Creative Inspiration From Dancing

Whenever I feel that I need some inspiration I watch people dance on the internet. Not just any old dancing – they need to be dancing in a public place where others don’t expect such fun!

There is the long, but oh-so-good Girl Walk All Day.

You see, they need to be out in places not regularly used for dancing because it makes watching the spectators fun too. The public dancing breaks so many social conventions that I feel that it’s a great place to get inspiration from because this dancing is, at its core, trying to push creative boundaries.

My watching of dance videos can be traced back to some dude named Nathan.

Here’s some of Nathan J Barnatt’s videos:

This one features Yelle, who’s music would be great for a video game!

Also, who doesn’t want to just get up and dance ridiculously at least once a day?

You know what, Yelle’s videos are great too.



May 10th, 2012 by admin

All Uncharted Games Edited Into Movies

Reddit user Morphinapg has edited all the Uncharted series to be viewable as a movie. This makes perfect sense since the Uncharted series is often compared to a movie and is sometimes said to be the best Indiana Jones games ;)

Uncharted 1

Morphinapg says this about his project to edit the games into a movie in his original posting on Reddit:

With these projects I was trying to make movies that would be viewable whether or not you had played the game, or even care about playing video games, so I wanted to make them as close to a real movie as possible. This meant taking out as many chapter titles, button prompts, and more to make it seem less like a video game. There were certain aspects I wasn’t able to remove, such as the current weapon selected, or an occasional button prompt. I tried to focus mostly on the cinematics, but also include the minimum amount of gameplay to link them, especially focusing on the more cinematic elements of gameplay. I wanted to make sure not to cut any cutscenes or any gameplay that would leave the viewer confused if they hadn’t played the game, so in the end Uncharted 2 and 3 were quite long, but that’s just because the stories are much more complicated than Uncharted 1′s. Either way it’s still a lot shorter than playing the real game, so if you are ever in the mood to watch the story of one of these games in one sitting, but don’t have the time to play the entire game through, then these are great for that purpose, or if you want to show these games’ stories to friends or family that don’t care about playing video games.

Uncharted 2

The urge to make a movie out of this game is not found only in the minds of fans of the series. The IMDB page on the first Uncharted movie is sparse at the moment but I’m sure it’ll have more information soon enough.

Uncharted 3



April 30th, 2012 by admin

Thoughts on Starting a New Business

Two nifty takes on planning a business have landed in my inbox in the past week and they both are good enough and flexible enough that I feel I should share them. First up is a new way to go about business planning and rethinks what the business planing should focus on.

The problem with the traditional business plan is that while it is a great *initial* exercise for the entrepreneur, we don’t yet have all the right answers but are expected to pretend we do. More importantly, we see the world differently and need help finding the right answers but the business plan format is not conducive for that.

It’s called the lean startup canvas and propose to not think about the product you’re creating but rather the business model that you’re creating. This may not sound radical but the change in focus can be helpful.

Thinking about the business model as “the product” is quite empowering. It’s not something you back into once you have a product with early traction to pitch investors. Rather, it’s something you can and should be actively building and testing from day one.

The canvas is focused on the business aspect of the plan, but what about living while you’re starting a business. If you read TechCrunch you’ll start to think that the only thing worth doing is working 20-hour days to start a company to sell it to somebody else – the act of creating a business for money is the thing we ought to aspire to.

The reality is that people need a good work-life balance. MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey has an excellent talk on his experience with finding that work-life business. Watch the video below or read his notes on his blog about the talk.

Webstock ’12: Matt Haughey – Lessons from a 40 year old from Webstock on Vimeo.



March 27th, 2012 by admin

Health and Video Games

Health care is an ever-expanding industry so it makes sense that the world of games and health will intersect.

For an introduction to the complexities of health care in the developed world and how we can start seeing how games can impact it watch this keynote by Ben Swayer at the most recent Games for Health – Europe conference.

General care

When it comes to general care there have been some attempts like WiiFit that brought the idea of games connected to health to the mainstream. The connection between professional game designers and health care practitioners can better bridge the divide between for-profit and for-health care. The ideal is people play games that are fun in itself, and it just so happens that the games are about (or for) healthy living.

Wii Fit in action:

There’s also games that help people stay fit through activity:

Zombies, Run is perhaps the best example of this:

Fitocracy a gaming-inspired approached to an online community about staying fit by being active.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Here’s a good video summary from an excellent New Yorker article on how PTSD is treated using virtual environments.

Games for research

Foldit is the most popular example of a game that uses players to research solutions that computers can’t solve. This game focus on the complexity of protein folding.

Phylo is another example of a game that uses the players of the game to compute complex information. The players assemble sequences of DNA for success!

*It’s also worth noting that health games and serious games (education) have a lot in common but I feel that is covered enough elsewhere on this blog.



March 16th, 2012 by admin

Things to Note From GDC 2012

Unfortunately I was not able to get down to GDC 2012, but I was following some of the chatter online and spoke to people upon their return. I’ve compiled a few things that I think are noteworthy and one should keep an eye on. If I was at the conference itself I’m sure the list would be quite different.

Industry stuff:

Problematizing women-focused initiatives in the game industry.

When the Consoles Die by Ben Cousins. About a half hour and worth the watch:

When The Consoles Die, What Comes Next?

View another webinar from Ben Cousins

Technology stuff:

A procedural world generator called Outerra that can put Minecraft to shame .

It also looks like the world of mind reading is improving with a game of mental tug of war.

CryEngine, which powers the Crysis series and military simulators had a new tech trailer on display and it looks impressive – would you expect anything less? The new tech trailer for CryEngine3 can be seen on GameTrailers.



March 14th, 2012 by admin
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