This year at Comic-Con, Showtime launched an alternate reality game that gives players the opportunity to hunt down a serial killer known as The Infinity Killer. This game is the newest installment in a series of viral campaigns Showtime has used over the years to promote its dark drama Dexter. Readers should be warned that some of the links in this article may lead to graphic images akin to those shown in the television series.
Maxis, creators of the controversial Spore franchise, is releasing Darkspore, a new action-RPG built using Spore’s character creation tools. Leading up to the game’s release in 2011, Maxis has released an alternate-reality game rife with puzzles, introducing the universe of Darkspore.
“Nothing ruins a good party like a Velociraptor attack, and when a group of Urban Hipsters gets caught up in a whirlwind of Mesozoic fury, it’ll take more than PBR and vinyl to get them out of Brooklyn alive.” It’s hard to top the logline for Jurassic Park Slope, an interactive transmedia experience set in Brooklyn that’s committed to signing on Bill Murray as its star.
When talented designers jump ship from big videogame companies, they gain a lot of freedom — and get out from under the thumbs of marketing teams. Such moves to independent development also provide gamers with pure dollops of genius like Jamie Cheng’s new Shank.
SCVNGR is a location-based gaming platform for mobile phones that has been used in alternate-reality games for campaigns ranging from the New England Patriots to Dexter. They scored $4 million in venture capital late last year. In this article, Jane Doh takes an in-depth look at this helpful tool for puzzle designers looking for a more local flavor.
After modders claim to have downloaded an advance copy of the highly anticipated game, the stolen code ends up online.
A web interface will let gamers manipulate an industrial robot to create a virtual monument to Spartan warriors. Get a first look at the machine, hidden in a secret San Francisco location, that makes the interactive tribute possible in the run-up to Halo: Reach’s release.
Web game developer and musician Gabriel Walsh released his album, The Earthly Frames, Volume 1 in a unique fashion, supplementing his musical content with audio samples for remixing and a series of unique “fragment” files on fifty USB drives for the album’s release. While the fragment files may be enjoyed in isolation, assembling the disparate fragments spins a narrative that is partially autobiographical and partially fictional.
The future of reading might also be the future of writing, if author Neal Stephenson’s new experiment is any indication.
Stephenson, author of the best-selling Cryptonomicon among other science fiction and historical fiction works, has unveiled a new digital-novel platform called PULP that incorporates glossaries, images, music and video into an open-source-style book. The story is written by a “cabal” of authors, and readers can contribute feedback and ideas as the story unfolds.
Stephenson’s new company, Subutai, published the first chapter of its first book this week, called The Mongoliad, a medieval epic set in 1241 as Mongol invaders take over Europe.
Serialized novels can offer readers a more interactive experience than a paperback or an e-reader — here’s something special about waiting for the next installment. But this concept takes it a step further, inviting fans to contribute feedback, illustrations and even influence the progress of the story. You can pay $5.99 to become a “citizen” for six months or $9.99 for a year, and check in every week for a new chapter.
The Mongoliad features a small band of warriors who set out to infiltrate the marauding Mongol hordes making their way across Europe. The warriors, who possess a millennium-old secret tradition, are led by a heroic knight, as the story intro explains. Naturally, their guide is an “agile, elusive and sharp-witted adolescent girl.”
Although the focus is still the written word, The Mongoliad turns the idea of a book on its head, offering social features like badges for activity, reader interaction, reader-created glossaries and encyclopedia entries, and more. There’s not much online yet, but today alone, readers have already asked for a pronunciation guide, a simpler story-navigation mechanism (so far, you have to return to the table of contents to see what’s next) and even a list of suggested further reading.
“Until now, novels have been defined by the technology of the printing press, and we don’t have to use that definition anymore unless it suits us,” Subutai president Jeremy Bornstein writes in the intro.
Readers can contribute original content through forums, and the authors say they are aiming to have a more integrated submission system soon. Some readers have gotten their creative juices flowing, submitting haikus in honor of one of the central characters, Haakon. Here’s one:
The dirt underfoot/is tainted by sweat and death./Legends are thus made.
The novel reads like a cross between romance novels and the Lord of the Rings trilogy:
“this was no Mongol: his hair was brown, long and full, and below his sharp nose drooped a luxuriant moustache.”
“Her companions would end up like hedgehogs, bristling with arrows, but she would hide among their corpses, then scurry to the woods before the sentinels caught her.”
But it’s a neat idea that advances the concept of an electronic novel beyond the delivery system. Here’s hoping for some tighter editing in chapter two…
Unless you’ve been living underneath a Zune, you’re likely aware that Steve Jobs and his Apple empire held a music-centric event in San Francisco today in which the company’s best-selling line of portable musical devices received yet another refresh (the holidays are coming up, you know). And while some of the updates were the usual benign, tech trickle-down one might expect, Jobs did break some new ground with an Apple TV do-over and an iTunes update that’s more social network than music store.
First, Apple TV: It seems everyone has levied an opinion on Jobs’ move into the set-top box space, and few opinions have been laudatory (Jobs’ defense: our product hasn’t been a huge hit, but “nor has any competitive product.” Fair enough). However, this year’s “one more thing” is pretty slick.
Jobs’ praises its small size (“You can hold it in the palm of your hand!” he exclaimed, though this seems somewhat irrelevant for a set-top box). We’re more interested in the fact that it does everything in HD when available, streams from your computer, rents commercial-free TV shows for 99 cents, streams Netflix content, displays photostreams from Flickr, and pulls content from your MobileMe account. Also sweet: you can stream stuff from your mobile devices, meaning you can start a flick on your iPhone or iPad, walk into your living room, and swap the feed over to your big screen. Nice.
