We don't hear much about the Iranian games industry, but a brief Presstv.ir report from Gamescom last week gives a glimpse into the Persian development scene.

Amir Tarbyatjouy, who managed affairs for the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games at Gamescom says that his country is becoming a "lead player" in game development in the Middle East.

So what kind of games have been coming out of Iranian studios? Tarbyatjouy described an Iran–Iraq war tank shooter, a Persian platformer (sans Jake Gyllenhaal), an adventure game starring a girl caught up in the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and an RPG based on Iranian mythology called The Age of the Braves.

But for all their enthusiasm, Iranian game developers find that real-world politics can make their virtual efforts challenging, particularly when it comes to raising capital.

"We need more investors. The [US] sanctions do affect our industry," Tarbyatjouy explained. "But they cannot stop it," he added.

[via Presstv.ir]

Andy Balo and a few friend have just released "Kind of Bloop," an 8-bit re-arrangement of Miles Davis' classic jazz disc "Kind of Blue."

Balo explains the inspiration behind "Bloop" on the project's website:

I've always wondered what chiptune jazz covers would sound like. What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga?

Balo recruited chiptune artists Sergeeo and astor, who'd already covered Charlie Parker's "Confirmation" and Coltrane's "Giant Steps," respectively, and funded the project entirely through donations culled through Kickstarter. Within four hours, the crew had the $2000 they needed to license the music and produce the tribute, which ultimately drew more than $8500 in pledges.

Right now, only people who donated to the project can download the full album. Those folks will also receive a limited-edition CD. The rest of us will have to wait until Thursday, when the tribute officially goes on sale for a meager five bucks.

Until then, enjoy these previews:

Kind of Bloop

1. So What — Ast0r
2. Freddie Freeloader — Virt
3. Blue in Green — Sergeeo
4. All Blues — Shnabubula
5. Flamenco Sketches — Disasterpeace

Yesterday marked the debut of a long-awaited music video from Felicia Day and the cast of her Web-based sitcom about MMO geeks, The Guild. Almost immediately "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar" hit the Number 1 spot on iTunes and Amazon.

The video is a collaboration between Day and Jed Whedon, half-brother of Buffy maestro Joss and co-creator of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". Day wrote the lyrics, while Whedon built the song and directed the short, a parody of insipid 90s dance music videos.

As far as game-geek tracks go, "Date My Avatar" fels a bit flat and bland — not quite geeky enough for my taste and references to "The Guild" are thin and superficial — but it's certainly catchy and there's no doubt that Day is a winsome cosplayer.

If you're into it, Digital City has an interview with Whedon and company.

Anecdotally, I think that much of the short-term aggression associated with videogames is a measure not of the inherent evils of aggressive play but of breaking players out of a context where aggression is permissible — a game world — and then asking them to quickly shift into a real-world context where that aggression is unacceptable. And then there's the burst of aggression we all tend to feel when someone interrupts us while we're deep in concentration, whether playing a videogame, reading a book or trying to catch a game on TV.

As far as anecdotes on the subject go, this one is a tragic doozy. A Texas teenager has been accused of beating a 23-month-old girl to death with a game controller after she interrupted his gameplay.

Although he initially denied the charges, 17-year-old Ethan Wolfe eventually confessed to striking the infant with a gamepad.

According to police in Tomball, Texas:

[Wolfe] said he was playing a video game, that the child had got in the way of the game, and possibly (relieved herself) on him. It frustrated him and caused him to loose the game. He struck the child three or four times with the controller of the video game. Then he picked the child up, and threw the child up on the bed.

Police say Wolfe didn't initially realize the baby was unresponsive. It wasn't until he went to check on her that he knew something was wrong.

Wolfe is being charged with injury to a child in the first degree, which carries the same punishment as murder.

[via KIAH TV]

A game designer has won one of seven prestigious chairs endowed to the University of California system by the MacArthur Foundation.

Michael Mateas, associate professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UCSC, is the first holder of the MacArthur Foundation Chair at the school. The chair's endowment provides $80,000 annually for five years. 

Mateas is known for his work with Facade, an artificial intelligence-driven interactive drama. Mateas is researching ways to bring rich social interactions to serious games, whose power he says has not been fully tapped. By building a suite of game authoring tools, Mateas also hopes to make the expressive power of games available to the masses.

"I want to enable everyday people to create games about topics that are important to them," Mateas says. "We're at a threshold, just beginning to create a medium that in many ways is as broad as writing. Anything you can imagine conveying in writing or film, you can potentially do in computational media in a way that makes it amenable to a level of exploration and reflection that is not possible in those other media."

