FourceLabs

We’ve submitted a paper to Meaningful Play, a conference on gamedesign held in Michigan, USA, in October. We talked about the design challenges that we had while making BlockBlazers and how we overcame them. The title of the paper is “BlockBlazers: Serious Decoy”, to give just a little idea what it’s about. I’m not sure what the rules of Meaningful Play are on posting (is that publishing?) the paper here, we’ll first wait to hear if we’ve been selected or not (August 15th) before asking about that. Keep you posted!

New technology making new gameplay possible:

Article on the always interesting Pasta & Vinegar concerning a physical interface which gets your heart pumping. Your heart rate acts as an input for the game. It’s proposed in the article that one’s heart rate would drive a racing environment (or other speed-based concepts) in which your speed is determined by how high your heart rate is, and that some other aspect of the game would also be influenced by your heart rate such as your ability to aim at something, turn a sharp corner, etc.

I’m not sure whether mapping speed to heart rate is a fair interpretation. What can you really know about a person by knowing their heart rate? To put it bluntly: maybe they’re really obese and just climbed a single flight of stairs. Do you want to challenge them further and choose to make a trade-off between excerting themselves or having more accuracy in the game, or would you rather make manipulating the game easier for them as their heart rate rises?

Sanyo’s breakthrough short throw projector design may well revolutionize the front projector market. By radically altering traditional projection optics, they’ve been able to design a projector capable of filling a wall from as little as 3-inches away.

Let’s just hope it will be affordable.

http://hackronym.com/olpc/gamejam/index.html
This game design event is held this very weekend. But it could be an interesting challenge to participate in if the event is repeated in the future.

So much for Philips’s Entertaible.

http://www.konjak.org/chalk.htm

This is an arcade shooter à la Gradius, but with a cute anime character… and chalk. Draw lines to eliminate enemies or to defend your character. According to Adriaan, this works great with a sketch tablet. Download now and be addicted!

This is a nice multiplayer game, check it out.