The Sandbox

I recentlyblogged about wanting videogames in movie theaters.

Well, the wait is over.

Check out this YouTube video of Newsbreaker. It's a multiplayer version of the old Breakout game, but it's played in a movie theater by the audience - using motion sensing technology. Looks sort of goofy, but has interesting implications for this kind of stuff down the line. Some people had more fun playing Newsbreaker than watching Spider-Man 3.

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

I made a post over at Tech Talk, comparing Sony and Apple, and how Sony falters in delivering cool gadgets, while Apple tends to not do so. It's mostly techy and not gamey, but has liberal mentions of the PS3 and PSP, so there's some gaming info there, if you want to check it out.

I may as well describe what I would have hoped for from the new PSP, and why I would think it would be better than what Sony has delivered.

I posted earlier about Games as Art, a perennial topic among developers and players of games. Of course I come down on the side of the fact that games can be capital-A Art, at their best: not because I'm an artist myself, and not because I develop games, but because I know a thing or two.

Roger Ebert says I'm wrong. Clive Barker says I'm right, but really, do I want to be on Clive Barker's team? Sigh.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

NextGen has an interesting little feature online discussing the future games. The piece only scratches the surface of the phenomenal changes to come: digital distribution, microtransactions, interface innovation, user-generated content. The way I see it, the existing physicality of games - the consoles, the discs, the controllers - will continue to shrink and fade. I imagine the boundaries fading as well, so that we have a truly ubiquitous gaming experience integrated throughout our daily lives - the goal being, essentially, like a phone that you can take and use anywhere. To me, that should be the goal: a truly mobile, cross-platform, persistent game world that we can access and manipulate from wherever we are.

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.