Mateas is also developing a series of emergency response games. He's already done preliminary work on a training game for rescue situations in collapsed buildings, collaborating with a team at NASA Ames Research Center to expand the number of firefighters to have access to the highly specialized training.

As Mateas points out, the award of the chair to a game developer represents a tacit acknowledgment of the importance of the medium.

"What excites me about games is their potential as a new way to communicate and to reflect on the human condition. Having the MacArthur Chair helps to legitimize this work and sends a clear message of support for the creation of this new discipline of computational media."

Gamasutra brings word of two gameplay twists for Fable III, the latest iteration of Peter Molyneux' ambitious RPG franchise, known for its emphasis on moral choice and its ambitious adaptive worlds.

Speaking at GDC Europe in Cologne, Molyneux told attendees that Fable III will be broken into phases — the first, rather typically, will put the player on a quest for power, while the second will focus on the challenge of wielding it.

The first half [of the game] is about leading a rebellion, storming and overthrowing the tyrant king..[but] rather than doing what most games do, which is end there... we then change the game and make you ruler...How are you going to fulfill the promises you made in your journey to rule?

Apparently, by touching people. In addition to turning the traditional powerlust of RPGs on its head by forcing players to actually wear the crown they fought for (and pass judgment on his subjects) Fable III introduces a new "touch" mechanic. The idea is to bring the player deeper into the gameworld by letting her hug, embrace, kiss and hold hands with NPCs.

Molyneux explained that "the character feels very detached from the world" in many video games. Why shouldn't we have the ability for the hero to touch people?" 

What's interesting about the mechanic is that it's dynamic. Rather than just a collection of scripted opportunities, Molyneux' touch system seems to be an extension of the tactile experience pioneered by Fumito Ueda in Ico, where the relationship between the game's characters was drawn in large part by the nature of their constant physical interactions. In Fable III players can even take an NPC by the hand and lead her around the the world, Ico-style, if they wish.  By giving players the ability to physically interact in ways that are more about communication than combat, Molyneux hopes not only that they will feel a stronger presence in the world of Fable but also that the tactile gestures between characters will "start to mean something."

As for more risque possibilities? "I don't think I need to tell you what other touch mechanics we have," Molyneux drily revealed.

While the Fable franchise often has trouble living up to the ambitious expectations Molyneux sets for it, this iteration seems as intriguing as ever.

[via Gamasutra]

The era of gesture-based controls is only just taking off, but before it's own wand-waving system sees production, Sony is already charging ahead with an emotion-tracking system.

In a patent spotted by Silicon Era, Sony describes a system that uses a camera and a microphone to capture metadata about a player's emotions. Laughter (and the inevitable shouts of frustration) are recorded by the mic, while gestures of triumph (like a high five) or more subtle smirks and grimaces are captured by the system. These signals of human disposition are then converted to metadata, which can be used locally on the console or passed over a network in a multiplayer environment.

While the proposed technology has an obvious application in grafting player's emotions onto their avatars — imagine how much more subtle and rich player interactions will become once body-language and facial expression are part of the equation — the system could be a huge boon to non-player characters as well.

One of the things that makes creating realistic NPCs so difficult is the clumsy way in which they must receive input. Dialog trees and even limited natural-language parsing leaves out much of the context required to hold believable conversations. With emotional tracking, characters could use a player's emotional state to resolve linguistic ambiguities. They could also use those cues to gauge, anticipate and respond to player reactions.

Another application we're really looking forward to is games that can tell whether you're frustrated or bored and tune themselves accordingly.  And if (when) this technology ever sees the inside of a living room, get ready for a whole new genre of "mood games." Could Sony Psych Ward be the next Wii Fit?

Roger Ebert may have used "Romeo and Juliet" as an example of why games aren't art — falsely positing a game version's requisite happy ending — but the Beijing Film Academy is using game culture to give the Bard's own work a facelift.

In a production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" mounted at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh Scotland, the BFA has adorned Oberon and Titania, the quarrelsome fairy king and queen, with virtual reality gear. From Kenneth Scott's review:

It has been argued that it is the breaking down of identities that leads to Titania and Oberon's brawl, which drives the rest of the story. So it's appropriate that as the show starts they are wearing virtual reality headsets to engage in a fight as characters in a computer game.

