“Hommage à New-York” by Florent Deloison: a game in which the player has to destroy the computer code creating the game:
Dans cette version, au lieu des casser des briques, le joueur doit détruire le code informatique à l’origine du jeu, qui finit immanquablement par s’arrêter de fonctionner lorsque des commandes essentielles au programme ont été supprimées. Un gros bouton rouge situé sur le pupitre de commande permet de rédémarrer le jeu.
“What makes Paris look like Paris”
Given a large repository of geotagged imagery, we seek to automatically find visual elements, e.g. windows, balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. […] To address these issues, we propose to use a discriminative clustering approach able to take into account the weak geographic supervision. We show that geographically representative image elements can be discovered automatically from Google Street View imagery in a discriminative manner.
Read in Iwata Asks:
Yuzawa Yeah. We were sure to make use of that. And when the Wii U GamePad controller still hadn’t come together, we had Motoyama-san make a mockup (model) so we could check how it would feel in your hands.
Motoyama I actually brought that today. I’m sorry it’s such a shabby thing.
Iwata Oh, it’s made out of cardboard! (laughs) Motoyama Yeah. The screen has a lid and you can insert pieces of paper in the top to change the display.
Iwata I love how you can slide a piece of paper in! (laughs) Everyone (laughs)
Motoyama We wouldn’t know how it felt unless we could actually hold it, but since we didn’t have one, the only thing to do was make one. In the middle of the night, I cut pieces of cardboard and glued them together.
Kurisu It even has the grips in the back. Motoyama-san burnt the midnight oil to make this. (laughs)
Iwata It holds differently than a tablet, and the screen size isn’t like that of an iPad or smartphone. When Nintendo changed the design along the way12, I bet you thought “What are you doing?!” (laughs)
Motoyama Well, it didn’t make that much of a difference. (laughs) Kurisu Yeah. (laughs) But having a mockup like this that you could hold helped us get a better idea of what was being made.
An interesting Swiss film displayed at “Cinéma tous écran” (a local festival in Geneva): Pixeliose by Romain Graf.
The story goes like this:
“Adrien suffers pixeliose, an unknown disease resulting in partial pixelation of his field of vision. To cure this disease, he goes to a woman, Dr. Rittenmatter, ophthalmologist. This consultation gives no result, but they feel surprisingly close and decide to meet for a swim.
Adrien is traumatized by the death of hundreds of people who jumped from the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 in New York City.
His illness can’t be treated, it does not exist. However, Dr. Rittenmatter believed him and understood what he feels, which matters more than any other medical treatment.“
Why do I blog this? It’s intriguing to see how a sort of New Aesthetic McGuffin (in the form of a disease) is used to create a plot here. Aside from this, and the pleasant viewing of the film, the use of ophtalmologic devices is also curious to create a specific atmosphere. Definitely something to use in design fiction workshops.