Create Digital Motion’s Peter Kirn explains a bit more about the One Button Objects show that we’re co-organizing on March 12 at Gray Area Foundation.
So many fun toys coming our way!
http://createdigitalmotion.com/2010/03/extended-through-friday-one-button-objects-call/
We’re still feverishly playing and debating all the great Gamma4 games we received last week! So while you wait for us, why not browse the primo rewards we’re offering in our brand-new Kickstarter campaign. We launched the campaign today to raise the last chunk funds that we need, to hold our amazing curated indie game debut party-thing next month in San Francisco! A whole slew of indie devs have given us great schwag like tshirts, download codes, and maquettes to pass along to our pledgers. Most enticing of all, we are offering THREE All-Access GDC Passes, generously donated by Think Services! For $1600, getting your GDC pass from the Gamma4 Kickstarter campaign isn’t only The Right Thing To Do, it’s just plain economical.
For those of you who work more on the hardware/electronics side of things, Kokoromi and Create Digital Media are very happy to announce:
CALL FOR WORKS – KOKOROMI’S ONE-BUTTON GAME OBJECTS
What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we’d like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design.
To celebrate the arrival of their Gamma game event in San Francisco, game collective Kokoromi is teaming up with Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion to launch a call for ONE-BUTTON OBJECTS. This call seeks to inspire unique hardware/software hacks that integrate playful, one-button interaction within a standalone machine or device. The curators are seeking circuit-bent gadgets, retro-fitted consoles, mechanical constructions, custom electronics, and other one-off creations. During the week of the Game Developers Conference, the Game Objects will be featured in an exhibit at the Gray Area Foundation, 
a new collaboration and exhibition venue revitalizing the Tenderloin, near the Moscone Center. A selection of these Objects will be shown at the opening night Gamma party, alongside the software-based Gamma4 one-button games, on March 10th at the Mezzanine in SoMa.
Check out the full Guidelines and Submission requirements.
CDM will be organizing some hackdays around the world to get people started on their One Button creations, so stay tuned!
Kokoromi is eagerly looking for one more Presenting sponsor to join us and our 2010 partner GDC in bringing Gamma4 to the world this March. Honestly, we really need your help to make this happen. Needless to say, a Presenting sponsor (the top tier of Gamma4 support) gets lots of great media coverage, international industry visibility, and some sweet VIP benefits at the event itself!
So! You (or someone you know) want to reach out to the beautiful mess of game creators that will be assembling soon in San Francisco? Do get in touch (gamma4 -at- kokoromi -dot- org) and we’ll drop you a Gamma4 sponsorship writeup, which explains how we will make it so. Muchas gracias, caballeros!
Ready to submit your One Button Game? Cool.
Is the secret to good games found in high-tech interfaces? Kokoromi proposes that game developers can still find beauty in absolute simplicity. On March 10th, Gamma 4 will unveil brand-new games that use JUST ONE BUTTON.
Montreal experimental game collective Kokoromi announced that it is partnering with Think Services’ Game Developers Conference to bring the fourth edition of their renowned Gamma game showcase to GDC 2010 next March.
The Gamma showcases, which are free for anyone to enter, present independent designers with constraint-based challenges and a public play environment that push the boundaries of game-making.
Comparable to a longer-form, targeted version of the ‘indie game jam’ concept, previous years’ themes have included Gamma 01: Audio Feed (games driven by live audio), gamma 256 (games with extremely small pixel dimensions), and GAMMA 3D (games using red-blue stereoscopic 3D).
From these unique events, ground-breaking experimental video games have emerged such as Passage, Paper Moon and Super HYPERCUBE (pictured). In past years, Gamma has played host to some of game making’s most talented individual creators, including Jason Rohrer, Petri Purho, Adam Saltsman, Shawn McGrath and Alec Holowka.
Kokoromi will open this year’s Gamma submissions -– and reveal its latest theme — in November 2009, allowing game makers 6-8 weeks to build their games.
Chosen games will be showcased at a public party following the Independent Games Summit at the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. In keeping with Gamma’s distinctive “new arcade” format, these games will be featured on large screen projections, and accompanied by the music of local and international DJs.
Following the debut event, the selected games will be playable in a special GDC-donated booth on the Game Developers Conference Expo floor from March 11th to 13th, 2010. Game developers, media, and industry luminaries from around the world will be able view and play the games and speak with their creators.
Gamma 4 offers unprecedented exposure for the selected game makers, who will be given two GDC 2010 All-Access passes for their outstanding creative effort. It also adds a notable new attraction to the GDC Expo, which also hosts the renowned Independent Games Festival Pavilion and a variety of exhibits from the game industry’s leading companies.
Gamma is part of Kokoromi’s mandate to inspire and present diverse, experimental game content to a wide public audience. In doing so, they are part of a larger international movement that recognizes games as a unique artistic form.
More information on Gamma 4 theme and submission dates will be available in November 2009 at the official Kokoromi website.
Kokoromi is teaming up with the TAG (Technoculture, Art, and Games) research group at the Montreal Biennale art show, which opens tonight! Stay tuned to this space (and our Facebook group) for more details in the days to come.
Up first: your exclusive chance to play our red/blue stereoscopic headtracking cube fitting game from the retro-future: superHYPERCUBE
This is the first public showing of sHC since its debut at GAMMA 3D, and we’re psyched to help inagurate TAG’S Porous Lab. Musical tracks for your enjoyment will be provided by Montreal’s oblivionboy.
The vernissage is free, and the gallery open late tonight – from 6:30pm to 11. Porous Lab is on the 2nd floor of the Ecole Bourget, just above Laika 2.0 — where you can grab a drink.
Come see some art, have a beer, chill on our couches, and enjoy some stereoscopic headtracking goodness.
Guy-Concordia or PeelWhen Kokoromi announced gamma3d, we honestly didn’t know whether our design challenge, anaglyphic stereoscopy (which is – binocular display using superimposed red and cyan images), could actually be integral to a game. We issued the challenge to ourselves and other creators to explore whether the technique could produce truly original gameplay – interactions not possible to achieve in any other manner.
Based on the submitted games, our answer could be “yes, but extremely rarely, and only with carefully controlled and limited visuals.” Namely, of the games we received, only The Depths To Which I Sink was impossible to play without the anaglyphic red-cyan glasses. Depths strips away all other depth-of-scene cues, like scale, horizon, and parallax, and disguises the anaglyphic color palette in simple non-representational graphics. In other words, if you don’t wear the 3D glasses, the rectangular game world of Depths is completely flat.
But stereoscopic design techniques are deeply dependent on the specific hardware and software used to deliver the illusion, which means each is unlikely to become widespread. The gameplay innovation of each would be limited to that particular interface, and even then, there doesn’t seem to be much that can’t also be done by other means. Other stereoscopic technologies that feature more discreet perceptive separation between the two “eyes” might offer a few unique opportunities, which we hope to see when that technology becomes more accessible to experimenters.
In general, stereoscopy seems primarily a way to interest and immerse players visually and sensorially, rather than create any revolutions in gameplay. But we invite you to prove us wrong on that one. In the meantime, it’s definitely a way to get a room full of our favorite people to put on wicked cool cardboard glasses.
Photo: Simon Law – Some rights reserved.
