"We realised we had the opportunity to create what we call ‘the ultimate first-person game,’” he told Ars. “The illusion provided from successful binaural audio is closer to immersive reality than anything a screen can provide. That is, when it truly works, you’re actually there, getting a closer approximation to the information you’d get from a real space. So some people really find the game incredibly, unplayably, scary."
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Scared of the dark: a look at the audio game Papa Sangre. A first-person game that has no video—you play it solely through audio.
"
In our interview with Jenova, he talked about the original inspiration for Flower:
When we made Flower, it was initially designed from experience. I grew up in Shanghai, which is a huge metropolitan city. We didn’t have that much green. I had never seen a rolling grass hill. When I came to California and I was driving on I-5 from L.A. to San Francisco, I saw all these farms, endless green, the windmills. It really gave me a sense of nature and I wanted to capture it. It’s like a person that has never seen the ocean going to the beach for the first time.
I wanted to capture that, so I took a photo, but the photo only captured a very small field of view. It’s totally different from what I remembered. What I remembered was 360 degrees of nature, endless, so I took a panoramic video. It tells the scale, but it still doesn’t tell this feeling of being surrounded by nature. Then, there’s the wind. There’s the smell. Everything there was necessary to recapture that strong experience I had.
That’s when I realized I’m a game designer. With a game, I could do that. I could let the player fly through the grass as if their face was next to it. They can push away the grass, they can [almost] smell it by interacting at close distance, but also they could fly up and seen the scale of the whole field. Games have so much freedom that I can capture everything I want to capture. The other thing is the sense of endlessness, the sense of freedom. You can go anywhere you want.
"
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The Smithsonian is putting on a exhibition in 2012 entitled “The Art History of Games.” thatgamecompany’s “flower” will be one of the featured titles. This quote came from an email promoting the exhibition.
(Can you tell I’m infatuated with this company and its games?)
"Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store. In a nutshell, I will be leading the charge for games on the App Store, so whether you browse through iTunes, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, the games content you see will be handpicked and organized by me and my team. I couldn’t be happier."
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Bye IGN, Hello Apple « Mouth on Fire - Matt Casamassina, former editor at IGN of their N64, GameCube, Wii, and Wireless/iPhone channels. Hands-down my favorite gaming journalist in the business. Apple couldn’t have picked a better guy for this role.
Thanks to Gamasutra’s Twitter for the news and the story.
"Perhaps that’s not the same as truly driving us toward faith. But perhaps more’s going on in modern, big-name games than I’ve given them credit for. Assassin’s Creed II (despite Ubisoft’s reluctance to talk about it) tackles real issues of religion and faith, even if I may not like the conclusions. Heroic fantasies like Dragon Age: Origins challenge me to be the hero, and perhaps as Wyatt suggests, I can carry that sense of heroism into the little things in my life — being a better parent, a better friend, and yes, a better believer. And maybe that’s enough."
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GameSpy: God’s PR Problem: The Role of Religion in Videogames - I am genuinely surprised, and impressed, by this article’s exploration into the role religion plays in video games. Surprised that it’s asking serious questions (on a level I haven’t seen since Next Generation magazine, the best gaming publication ever), and impressed at the quality of the article and the designers’ responses.
This is good gaming journalism, folks. Good job, GameSpy, and thanks to Julian Murdoch for looking for meaning in today’s games.
![Based on the teaser images, it seems likely that all of these titles will also make their way to the Mac. This leads us to believe that Valve has ported their Source game engine over to the Mac, which would allow any future games based on this engine to be easily launched for the Mac. Alternative [sic], Valve could be using Transgaming/Cider for the translation.
The Significance of Steam and Valve’s Games for Mac - Mac Rumors
This is a big deal for gaming on the Mac. If Valve has indeed ported or rewritten their Source game engine for the Mac, it’s an even bigger deal. Not only would Mac users have access to a great game distribution platform, but game developers would also have access to a game engine that could easily target Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and OS X. It would make the case for developing Source-based games for the Mac a no-duh proposition.
Plus, I don’t see how Valve could justify this hype if all they’re doing is using Cider to act as a graphics translation layer. That’s nothing new, and anyway, who would want to base an entire business venture on another company’s inelegant graphics translation product? I hope Valve sees it the same way.
Update 3/8/2010: They do.](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kyru6lrq1y1qzxralo1_500.jpg)
