the games are made up by the "players" as they find tasks for themselves to do and tend to design their own way of communicating with each other by moving in different ways. The closest to a game it became was where they put in spells which allowed the users to change the skin of their character, the spell distributed the skins randomly so groups of people would spend ages all trying to get the same skin so that they all looked the same. The Little Red Riding hood game could have been a game but they put more emphasis into explaining the characters and how they were designed rather than the interaction within it. Their artwork was very pretty though.
Anyway that's all for now. I feel a bit mean for almost ripping these people to pieces, I could say much more but this is already quite a long post.
Over and Out.
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