Indie Tech Talks

With tools for mak­ing inde­pen­dent games more acces­si­ble than ever, Baby­cas­tles is giv­ing DIY devel­op­ers, artist and tech­nol­o­gists the spot­light through a series of talks at the Game Inno­va­tion Lab at NYU-Poly. In pro­duc­ing this series, I’m look­ing to get tin­ker­ers we don’t usu­ally hear from on stage for tech savvy audi­ences that love their work. An inte­gral com­po­nent of this is the host, Andy Nealen, who brings out the speak­ers’ insights through informed ques­tions. He’s got a robust back­ground in com­puter sci­ence and is a suc­cess­ful indie game devel­oper him­self, so he knows what he’s talk­ing about. The first two talks from Scott Ander­son and Kaho Abe were well attended and almost the entire audi­ence stuck around for an hour after each talk to swap ideas and play games. Check out the posters for the past events below (designed by Colin Sny­der also of Baby­cas­tles) and look out for the next talk when we resume the series in Sep­tem­ber.
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The New Photographers Presentation

This post is for the stu­dents of The New Pho­tog­ra­phers class in the Visual and Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies pro­gram at Har­vard. Here, you’ll find the pre­sen­ta­tion I showed on Mon­day as well as links to work and resources rel­e­vant for each exam­ple. Feel free to write ques­tions in the com­ments. Thanks again to Sue Jaye John­son for invit­ing me to present!

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Activate! Games

At PET­Lab, a social impact games research and devel­op­ment group at Par­sons, the main project we’ve been work­ing on over the past year is a game design cur­ricu­lum called Acti­vate!. Acti­vate! uses both phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal activ­i­ties to teach sys­tems think­ing, game design and issue lit­er­acy to mid­dle school stu­dents. Last sum­mer, we took Acti­vate! to Abu Dhabi as part of the “Sum­mer of Semi­con­duc­tors” Pro­gram spon­sored by the AMD Foun­da­tion and the Abu Dhabi Edu­ca­tion Coun­cil. Our work with Acti­vate! will be fea­tured at the upcom­ing Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence as part of Games for Change’s day of pro­gram­ming. Here’s the video I made about the pro­gram in Abu Dhabi:

This com­ing sum­mer, Acti­vate! will return to Dan­de­lion Mid­dle School in Bei­jing where it was first taught in 2010.

Space Cruiser Trailer

Space Cruiser is a coop­er­a­tive mission-based game cen­tered around nav­i­gat­ing around a fic­tional uni­verse, designed for 100–200 par­tic­i­pants to be installed at Hay­den Plan­e­tar­ium of the Museum of Nat­ural His­tory for night on Jan­u­ary 26th, 2012. The game is being put on by Baby­cas­tles, designed by Ivan Safrin.

I made this trailer from my footage of the amaz­ing playtest last night.

The game imag­ines the plan­e­tar­ium as a large, player-controllable space­craft. A multi-player con­trol deck at the cen­ter of the the­ater will offer a small crew the chance to nav­i­gate the space­craft together, pilot­ing through treach­er­ous aster­oid belts. The crew is an unas­signed, free-form team that works together to pilot the space­ship, with var­i­ous parts of the ship spread out over the the­ater while being guided by a on-board com­puter sys­tem that is voiced by Stephin Mer­ritt of the Mag­netic Fields. For the one time event, Greg Fox will play a live sound track. All space ship mod­ules have been hand made by Mike Anderson.

Where Conversations Help Us See

The Bag­News­Sa­lon, a pro­gram of Bag­News­Notes, brings together the world’s lead­ing pho­to­jour­nal­ists, visual aca­d­e­mics and other informed observers to under­stand­ing how the visual media frames the key social and polit­i­cal events of the day. I have had the plea­sure of pro­duc­ing the online Salons for sev­eral years now. With new part­ner­ships and tech­nol­ogy plat­forms, the series has really taken off. Given the depth of insight pro­duced dur­ing the 90-minute con­ver­sa­tion, we’ve made a con­certed effort to make archives of the salons avail­able at the Bag­News site.

