Happy belated Thanksgiving, Americans. I stayed at my family’s place in Massachusetts for the holiday, and now that I’m back in New York I am fighting to catch up amid the whirlwind of work that December always is. We’ll be continuing with our Metal Gear Solid marathon soon! For the moment, though, just some things to catch you up on!
At Thought Catalog, I wrote about the time I adopted a baby robot dinosaur. During the FFVII Letters that Kirk Hamilton and I wrote at Paste, we talked about the broad sketches digital worlds can draw that let us attach our imaginations to things. That sense of attachment is even stranger and more intense when it comes to things that resemble living creatures. And sad. And primal.
There’s a new augmented reality game for iOS called Dimensions, and it’s very, very neat. It uses the audio in your environment and responds to your movement and activity level to create the sense that you travel among realms of sound. It’s easier to experience than to describe, but in this interview at Gamasutra, the developer talks to me about augmented reality and the nuance of making the world around you, subtly, into a magical experience.
There are social games where you click on farm animals and there are real games where you pull triggers and shoot dudes, right? Not anymore. The lines between these platforms are becoming more elastic, and the multiplatform social space and the core gaming space are beginning to borrow from each other more and more. Chris Archer used to work at Activision, but at his new studio, U4ia, he told me he wants to make “first person social” games that bring together the social and FPS spaces.
Of particular interest, he believes that amid all of our networking activities and social media platforms, it’s actually harder these days to have a meaningful gaming experience with your actual friends than it was in the ol’ LAN party days. What do you think?
I spend a lot of time in the change games space, talking to folks who want to make games that motivate people to support charitable causes or to better understand global issues. One shortfall that’s plagued this promising sector for some time is that they’ve gotten good at raising awareness, but ways to get people to actually do things — give money, spread the word — are still under consideration.
A new game from Sojo Studios called Wetopia has found a really promising way to take all of the sharing and visiting and resource management inherent to Facebook games and use it to support major nonprofits. Ellen DeGeneres said she likes it! Check out my interview (with Sojo Studios’ Lincoln Brown, not with Ellen, sadly).
Finally, I’ve gotten to chat to the studio head of IO Interactive about what’s next for them. They get to work on a new IP and a new Hitman game once they ship Absolution. In my full interview you can read all about it.
By the way, here are my five most favorite albums from 2011, if you are looking for something new to listen to:
1. Widowspeak (s/t)
2. Parallax (Atlas Sound)
3. Staring at the X (Forest Fire)
4. D (White Denim)
5. Helplessness Blues (Fleet Foxes)