“I know, and in the next level, sprites are zombies. They’ve got flesh on their bones!”¹

Geek Out

Level up. A gaming platform hasn’t really “made it” until it has a thriving homebrew community. As much as Nintendo, Sony, et al., might try to ensure that their customers only play through corporate-approved avenues, a huge group of users insist on hacking the roadblocks to use their consoles the same way they’ve always used their PCs: to play games that didn’t cost millions to produce. The New Museum (235 Bowery) hosts a forum tonight, “Next Level,” where indie game auteurs will look at the ever-growing phenomenon of self-made, self-published games. The museum’s PR copy for the event could not be any worse—blathering meaninglessly about “games that blur the line between digital art and creative entertainment”²—but the lineup of speakers is very good. Mark Essen, Jason Rohrer, and others will attend. The trailer for Essen’s latest, Cowboyana, is above, and I also recommend Rohrer’s Passage.

Geek In

Superstruct the future. The previous sentence probably doesn’t make any sense, and neither does The Superstruct Game, at first. I can’t do a much better job of explaining the premise than the above preview video, but the gist is that you sign up for the game, you form one part of a collaborative effort whose goal is to predict what the world will look like in 2019, and how it will respond to global crises. Through a social-networking framework, you build theoretical structures in the hope of efficiently organizing people to solve problems like a raging respiratory virus or a brush war over alternative energy. OK, I am not helping the game make much more sense, and I’m done rewriting this paragraph. Try it out for 15 minutes and you will catch on. It’s a novel idea created by game theorist Jane McGonigal.

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1. From the 1990s Saturday-morning cartoon ReBoot. Did anybody else watch this? I remember loving it when it first came on even though I might have been at the high end, age-wise, of their intended audience. ↑

2. This “blur the line” crap must be the most trite and overused cliché in the museum industry. Here’s how you write a museum blurb for something when you have no idea what you’re talking about:
   

   1. Think of two ways to describe the thing.
   2. Pretend that there is a dichotomy between those two descriptions.
   3. Say that the thing “blurs the line” of your false dichotomy.
   How could you describe a video game? You could say it’s digital art. You could also say it’s creative entertainment (as opposed to non-creative entertainment, I guess). Hey, let’s draw a line between those two things! And then blur it! It works for anything. Let’s say you’re putting together a flashlight exhibit. You want to issue a press release. Just type, “The flashlight blurs the line between illumination device and bludgeoning tool.” Congratulations, you are now a fancy museum. ↑