The Fall of Bin Laden Salon

Photo by Bay Ismoyo/Getty Images

Upon the death of Bin Laden, we looked at pho­to­graphic cov­er­age of both the com­pound where Bin Laden was killed and the reac­tion to the news glob­ally. Images of screens, news­pa­pers and peo­ple watch­ing revealed how much the event was a global media phe­nom­e­non. [ Archive of The Fall of Bin Laden Salon ]

The Great Reces­sion Salon

Photo by Michael Williamson/The Wash­ing­ton Post

The Great Reces­sion was a largely invis­i­ble event, so the salon dis­cus­sion revolved around how it was ren­dered visual through depic­tions of loss, des­ti­tu­tion and per­se­ver­ance. [ Archive of The Great Reces­sion Salon ]

Occupy Wall Street Salon

Photo by Louise Macabitas/Reddit

For a Salon on Occupy Wall St, we drew from a broad range of sources to look at how image mak­ing and cir­cu­la­tion became cen­tral to the most suc­cess­ful social move­ment in the United States in recent mem­ory. [ Archive of the Occupy Wall Street Salon ]

Upcom­ing: Cam­paign Mania Salon

Photo by Jewel Samad/Getty Images

For the upcom­ing Salon on the Pres­i­den­tial Cam­paign, the panel will dis­cuss what pho­tos imply about the cam­paign, as well as the depth, breadth and nature of the media’s visual cov­er­age. I hope you can join us on Jan­u­ary 29th.

Babycastles’ Raw Beauty

Between mak­ing the Games For Change Fes­ti­val hap­pen in June and sub­se­quent inter­na­tional adven­tures, my blog fell by the way­side. I’ve got a list of at least 15 pos­si­ble posts to write. Daunt­ing! So let’s get started the easy way and post some video.

Here is raw footage I shot at two recent Baby­cas­tles events. Baby­cas­tles is an inde­pen­dent videogame arcade pro­duc­tion group and gen­eral per­vayor of inde­pen­dent game cul­ture. As the Baby­cas­tles Archivist and Doc­u­men­tar­ian, cap­tur­ing video of events is only a small part of my respon­si­bil­i­ties, but it’s def­i­nitely the most fun part. Baby­cas­tles enthu­si­asts far and wide are enjoy­ing the unedited takes of events.

QWOP THE SCREEN ⋰ Highly Phys­i­cal Videogames

A col­lec­tion of highly phys­i­cal videogame instal­la­tions. Games that delib­er­ately make it awk­ward to see the screen, as well as games that get rid of screens entirely. This was the funnest Baby­cas­tles open­ing I remem­ber. Curated by Doug Wil­son, Ben­nett Foddy, and Matt Parker. Octo­ber 7th, 2011 at 285 Kent Ave.

BABYCASTLES 285 KENT CLOSING PARTY

The party cel­e­brates the the arcade’s six-month run in Williams­burg on Novem­ber 4, 2011. Baby­cas­tles is not over. It’s just trans­form­ing. The night fea­tured per­for­mances by Inspec­tah Deck and Colt Seavers of the Wu Tang Clan, Ava Luna and DJ Dog Dick. A tour­na­ment of J.S. Joust was played. The win­ner took home a copy of Kata­mari Damacy signed by Keita Taka­hashi. Games pro­duced by the Parsons/Babycastles Game Jam were avail­able to play. Minori­ties could sign up as bone mar­row donors as part of the “Amit Gupta Needs You” campaign.

Games For Change Festival Line-Up

We announced the Games For Change Fes­ti­val line-up ear­lier this week with Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore, Pulitzer Prize win­ning author and busi­ness women Sheryl WuDunn and leg­endary game designer Jesse Schell as some of the lead­ing speak­ers so far. I was brought on as fes­ti­val pro­gram man­ager to help make this pro­gram happen. Games for Change is the lead­ing global advo­cate for sup­port­ing and mak­ing games for social impact. The Games for Change Fes­ti­val is the largest gam­ing event in New York City and the only inter­na­tional event unit­ing “games for change” cre­ators, the pub­lic, civil soci­ety, acad­e­mia, the gam­ing indus­try and media. This year’s fes­ti­val will take place at NYU from June 20-22nd.

The most enjoy­able part of this work for me is learn­ing about the inno­v­a­tive col­lab­o­ra­tions, plat­forms and fund­ing mod­els that have emerged in recent years to make social impact games a real­ity. I’m build­ing a pro­gram that will make these devel­op­ments trans­par­ent to fes­ti­val atten­dees inter­ested in embark­ing on sim­i­lar projects. This will be the 8th Annual Fes­ti­val, and never before has there been such enthu­si­asm for games mak­ing a real world impact. The oppor­tu­ni­ties to pro­duce social impact games are mush­room­ing. The 8th Annual Games For Change Fes­ti­val will be the best oppor­tu­nity to find out what has worked, what hasn’t and where all this is heading.

