Space Invaders: Art and the Computer Game Environment
Friday 18 December 2009 - Sunday 21 February 2010
Space Invaders: Art and the Computer Game Environment is an exhibition at FACT exploring the increasingly blurred boundaries between video-game spaces and real spaces.
As part of the exhibition, we're running a competition based on this classic arcade game! Each fortnight, we're giving away prizes to the highest scorer and to one randomly drawn entrant - so if your score's no good, you still have the chance to win!
With thanks to Tapas Tapas, Leaf Tea Shop & Bar and Red Lotus.
This fortnight (Monday 8 February - Sunday 21 February) is the last in our Space Invaders exhibition - and the last for our exhibition competition as well, so we're offering some extra special prizes!
The person with the top score this fortnight and one randomly dawn lucky entrant will walk away with a year's FACT membership. Not only that, the person with the top score over the entire exhibition at the end of this fortnight will win a Nintendo DSi - as used in the Space Invaders exhibition! (if one person wins both, the membership will go to the next highest score).
Here, Matthew Jeffery ofEA Gamesprovides an insight into what it takes to become a game designer and what aspiring designers can do to improve their chances of success. The presentation was made at the SAND (Swansea International Animation Festival) in November 2008.
Will Wright (Wikipedia) is the lauded game designer who created games such as The Sims and Spore. Here, he discusses the need for people to be "narcissistic" when designing video games and uses this premise to explain the success of games that are founded on elaborate, customizable identities.
Augmented reality, the layering of computer generated graphics over real-word environments, is one of the most talked about areas in technology innovation at the moment and provides a literal example of the merging of environments addressed by the Space Invaders exhibition.
Although still a fledgling technology, augmented reality promises some very exciting possibilities. This video demonstrates how a physical activity can be overlayed with virtual graphics and data to create a new level of gaming altogether.
Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled on this YouTube video, but it's worth taking a look all the same.
Award winning Harvard lecturer and researcher Shawn Achor briefly explains the Tetris Effect - a conditition through which Tetris players begin seeing Tetris shapes in the real world and the corresponding ways in which they could fit together.
He goes on to explain that the brain's ability for recognizing patterns, from which the Tetris Effect stems, is an ability that individuals can exploit to improve their overall happiness and wellbeing.
This video presents an introduction to Video Games Live, a spectacular orchestrated show based on music and effects drawn from the world of video games. As well as demonstrating the extent to which video games have become part of our culture, the show is credited with bringing classical music to a younger audience.
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine documents the 1997 chess match between the world's greatest chess player and IBM's Deep Blue computer. Far from being a simple celebration of human intelligence and achievement, it shows a darker side to the much publicized showdown.
I couldn't find out a great deal about this intervention, although popular opinion seems to be that it was conceived by a group of students in Poland and that it is executed using microprocessors rather than timing. Regardeless, it's another great example of computer games being woven into the fabric of society and their subsequent remixing and remaking as a result.
