The B.U.T.T.O.N. team (sans Nifflas, who lives up in Sweden). Yes, Nils’ baby is part of the crew!
Wow! Our silly party game, B.U.T.T.O.N., has been chosen as one of the 32 finalist games at IndieCade 2010.
The finalists include three games from Denmark, which makes our tiny little home country the second most represented nation at the event!
I’d also like to note that another GAMMA IV game, Steph Thirion’s Faraway, is also being featured. Yay GAMMA IV!
Our nomination actually has a lot of history behind it. In 2008, we attended IndieCade (then in Seattle) to show our Dark Room Sex Game. It was there that we met Nils Deneken, a fellow København’er who was there showing his adventure game masterpiece, Rückblende. Since then, Nils has become a close collaborator, and an even closer friend. Two years later, it all comes full circle – Lau and I team up with Nils (and others!) to make a new game, and we get to show it at IndieCade. I mean, shit, I’m smiling just thinking about it.
This is what the indie scene is all about, folks. It is not about computer games in them of themselves, at least not primarily. For me, it’s all about the people playing them and making them. Game development is such a fantastic platform for meeting other people. We stand as living proof.
The Dark Room Sex Game team and Nils, back at IndieCade 2008… and also on a boat?! What’s up with our fascination with boats?
Are you headed to IndieCade too? Send us an email. We’d love to meet up!
Today, Wednesday the 1st of September, I will be leading a public discussion in Copenhagen at a joint Women in Games and Game Design SIG meeting about sex in games. Here is a description of the theme of the discussion:
Sex in Games – Where Do We Draw the Line?
This summer the Danish political party ‘Socialdemokraterne’ proposed a ban against drawn and animated child pornography – a ban targeting Japanese Hentai and erotic games. Is rape and sex with minors in games morally wrong? Should we ban games that encourage these kinds of behavior, if so, what other kinds of behavior in games do we as a society want to ban? In what ways and to what extent do games affect our behavior? What roles do social norms and culture play in the games we make and interact with in today’s world? What other issues does this potential ban raise, and what larger implications arise for the games industry?
To be earnest, the reason I’m doing this talk is because I was going to write an Erotic Game Tip post about the hentai rape game, RapeLay.
Norbury has worked with some other top-notch ambient artists like the Boats and Library Tapes. If you like the material above, also make sure to check out his work with Le Lendemain, and his recent collaboration with Andrew Hargreaves.
The second release, Light in August, Later, by Japanese artist Aus, is a little more electronic in nature. But as Boomkat put it, the album could indeed be mistaken as an “unofficial sequel” of sorts:
Lovely stuff! Perfect listening as the summer quickly begins to fade away…
A stunning rendition of Mogwai’s legendary “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong”, off the band’s new live album, Special Moves:
The archetypal post-rock anthem. Highest possible recommendations!
Boy do I have fond memories seeing Mogwai live at the Fillmore in San Francisco, in 2004-ish. Go see them live, if you ever get the chance. And you may want to bring ear plugs… they play the loudest show I’ve ever attended!
The whole EP is being given away for free! Get it here. (as seen on the ISO50 blog)
The last track, “Grandma’s Words / Rise Out Of The Stone”, is the standout. I was really moved by the spoken intro – a sobering reflection on Japanese-American internment as practiced by the US government during World War II. The segment, apparently recounted by Saginaw’s grandmother, includes this timely warning:
Fear… does a terrible thing to people. It can change to hate, it can change to discrimination of all kinds…
Do you play chat roulette? I think it’s a great erotic game. Before you judge me as a pervert (too late?) let me elaborate a bit on that statement.
One of the pinnacles of good game design is a game that can be played in many ways where the players co-design and shape their own experiences. Especially in multi-user environments on the internet, different player types playing different “games” in the same environment can create an ecology of players reinforcing and supplementing each other’s experiences. A typical example would be MMORPGs, where some players enjoy playing the crafting game, others the high end PvP game, and still others enjoy just playing the auction house, brokering goods. Richard Bartle first aired these ideas in 1996 in the now-classic article “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDs.” He described the players of MUDs as roughly four different kinds of players: Killers, Achievers, Explorers and Socializers. More importantly, he analyzed the interactions between these types of players in online environments.
Bartle has been used and misused for a lot of stuff, and I am in particularly skeptical about using this theory prescriptively, which easily could lead to a self-reinforcing loop of only designing games that cater to specific experiences that players already expect. Nevertheless, it is always fun to apply this taxonomy, as well as any other theoryofpersonalitytypes, to any social ecosystem in order to model some of the social dynamics happening.
So what games can be played in Chat Roulette?
Some of the content below may be NSFW. We’re talking about ChatRoulette, after all..
This week it’s time for the ill shit – a perfect summer hip-hop beat, oozing with bossa charm:
Hot daaaamn!! I seriously can’t get enough of this. The track features Ohmega Watts, who has also done some excellent work with Lightheaded on Tres Records.
The whole album, by Mental Abstrato, is really stellar. If you like your hip-hop jazzy, look no further.
There’s been a lot of good hip-hop this year, but for me, this track is one of the standouts. Ace!
As a token effort towards putting the bi-weekly back in the cphgc erotic game blogging, I’ve been asked to do a short post on an erotic game. Since I’m not much of an erotic gamer myself, I’ve chosen to give a short overview of a game that’s, if not erotic, at least containing some adult imagery.
He’s just released four “mini-trailers” to tease some of the new features he’s been working on. Here’s my favorite one:
I’ve been lucky enough to try the new build here at the office. The new rotation mechanic is very satisfying to play around with! It takes the core idea of the game – the fragmented viewport – and forefronts it in a way that forces the player to think about the game space in a strange new way. Ingenious stuff.
Check out the other three trailers after the jump.
