Chore Gaming

— 8 September 2007

I attended the Develop Conference in Brighton this year and there were some interesting sessions. One of them was called “Emerging Issues in Game Design” and featured four very different presentations. Mark Eyles from the University of Portsmouth did, for example, talk about a genre of gaming that he calls “Ambient Games”. He browsed through a gazillion of slides (the man was bursting with energy) and ended up with a short demonstration of his research game “Ambient Quest”.

First I must say that I initially had a hard time grasping the essence of the ideas he presented.

Some background:

Ambient Games are inspired by the concept of Ambient Music:

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. – Brian Eno, 1978.

Hmmm…

I pondered upon the connection and gradually managed to build a vision in my mind. Ambient Games must be sort of like an aquarium. It plays by itself and if you want to, you can go and interfere with it, toy around for some time. An Ambient Game would be a sort of hybrid between game and screensaver, if you will. (A sidenote: Earlier the same day, Tsutomu Kouno from Sony Worldwide Studios talked about the creation of LocoRoco. And recently I saw rumors like this appearing on the web. Interesting!)

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