Reyy

The game is internet based. The more people playing at one time, the more chaotic, and therefore more fun!

The game begins when several mysterious explosions occur in San Francisco during morning rush hour...

Wesley Chen shows off diagrams on game theory.

http://www.news8austin.com/content/your_news/default.asp?ArID=194809

This is an excerpt from the article

"We like the word 'game' because we played video games," Chen said. "Everything can be represented by games, everything from politics, job search, even love."

An example is when a boy wants to win a girl, Chen said. He can use game theory to decide his moves.

"You can use this game to benefit you by listing the possible outcomes. Let's say if I present her with a gift, what will she think? You can list the possible outcomes and plan four, five or six steps ahead."

The statement about "Everything can be represented by games,..."is very indicative to me how "serious" games are to a multitude of people. I'm still hoping to apply game theory to my final studio project this semester. I would love to see the diagram he was showing in the image above.

I really like this game. Maybe there's something to the non-linearity idea that was mentioned in the "Ergodic Literature" reader. The aspect of changing characters in the middle of the game is interesting but I believe the "selecting" of one of the options above the scenes is very engaging. I'm not sure yet if the story have a different outcome depending on the options chosen but it definitely gives your mind a different way to process the information.

I think it is more successful than its predecessors[zelda, etc] because of its cinematic characteristics: soundtrack, effects, "camera" movement. The screenshots I chose are as follows:

This shot is a good example of the game's ambiance that is quite successful in projecting the story..

...while this example shows the game's attempt of multiplicity of scenarios.

I like the premise of the text. The way Aarseth used a mathematical(or is it physics) idea, ergodic, to do his literary analysis is very intriguing. But it almost sounds like "deconstruction". I am curious if derrida himself had an input about the "interactive narrative".

The author cited a form of cybertext in antiquity, I Ching. I'm hoping to see a copy of this book in the future because of this idea of randomization. It's an amazing example to support the author's theory. The image below is a trigram used in the texts of I Ching.

Although it's funny that the book, Ergodic Literature, is presenting the idea of non-linear by using a linear form. I'm not saying it's oxymoronic. It's just funny.

This game might improve exponentially just by maybe using bullet points instead of these lengthy paragraphs. Not unless the target audience are gamers who loves to read hours and hours of texts before one even starts the game. There's a reason "pong" was one of the progenitors of the video game history...

The game idea is about survival after an apocalyptic event i.e. nuclear detonation on major cities worldwide. How do you come out from the ashes, in a sense? Maybe, as a first-person wanderer, you collect things that you believe it will help you survive. Also, gather information on how to establish local, national, global governments amidst the anarchy at hand.

I found this game proposal, but I don't know if it ever made it to production.

http://www.outbreakthegame.com/about.php

Or maybe it's inevitable that the games will become one of the savior on the non-imaginative movie moguls. With the advent of the digital tech they[movie moguls] certainly have an abundant of storylines from the comic book industry...

But here's what I'm blogging about at the moment..."Play! was a video game symphony that brought to life the award-winning music of 20 of the biggest and best computer games around. Music from the games was performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Arnie Roth and backed by choral sensation Cantillation) while massive screens, suspended over the orchestra, captured stunning game play sequences. Play! ran from 19-23 June and was exclusive to the Sydney Opera House. Music was performed from games including:
* Final Fantasy VI &VII
* Metal Gear Solid
* Halo
* Castlevania
* World of Warcraft
* Kingdom Hearts
* The Legend of Zelda
* Super Mario Bros
* Sonic The Hedgehog" [selectparks.net]

http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/sections/whats_on/features/play/index.asp...don't forget to click play to get a preview of the event...

I would have like to have heard and seen this event. It's not an actual art show or is it? Using a group of musicians to activate the images of the games is not unique but arguably quite an artform. Imagine watching your favorite game with the live sound of strings, brass, percussion, etc...Specifically, I would love to have seen and heard the performance for Final Fantasy!

Back to the movie/games...I saw the two movie versions of Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within and Advent Children. The former bombed in the theaters and the latter is the one I enjoyed watching.

Final Fantasy VII Advent Children... is a 2005 computer-animated film directed by Tetsuya Nomura, co-directed by Takeshi Nozue, written by Kazushige Nojima and based on the highly successful 1997 console role-playing game Final Fantasy VII. The film is set two years after Final Fantasy VII and one year before "Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cereberus" and follows Cloud Strife as he unravels the cause of a mysterious plague that has beset the population. The initial DVD and UMD release of the film in 2005 was voiced in Japanese. The English-dubbed NTSC and PAL versions were released on April 25, 2006. The Spanish-dubbed PAL version was released on January 30, 2007, in UMD and on February 20, 2007, in DVD. The film's soundtrack, scored by Nobuo Uematsu, was released on September 28, 2005.

This second version probably fared better than the previous one because the movie used anime as the base for its graphic artwork. Although, I'm not a Final Fantasy player, I enjoyed the movie immensely.

"Do you think that military use of computer games increases or decreases the likelihood of armed conflict?"

Neither...but then again speculating on the affects of games on our "fibble" minds have been goin' for years. Depending on the politics of the so called experts speculating, we get the "this is good/bad for you"

This image reminds me of an old tv commercial, was it an Apple superbowl commercial?...where a person hurls a hammer of sort unto a large projector screen. The screen had an ominous image of a man speaking, to the masses viewing the screen.

Also very Orwellian in the "1984" sense...

We are hunting wabbits...

Here's another "game theory" article that uses a different scenario than the "nash equilibrium" or the "prisoner's dilemma. But it's interesting the word "trust" was the caveat...

http://www.slate.com/id/2174706/

totally unrelated but funny...

http://gprime.net/game.php/nanacacrash