There has been a lot of great cov­er­age of the fes­ti­val line-up so far. One of my favorites comes from GamerTag Radio. Here’s what they have to say about Games For Change:

It’s a shame that often, when pop­u­lar media cov­ers the gam­ing indus­try, they can only point fin­gers and find fault with our beloved past-time. Can vio­lent games be harm­ful? Sure…maybe. But are groups like Games for Change using the pos­i­tive aspects of gam­ing to impact the world? Absolutely.

Check out the fes­ti­val site for more infor­ma­tion on the pro­gram and to reg­is­ter. The full press release on the line-up is avail­able here.

BagNews Salon Archive for “Assignment Egypt”

I’m a lit­tle late post­ing this over here, but the archive for the most recent Bag­News Salon “Assign­ment Egypt,” which I pro­duced, is up. Pho­tog­ra­phers and visual aca­d­e­mic dis­cussed news pho­tos of Egypt’s 18-day revolution. Check it out over at Bag­News.

As always with the Salons, when you get a group of visu­ally adept peo­ple dis­cussing a small selec­tion of charged pho­tos, amaz­ing insights result. Below are a few of my favorite quotes from the salon. Read more quotes in the archive post.

“This image shows us the level of com­mit­ment. Every­one here is will­ing to be vul­ner­a­ble and con­front the real­ity of the pow­ers that are beyond them entirely.”

- Michelle Wood­ward, Photo Edi­tor for Mid­dle East Report

Laura El-Tantawy / Burn Mag­a­zine – Egypt­ian anti-government pro­test­ers sleep on the tires of a mil­i­tary tank sta­tioned on Tahrir (Lib­er­a­tion) Square.

“This is a corol­lary to the tanks in the square. It’s like they are say­ing, ‘You’re got your tanks, we’ve got Face­book.’ they even made it out of rocks, the same rocks that a cou­ple days later or a cou­ple days before became projectiles.”

–Michael Shaw, Edi­tor at BagNews

Tara Todras-Whitehill / Asso­ci­ated Press – Anti-government pro­test­ers take pic­tures of protest art in Tahrir Square, the cen­ter of anti-government demon­stra­tions, in Cairo, Egypt, Sun­day, Feb. 6, 2011.

SXSWNYC @ Purpose

Some of the fine folks at Pur­pose, an agency that builds 21st cen­tury move­ments, decided to do some­thing about their angst over not mak­ing it to Austin for SXSW Inter­ac­tive. They put together an alter­na­tive SXSW NYC at their offices last Fri­day. I had the oppor­tu­nity to present a snappy, 5-minute talk on insights I devel­oped work­ing with Sud­den Flow­ers Pro­duc­tions in Ethiopia.

Photo by Jonathan Ystad.

Check out the pre­sen­ta­tion below. Other pre­sen­ters included TED prize pro­ducer Bon­nie Calvin, Adven­ture Project founder Becky Straw, artist Eric For­man, and Pur­pose strate­gist Lee-Sean Huang, among others.  

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Sleep No More

Lon­don based the­ater com­pany Punch­drunk has trans­formed an old club in Chelsea into a night­mar­ish 5-floor labyrinth for their play Sleep No More, a com­bi­na­tion of Shakespeare’s Mac­beth and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I’ve been help­ing to pre­pare the set, which has given me an inside look at how the best of immer­sive the­ater is done. Between the phe­nom­e­nal set design, inti­mate and chill­ing encoun­ters with char­ac­ters through­out the per­for­mance and the well crafted alter­nate real­ity game that lead up to the open­ing, it’s no won­der that Punch­drunk has such a cult fol­low­ing. The expe­ri­ence is addict­ing. (SPOILER ALERT!)

Sleep No More takes place in The McKit­trick Hotel. To enter, you go through a pitch black labyrinth which emp­ties out into a 1930s jazz bar. To go beyond the jazz bar, you must put on a tra­di­tional Venet­ian style mask (see a photo here) and get on the ele­va­tor. The masks help main­tain the soli­tary atmos­phere while at the same time mak­ing the mask-less actors stand out from the audi­ence mem­bers. You are pushed out of the ele­va­tor in small groups on dif­fer­ent floors.

The open­ing scene (if you can find it in time from wher­ever the ele­va­tor man dumped you off) is a silent, slow-motion ban­quet in the ball­room. The tense meal ends with the 12 actors scat­ter­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. The audi­ence scat­ters, too, as they break into small groups fol­low­ing dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters through the hotel. You must decide who to fol­low, if anyone.

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