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The Console Wars are back, gamers should rejoice

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is a week's worth of executive sniping and news, parties and celebrity, and of course video games. The artists and executives for Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony struggle to rise above the din of explosive trailers and bombastic speech. The fervor surrounding this year's dual launch of the next PlayStation and Xbox only made things worse, churning carefully planned press conferences into indistinguishable white noise. With one very clear exception. Standing on a stage set up in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena last Monday, Sony Computer Entertainment of America CEO Jack Tretton ignited an uproar of applause with a series of promises directed straight at competitor Microsoft. The PlayStation 4, he said, won't impose any new restrictions on the use...
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Electronic Arts re-examines game making as the next generation looms

For Electronic Arts, that clarity helped them see that their last-gen problems were driven by a cacophony of game engines, a mess of tools that hindered more than it helped the creation of new ideas. "The last transition, we didn't do a great job as a company managing our tech base," Frank Gibeau told Polygon. "What we ended up with was a proliferation of engines, such that at the peak of the last cycle, this cycle, we had something like 20 different development environments for our game teams to be working in. "Sometimes you just don't need 20 different hammers and 20 different set of tools because it becomes very difficult to manage, it becomes very costly, and in fact it actually limits innovation because you have so much time that your spending on engine development as opposed to...
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Privacy concerns threaten to overshadow Microsoft's new console

During last month's unveiling of the Xbox One on Microsoft's Redmond campus, developers showed off how the Kinect can track eye movement to monitor how attentive a player is, use "blush technology" to monitor a player's heart rate, see movements in the dark and even extrapolate a person's mood by watching their face closely. What Microsoft officials didn't detail, and continue to decline to talk about, is exactly how that data will be used and if any of it will leave a player's home to either be processed by Microsoft's cloud service or collected for other reasons. While Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 also has a camera, it is not required for the console to work, Sony officials told Polygon. Because the Xbox One will also deliver ads, stream movies and provide cable television access,...
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From Xbox One to Xbox None: The risks of an internet-required gaming console

If you can't get online, or don't want to, the Xbox One becomes useless. Microsoft is making a bet that its next console can survive, perhaps even thrive, off of the purchases of those typically plugged-in early adopters and that internet proliferation, which currently hasn't spread to about a quarter of the developed world, will steadily encompass all of those who might have an interest in gaming. It's not a bad bet, but it does send a bad message to those unwilling or unable to get online: Tough luck. Unveiled last week during a day-long event on Microsoft's campus, the Xbox One seems to be a lot of things: A device where you can watch movies or live TV, listen to music, browse the internet, video chat with your friends, play games. A gaming console that watches you with the help...
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Adventures with Facebook's take on Plants Vs. Zombies

In Plants vs. Zombies Adventures, players will still protect their home from an army of cartoonish zombies with defensive plants, but now they'll also take to the road, traveling in a beat-up RV to zombie hot spots where they'll have to defend their home on wheels from zombies that can attack from any direction. And those defensive plants now have to be grown ahead of time. The game brings with it ten new zombie types, 11 new plants, and most importantly, a personalized neighborhood that players will work to customize, expand, and, yes, defend from roving bands on zombies. Where the original Plants Vs. Zombies had the player defending from zombies that always marched across horizontal lanes of grass, this new Zombies game has the zombies attacking along cobblestone pathways that...
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A video game about mass surveillance in the age of Big Brother and Little Brothers

We live in a hyperconnected, technologically turbo-charged world of mass surveillance and "digital shadows" that is so subtly controlling, that it makes the notion of Big Brother seem quaint. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the only person watching you was the government. In today's society, the millions of digital eyes found in laptops, video game consoles, tablets and smartphones and a person's growing trail of data and information left online, are the realization of a more insidious invasion of privacy, a willful Little Brother. Where the overt surveillance of Big Brother was examined in a 1940s book, today's troubling Little Brother is scrutinized in an upcoming game from developer Ubisoft Montreal. Watch Dogs plays with the notion of information warfare and civil...
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Next-gen's three strategies: Adapt, collaborate or conquer

The Wii U launched in November and like the upcoming next PlayStation and next Xbox, the most interesting thing about the console isn't the games it can play, but rather the philosophical approach to interactive entertainment a console's design espouses. The Wii U is designed to complement the living room and internet experiences. It is a console built to play nicely with competitors like websites, smartphones and television. The Wii U's chunky second-screen GamePad has an interactive TV guide that can be used as a sort of super remote that allows you to not only find a show and start watching it without having to pick up a TV remote, but also research the show's history, cast and even chat with friends as you watch. The Wii U borrowed from sites like Facebook and Twitter, creating...
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Controlling creativity: Eight developers discuss the dilemma of interactive art

That blow up between the people who made Mass Effect 3 and the people who played it may have been the most notable debate over video game creative control, but it isn't the only one: Diablo 3, DmC: Devil May Cry, Sonic the Hedgehog video games, there's a growing tug-of-war over creative ownership of video games fueled by the interactive nature of this form of story-telling and art. More than any other artistic medium, video games are a two-way conversation between creator and consumer, game maker and game player. That blurred line is further obscured by the rise of player-created content. We recently spoke to a number of developers including the duo behind Mass Effect, Minecraft's maker and other independent developers and award winners to get their wildly differing views on the...
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Disney Infinity hopes to inspire future game makers

