When the Wii was first announced back in 2005, I claimed that it was going to be the triumph of interactive design over brute-force processing for realistic graphics. Sales of the console during the last 2 years prove this point. But something unexpected happened: Even though the Wii wasn’t made for realistic graphics, the revolutionary [...]
Archive for the 'art' Category
Realistic Gameplay
May 30, 2008
Software: Live at TED
April 5, 2008
When I think about how the Internet has changed my life, the first thing that comes to my mind is to thank this revolution for the incredible access to knowledge that has provided me (and millions around the planet).
And one of the reasons I’m so thankful has to do with TEDTalks. An incredible conference that [...]
Ludic Comedy
January 12, 2008
We’ve all played Super Mario: a classic platform game where with trial & error you get to overcome the obstacles ahead of you. Now, a Japanese coder got the original level of Super Mario and gave it a very fun twist: it turned the game onto the most absurd and difficult platformer ever.
The bizarre kitty [...]
Software as Art
January 8, 2008
I usually blog about innovations on the field of gaming that try to unleash new possibilities with interactivity. Probably because games, due to the their intrinsic interactive value, are the most common place to find new styles of interactive design. But games are a subset of a much more broader category: Software.
Today, I want to [...]
Art + Science = Game
November 17, 2007
It has always been told that games are the perfect marriage between art and science. The best and most simple empirical proof of such statement is made by Helsinki’s great talent Petri Purho with this little game over here. I remember meeting him at this year’s GDC after he made a brilliant presentation on the [...]
When Books Were Technology
October 1, 2007
In a world of exponential technological growth, inventions from the past can sometimes be perceived as a common thing from nature. Books in particular, have been with us for so many centuries that we often forget they are one of the most important pieces of technology ever created.
The greatest contributor to books in the spanish [...]
Results & Competition
June 17, 2007
On my previous post, Patrick’s comment on skill gaming made me think about the nature of sports. Videogames that rely exclusively on mastering a particular set of skills, are usually considered digital sports. Such is the case of Unreal or Age of Empires that are part of digital olympic events.
The nature of skill-gaming has a [...]
Graphic Novels
June 4, 2007
My brother Richard (a.k.a. Liniers) is a very succesful cartoonist. His particular sense of humor and sensibility are expressed in a daily comic strip named Macanudo. Maybe because he’s 10 years older than me, he was more prone to draw with pencils than with computers. And for me, as the son of a digital era, [...]
Music is Play
April 4, 2007
Maybe you have wondered why I have chosen to quote Louis Armstrong in the headline of this blog: “What we play is life” satchmo said when asked about his jaw-dropping style when it comes to play his jazz. And the key word here, is Play.
If games are art, that’s simply because playing games can bring [...]
The Nature of the Digital Author
September 1, 2006
Keeping track with my last post on Collective Culture and how we’re starting to have a concrete perception of “culture as building blocks where we can remix anything just like we want it”, I wanted to narrow this vision towards games.
Some weeks ago I found a fantastic game named Block Action. It’s the good old [...]
