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 'play' Category
Realistic Gameplay
May 30, 2008
Chess as Art
March 15, 2008
The book How Life Imitates Chess written by world famous chess player Gary Kasparov has a very interesting paragraph describing how the dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp interpreted Chess:
The artist Marcel Duchamp was an energic chess player. During a period of his life, he even resigned art for chess and said that the game had [...]
Rant on Education
November 8, 2007
I’ve been thinking about Education a lot lately. Two reasons: my partner commented to me some weeks ago about an idea he had for making videogames to be used on schools. And secondly, I had one of those interviews about games & violence where the questions went on the direction of asking “but, do you [...]
Philosophical Rugby
October 6, 2007
Just like music, were Tango defines Argentine identity or Samba speaks Brazil’s rythm; sports emerge from cultures expressing their influences and virtues. American Football is the american adaptation of Rugby were they’ve created a propietary version of the sport that works perfect for broadcasting TV commercials and it’s focused on technological innovation. Meanwhile, Rugby represents [...]
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 [...]
Results & Numbers
June 13, 2007
I hate Casino games. When I get work proposals from people that belong to the gambling industry, I just can’t stand it. The reason is quite simple: They’re all about results. They explore the most frivolous aspect of play and yet a very powerful one: Scoring. And when it comes to just winning points, the [...]
Story + Game… + Music
May 3, 2007
Exceptional filmmakers of this era such as Wes Anderson, Sophia Coppola or Spike Jonze -just to name a few- have a very interesting thing in common: They use extraordinary musical scores in their films to spice up their stories. The ambientation and personality of their works owes significant credit to the list of songs they [...]
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 [...]
