This blog has been a little bit slower recently. Markus and I have been working with our next book, Nordic Larp, and Annika has just been hit by October. Here is another selection of the random stuff from my “blog this” folder.
Increasingly it seems that the cool things come from Russia. I wish I knew more about the eastern neighbor. Now they have granny graffiti.
How long should we tolerate those tasteless paintings they call ‘graffiti’? After asking this question myself twice I said – we shouldn’t any more!” So says Anastasia, the leader of SSAE – Samarian Street Art Elders. “We decided to show what real graffiti should look like so that our children could adapt good tastes from an early age”.
This is from February, but I realized that I have not mentioned it yet. Guardian had a piece about cutting edge 3D street artist Edgar Müller. Very playful, very beautiful — and often very illegal.
Lose/lose is sort of a single player pervasive computer art game. I would never play it on my own computer.
Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.
The concept of a game that simulates the effects of game violence is not really new, but I like the execution here.
It seems to me that most pervasive games are either variants of Killer or of scavenger hunts. A new version of Killer is here again: gpsAssassin.
Now a new game called gpsAssassin may have struck gold by fusing location and the popular campus game Assassins with the text-based games that have become immensely popular on social networks, Twitter, and the iPhone.
As is pointed out on Posterous, this is “Botfighters again, with silliness thrown in”. Still, I think I need to try it out. But it does indeed sound excatly like BotFighters. This especially sounds exactly like some descriptions of BotFighters play we quoted in the book:
[Founder Nicholas] Holland says that gamers have been known to actually change their driving routes so that they can get in their attack on an unsuspecting victim and get out of dodge before they have a chance at retaliation.”
Previously on Pervasive Games: Random things for a Tuesday and for a Friday.
Pervasive Games: Theory and Design 
Suviko sent me a link to this: Symantec considers Lose/Lose a Trojan Horse. And I find it hard to disagree with them.
– Markus
By: Montola on November 5, 2009
at 11:17
Heh. Lose/lose is now OSX.Loosemaque. Antivirus companies have a policy of never naming the new viruses according to the wishes of the virus creators. (They also have lists created by the marketing department of threatening names that pop; a good threat requires a great name and that cannot be trusted to the whimsy of the antivirusnerds.)
By: Stenros on November 5, 2009
at 11:23