It is also a powerful creation engine, like Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet, designed to allow people to invent their own complex games, play them within Disney's many worlds and then share those creations with everyone who owns the game. The developers of Disney Infinity have already managed to recreate playable Disney-fied versions of a slew of popular video games in Disney Infinity's Toy Box mode using the game's "logic tools." "We've created games inspired by Donkey Kong, Mario Bros 1-1, Ironman Stewart's Super Off Road, Gauntlet, Contra and Joust to name a few," said John Vignocchi, Disney Infinity's executive producer. "A team of guys went in and recreated the Bowser's Castle level from Super Mario Kart. [Developer Avalanche Software's head] John Blackburn spends a lot of his free...
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Bientôt l'été is part thought experiment, part video game, all art

It is a computer game almost by accident, a work of art that happens to use this particular medium to attempt to deliver a single magical moment that will touch its players in a sublimely introspective way. Bientôt l'été delivers gamers to a pale golden beach under a powder blue sky. There, players guide a hooded figure dressed all in white along the sand, tracing the rhythmic back and forth of the surf. Occasionally odd phrases pop up on the screen and then fade away. If you walk far enough you'll come to a bench, as you approach it the ordinary sky begins to darken, moons, nebula and planets arc across the sky, speeding through alien orbits. If you want you can sit and watch. In the distance, amidst rolling sand dunes, stands a small cafe. If a player walks to it they can go...
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Minecraft Realms hopes to make an increasingly complex game more family-friendly

Swedish developer Mojang has been inundated with calls for help from parents who find they're unable to maintain and fix the increasingly complex versions of the PC game their children are playing. This summer, the developer hopes to release a new child-and-parent-friendly subscription service for the game that could cut down on those problems. For a monthly fee, Minecraft Realms will allow anyone to create a permanent world in the game on a server, controlling who can play in the private world and that the game won't run into compatibility issues spurred by fan-created mods. "We've been working on it for quite some time," Carl Manneh, CEO and co-founder of Mojang, told Polygon. "We were discussing pretty early on adding it to Minecraft." Minecraft already supports the ability for...
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Nintendo tests the waters for new cartoon series based on Pikmin

The company behind the Wii U, 3DS and countless colorful gaming creations has been secretly toying around with the idea of creating and releasing a series of original animated shorts based on one of their relatively new video game franchises. The shorts, designed to be viewed on the company's 3DS, would either be given away or possibly sold through Nintendo's online store. Nintendo's senior managing director and prolific game designer Shigeru Miyamoto is personally overseeing the creation of the cartoons, which are based on the Pikmin series he first created for the GameCube in 2001. "They'll be released sometime before the release of Pikmin 3" due out this year, Miyamoto told Polygon in a recent interview in New York City. "Possibly as a Nintendo video. If they're popular we could...
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New MOMA exhibit embraces the art of video games as it explores their design

Their inclusion, as the center piece of a new design installation which runs through 2014, is the latest in the growing trend to showcase video games as art. But in this case, the art is assumed and it's the design that is being celebrated. The video games of MOMA, 14 in all, are housed in a larger gallery installation that focuses on the vitality and diversity of design. The exhibit highlights not just the ubiquity of design but illustrates the branching of this school of practical art, tracing the blossoming of applied, rather than theoretical design. Applied Design features 100 works, an eclectic mishmash of surreal objects. There's a portable homeless shelter designed to be tucked away in a pocket when not in use and inflated by city steam grates when it's time to sleep. There's a...
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The PS4 is a dream gaming console, that could be a problem

When Sony laid out the promise of the PlayStation Portable in 2004, it called it the Walkman of the 21st Century, a PlayStation 2 in your pocket. When the company unveiled the PlayStation 3, it talked about gaming across multiple screens, the ability for gamers to buy and sell in-game items and showed off a boomerang-shaped controller. When those systems hit, they delivered a feast of new playable content and edged forward the boundaries of gaming innovation, but both were shadows of the promises that Sony original made. Where Sony often promises the heavens, it's typically delivered the earth. Last week's PlayStation 4 unveiling seemed to be an event designed around this premise. While there were some hard promises made — we saw six games in development, some of the locked specs...
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How the fiction of a sci-fi shooter explores the realities of a real energy crisis

While the main thrust of Crysis 3 is a climatic wrap-up of the trilogy that started in 2007, the game's sub-plot deals with a shadowy global paramilitary group that uses low-cost energy to enslave the world. In Crysis 3, players take on the role of a super soldier empowered by alien technology as he fights off both the remnants of an alien invasion and fights to topple the corrupt Cell corporation. But if a player listens closely, they'll also discover details about Cell's rise to power through its use of sustainable energy. While playing through the first four levels of the game, I couldn't help but notice unexplained references to debt slaves, so I reached out to Crysis 3's lead writer for a bit of explanation. In the 24 years that passed between the second and third game, the Cell...
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Journey creator talks about his next game

Jenova Chen seems slightly distracted, almost lost in thought when I come upon him in a Vegas meeting room at the DICE summit this week. I catch a glimpse of a colorful, painted piece of artwork on the screen of his laptop before he presses the lid closed and greets me. I don't know if it's art from his next game, but I do know that the next thing from Chen and thatgamecompany is never far from his mind, or his fingertips. It lurks in his conversations, seemingly always on his mind. He's only at the DICE summit for one day, he tells me, because he hates to be away from this next thing. "I'm doing development every day," he said. "I'm writing code. I'm only here for a day. I'm trying to keep myself from distractions." In Chen's view making this next game is the most important thing...
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