Tuesday, June 24, 2008
New York – No one would ever mistake “Ambre and the Chainsaw” for a work of video-game art. The controls are too clunky. The sound scheme, too tinny. And the aesthetics – a swirled blue and white backdrop, peppered with photos of rock singer Bret Michaels’s pixilated head – too Spartan.
But “Ambre,” an homage to the winner of Mr. Michaels’s VH1 reality show “Rock of Love,” went viral shortly after its April release, spreading from Fyrebug.com, where the game is hosted, across blogs and messageboards. By this week, it had racked up a quarter million hits – no small shakes for a homemade creation strung together out of a pile of digital images.
“The MySpaces and the Facebooks were successful because they made it possible for everyone to have ownership of the Web,” says Rob Kamphausen, CEO of Fyrebug. “People want the same thing with games. They want to make something to share and show around, and have that ‘pat on the back factor,’ even if the interface itself is very simple.”
More: Gaming 3.0 lets players build their own fun
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Manchester, Tenn. – Once a year, usually under a stuffy, stultifying Southern sky, the faithful begin to assemble on the side of Route 24, some 60 miles southeast of Nashville. Every tribulation will be worn like a badge of honor: the long lines, the lashing rain, the white Tennessee mud, the overflowing toilets, and the miles of tents, with nary an inch between them.
But for the roughly 70,000 attendees of Bonnaroo 2008, staged on a 750-acre farm in this bucolic corner of the state, there was also respite to be found: private showers sponsored by Garnier Fructis, a video-game tent sponsored by Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and a shaving station sponsored by Gillette. There were art galleries, shaded tearooms, and a quiet Internet cafe.
More: The art of keeping cool at Bonnaroo
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
New York is a hard place to be earnest. This is one thing newcomers learn fast, long before they’ve memorized the subway map or pinpointed their favorite pizzeria. The entire city – every electric, shaking, rattling square inch of it – consumes the ardent and the naive, chewing and grinding us with its big asphalt teeth, until we’re all spit out together, several months later, as freshly minted cynics.
So how, exactly, to explain the appeal of the outlandish Telectroscope gadget, planted not far from the legs of the Brooklyn Bridge? Here’s a toy, like Francis Drake’s spyglass – studded with the odd, useless lever or meter – dropped amid the warehouses and art galleries of Brooklyn, and rimmed by a crust of rocks and debris, as if it had erupted from under the Hudson River.
More: Londoners and New Yorkers gawk at each other through a transatlantic lens