The multimedia production also uses game technology to give new life to the sets of the 16th century masterpiece:

The use of games technology to project backdrops makes conventional scenery seem redundant. The high wall behind the stage is painted with light to form moving moonlit "willow pattern" landscapes, fantastical animals, Matrix-like screens or woodblock prints, and finally to bring the building itself to life.

Judging from pictures of the production, the woodcut and shadow puppet motifs seem as much references to post-Windwaker Zelda games as to their roots in 10th century China.

These days, nothing seems to strain the relationship between developers and gamers like digital rights management. But when your customers are as infatuated with your work as the millions who've been drooling over Blizzard Entertainment's Starcraft sequel, I guess you're willing to risk it, especially if your parent company is Activision.

That's right, after almost 20 years of shipping consistently tight, expertly crafted strategy blockbusters and online juggernauts, Blizzard is adding DRM to its repertoire, starting with Starcraft 2.

Mindful that intrusive DRM can cool the ardor of even the most devoted fans, Blizzard promises a lightweight scheme that will only require users to connect to Blizzard's servers once and sign up for a Battle.net account.

In an interview with Incgamers, which broke the news, VP of game design Ron Pardo notes that "piracy really historically has not been that bid of a deal for us." Though there have been a few examples, Pardo said that "for the most part we can shut down those services."

But if Blizzard's combination of fan loyalty and savvy use of online components to boost the value of buying a game spare it the ravages of theft, why the move to DRM?

The tongue-in-cheek answer to that question rests with Blizzard parent Activision and its Papa Smurf, Bobby Kotick. After bemoaning piracy rates for Call of Duty 4, Activision seems to have gotten much more serious about copy protection. And with chief Kotick publicly wishing for even higher game prices, the publisher is going to need some protection from outraged gamers and their pirate backlash.

The Halo movie torch has passed from a giant to a juggernaut, if a report from IESB.net is to be believed.

According to IESB, which swears that it's thrice confirmed the news with studio execs, cinematic custody of Bungie's Master Chief has shifted from Peter Jackson to none other than Steven Spielberg.

IESB says that after reading G.I. Joe scribe Stuart Beattie's spec script "Halo: The Fall of Reach," academy award collector and Bloom Blox creator Spielberg got a jones for making the movie. And when Spielberg joneses, the film industry stands at attention.

Here's the skinny:

Stuart Beattie, the writer behind the new concept that Spielberg loves, was quite busy during the 2007 writer's strike when he wrote the script on spec based on the storyline from Eric Nyland's prequel novel to HALO, THE FALL OF REACH. Beattie is also hot off the summer hit G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA which he co-wrote with director Stephen Sommers and others. During the promotional tour for that film, he told Scifi.com that the HALO story is, "an amazing story about this child that no one cares about and who cares for no one else, who kind of ends up saving all of humanity."

In April, Latino Review broke first word of Beattie's spec script, which is the first part of a trilogy and stands out for not bringing the alien Covenant mix into the picture until the middle of the second act:

The script is, first and foremost, a character-driven story about a soldier named John who was kidnapped or "conscripted" by the UNSC when he was just six years old, and then brutally trained to become an elite Spartan warrior known as Master Chief 117.

The script then takes us through the horrific first contact with the Covenant hordes on the doomed colony world of Harvest, and then climaxes with the spectacular fall of the UNSC forward base on Reach, during which every other Spartan is slaughtered.

The Halo movie was thought all but fragged after Peter Jackson and "District 9" director Neil Blokamp were unable to give the flick the attention it deserved. Now that the movie has respawned under Spielberg's guidance, the big question is whether the master of the modern blockbuster will helm the picture himself or simply take on production duties.

Even if Spielberg doesn't direct, his golden touch puts Halo in a good position to gun for the Citizen Kane of gaming movies. He's got competition, however, from Sam Raimi, who's got World of Warcraft in his craw and would no doubt love to pull an Orson Welles of his own on Azeroth.

With the very pinnacle of contemporary filmmaking jockeying for the chance to put pixels on celluloid, it seems game makers may not need to worry about crafting their own "cultural legitimacy." The movies seem intent on doing that for them.

[via IESB.net]

San Francisco, LA, Austin, Raleigh, Montreal...these are game cities. Philadelphia, not so much. But a passionate fivesome, including an audio engineer, a developer, a local game exec, a lawyer and a professor have banded together to make the City of Brotherly Love into the "Hollywood of Gaming."