As far as TV programming is concerned, ABC and FOX are currently on board. Jobs thinks the other networks will soon come around to his way of thinking, and given his track record of bending the world to his will, we would agree.
Oh, and price. It’s just $99, a refreshing break from the first-gen’s $299 price tag.
What else are we getting for early Christmas this year? A new version of iTunes that’s a hybrid music player and social network (think Last.fm meets iTunes). iTunes 10 will have a feature called “Ping” that lets you see what your friends are listening to.
This goes beyond the old shared playlist feature. Jobs played up the privacy features of course, but essentially you can share your own playlists, opinions, and recommendations with your followers (like musical Twitter) and in turn follow artists and friends to see what’s getting play out there. It’s also layered with concert info and all kinds of ancillary stuff that seems pretty useful, as long as it doesn’t result in MySpace-like sensory overload.
Along with the big platform upgrades, Apple’s music devices all received a refresh. The Shuffle got its buttons back. The Nano got a multi-touch screen (and lost its click wheel) while shedding nearly half its size and weight. Perhaps most exciting: iPod touch got the same A4 chip and Retina Display screen as iPhone 4, a 3-axis gyro like the iPhone’s, a rear camera with HD video recording, and – drumroll, please – a front facing camera with FaceTime. Eight gigs start at $229.
Oh, and Chris Martin from Coldplay played. Coldplay!
Check out the live blog through the link below.
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The new Apple TV, which will go on sale at the end of September for $100, is a puny box just one-quarter the size of the previous model. It has an HDMI port, a built-in power supply, an optical audio port, an ethernet jack, and built-in Wi-Fi.
Apparently, some tigers can change their stripes — especially if they have books to sell. One of our favorite climate villains, the Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg, has apparently warmed to the idea of climate change, and now says it’s a problem on which the world ought to spend $100 billion annually.
Lomborg’s forthcoming book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, declares that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today.” He examines eight methods to reduce or stop it, including wave, wind, solar and nuclear power, as well as geoengineering, and advocates a carbon emissions tax to finance investment.
As the British media points out, it’s a nice U-turn from a man whom the UN climate chief once compared to Adolf Hitler. In a great example of climate politics making strange bedfellows, the same UN chief, Rajendra Pachauri, provides a book-jacket endorsement: “This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Lomborg explains that he reached his conclusions like any good economist: By studying the numbers. In 2004, economists at Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus think tank were asked how they’d spend $50 billion to solve the world’s problems. They ranked climate change near the bottom of the priority list, below issues like HIV and malaria. But four years later, economists tackled the question again, and interest in climate change had risen like the polar temperatures. Lomborg said this prompted him to consider new climate change policies, so global warming wouldn’t languish at the bottom of the list.
Earlier this summer, we ripped Lomborg for railing against programs and treaties that aim to lessen or halt anthropogenic climate change. Now that he says it should be a top priority, we’ll take him off our villain list. And give him credit for his media savvy — the guy knows how to sell books.
Hot water discovered around a giant carbon star requires a new theory for the chemistry around stars to be explained. The new theory could significantly alter our understanding of what materials exist in interstellar space, and where water and life could exist in the universe.
A University of Michigan researcher thinks we can triple the fuel economies in our petroleum-powered vehicles in the next 25 years. All we need to do is replace horsepower with brainpower.
John DeCicco, a lecturer at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at Michigan, isn’t bearish on alternative fuels or electric vehicles, but he argues that the most cost-effective means of reducing carbon footprints and keeping fuel prices from swallowing us whole is an evolutionary progress in the combustion engines that already make up our transportation paradigm. That means placing efficiency above power, and adopting smarter electronic systems for our automobiles.
Cars, Clay Dillow, automobiles, carbon emissions, energy, environment, fuel efficiency, hybrids
In a study published for The Energy Foundation, DeCicco identifies emerging trends within the automotive world that are already pushing buyers away from raw power and toward other amenities, like Bluetooth connectivity, on-board Internet, and other IT amenities that enhance the customer experience minus the big block V-8 engine.
As cars grow friendlier from a passenger standpoint, they should also grow smarter under the hood. For one, reduced engine size and overall mass is an easy way to increase efficiency – DiCecco’s math says for every 10 percent reduction in weight, you get a 6.5 percent increase in fuel efficiency – but the inertial recovery of regenerative brakes on hybrids can push that efficiency higher. Add in an optimized powertrain and efficiency increases further.
Moreover, some concept cars have been experimenting with lightweight body materials like composites, increased aluminum and magnesium content, and carbon fibers that further reduce weight without reducing size, meaning we can keep our leggy sedans while still pushing up efficiency. Layer that with better aerodynamic designs, reduced tire drag, smarter transmissions, and leaner, lighter engine blocks – a real contributor to mass – and pretty soon you’ve got a smarter power source pushing 20 percent less weight (780 pounds for light fleet vehicles, or 30 pounds per year over the 25 year horizon).
Materials have to be safety rated, technologies proven, and – perhaps most importantly – customer appeal retained. But as DeCicco sees it, there’s no reason why a persistently evolving suite of improvements can’t hit an average fleet efficiency of 52 miles per gallon by 2025 and 74 miles per gallon by 2035.
Such technologies would allow the existing energy scheme to persist, albeit more efficiently, while nascent tech like biofuels and all-electric vehicles can come into their own at a reasonable pace (we also need time to upgrade our energy grids before shifting to an all-electric economy). Drivers would have to give up some of the get-up-and-go they’ve come to expect from generations of American muscle cars, but the savings – according to DeCicco’s models – would be vast.
For more details on how we get there from here, download a PDF of DeCicco’s study.
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