It's a tall order to be sure. Part of the inspiration for their mission stemmed from a tough choice 24-year-old developer Hardik Bhatt (right, above) found himself facing after graduating from St. Joseph's in 2007 — stay in the city he adores or pursue the career he was born for, elsewhere. The dilemma stewed until he took a trip to GDC, where he presented a controller-less game he'd made called Maxwell's Demon. At the Developers Conference, Bhatt noticed a slew of municipalities and states luring studios to set up shop and wondered, "Where is Philly?" When he got back home, Bhatt got together with audio engineer Mike Worth (left, above) and started the Videogame Growth Initiative.

Today, Bhatt and company are working to prize incentives out of the city to make Philly more attractive for game development. It's a tough pitch for a city in the midst of a financial crisis. Nonetheless, Worth insists that Philly is an ideal place for making games. Highest on the list of attractions is a very low cost of living. Plus, the city is home to four Ivy League schools, including the only Ivy to offer a game development program, the University of Pennsylvania.

Regardless of how well the Videogame Growth Initiative fares in Philly, the moral of this story is the power of networking amongst gamemakers from different regions. The growth of national conferences like GDC has not only raised the profile of gaming on the national stage it has also exposed budding entrepreneurs and developers to a whole host of new business models and funding strategies. While player community building is an important part of making successful games, developer community building is critical to the success of gamemaking itself.

[via Philadelphia City Paper]

On inauguration night, the event that marked the official admission of the Wii to the White House, First Lady Michele Obama wore an ivory, one-shouldered gown crafted by Jason Wu. Turns out the haute coture Wu has a bit of a thing for the Wii as well.

The 26-year-old fashion wunderkind cites Japanese culture, Tokyo in particular, as his chief inspiration, embracing its multi-textural blend of ancient simplicity and its epitomization of modern techno sapiens.

Naturally, then, that includes games. A lover of the Wii, Wu says zombie blast-fest House of the Dead triggers a flood of childhood memories every time he fires up Miyamoto's cash cow.

Games and fashion are nothing new, but when a hotshot designer starts spitting game references in the same breath as Bottega Veneta bags, Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry and vacations to Turks and Caicos, it's worth noting.

[via Huffington Post]

When I was a kid, mornings before school were a sugary ritual involving several bowls of Lucky Charms (peppered with Wheat Germ per mom's orders) and back-to-back episodes of "Star Blazers". Of course we had games back then, but starting the school day was still all about TV, which was banned from the dinner hour.

While the quest for a glucose buzz is still undoubtedly a part of the school-day startup, The New York Times finds that social networks and videogames have replaced TV as the techno-jolt of choice among students eager to start their day right. Of course, the kids aren't alone; their Gen X parents are right there with them.

In addition to several anecdotes about kids spending some quality time with consoles, snatching their parents' iPhones, or going online for a quick fix before heading off to class, the piece offers some interesting evidence of the early morning techno-trend.

According to Arbor Networks, which analyzes Internet use, Web traffic in the U.S. gradually declines from midnight to around six in the morning. But come 7 a.m., "It's a rocket ship," says Arbor's chief scientist, Craig Labovitz. Web content delivery giant Akamai sees a similar spike in the early hours of the day, and Verizon Wireless saw the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. surge 50 percent in July, compared with traffic just a year ago.

That's what the networks get for taking "Star Blazers" off the air.

[via New York Times]

Spokesman Peter Sunde may have resigned, and The Pirate Bay itself may be changing hands, but the notorious torrent site's founders are due for a reunion in Dutch court. And this time the date with a judge is their idea.

Ernst Louwers, representing The Pirate Bay Founders, told reporters this morning that his clients will file a summons by the end of the month for a new trial in the Netherlands. Last week a district court in Amsterdam ordered the site to "cease infringing the copyright members" of Sticthting Brein — a trade group representing the Dutch recording industry. Although a 30,000-euro a day fine was waived in the judgment, the court ordered The Pirate Bay to immediately block access to the site from Dutch IP addresses.

According to Louwers, the site's Swedish founders are moving for a new trial so that they can "present their side of the story." Given the crew's distaste for court appearances, it seems likely the request for their day court is, at least in part, a public relations tool designed to maintain the spirit of their brand while negotiating the sale of The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory. GGF has been very public about its intentions to acquire the torrent provider and make an honest file-sharing service of the enigmatic site. Last week, GGF announced it was close to a deal with a "major" record label that would allow it to sell the label's new releases and back catalog online.

The zeal of The Pirate Bay founders to appear in Dutch court is a striking turnaround. In June the trio were so difficult to reach that Stichting Brein resorted to issuing court summonses to Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg via Facebook and Twitter.

[via AFP]