We didn’t post a lot of news on our blog since a couple of months, however this doesn’t mean we aren’t active. We are working on several projects and in january we had the opportunity to build a new version of Dive on a big multitouch table. This experiment was pretty nice and a lot of people enjoyed the display and the tactile interface. We will try to post some video and pics on our website as soon as possible, but this is another story.

Today we are working on the build of a coming exhibition which will take place at Evry (France), in the Théâtre de l’Agora, on Tuesday, February 7 at 18:30 for approximatively one month.

We have been asked to work on a special “expo” by selecting 5 indie games of our choice. The only requirement was to keep the model of the “arcade cabinet” made of cardboard as an exhibition device. Currently we are installing the controllers and preparing each computer to be plug-and-play, ready to be launched and shown.

We don’t want to spoil you any surprise effect about the games selection, but we’ve based our decision on a very special concept! Everything is in the title: “Arcades didn’t have …” It’s up to you to guess what arcades didn’t have! Or myabe you could wait until next tuesday and join us during the event to discover what we did.

Oh, by the way, the picture we’ve put on this blogpost is a clue to find out the mysterious artistic choice of the exhibition!

In a couple of days we will be present at Stereolux! The event takes place at Nantes (France) and is about mediums convergence and new kind of artistic expressions. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to make two performances next Friday evening. We are currently working hard to finish a new version of Dive, specially designed for a performance act. We have improved several things such as sound design of the environment and the graphics atmosphere. We still have some slight modifications to provide on the level design part because it will have an important impact on the show.

Along to the Dive show, we will attend to perform a super play of the excellent T.E.C. 3001 (by the serbian indie studio Phoenix Games). To watch a (very good) player perform a perfect play is always nice, but we’ve wanted to be a little bit more innovative and creative on this part. As a performance, we will have a on live musical mix performed during the play. This means that our sound designer will have to play according to our player performance. We’ve made some try at our headquater and the results was pretty convincing. There will be two game in once. While one of us will play a game by mastering each control and knowing each level of it, another one will try to follow and forecast what is happening in game and play (interpret) it using sounds and rythms.

Until friday, we keep working and. . . rehearsing!

At least an event that will give a spotlight to the european alternative game scene! The Notgames Fest is a two days exhibition open and free to the public where  you will be invited to play games but also discuss alternative game design and meet some european weird creators! The exhibition will be curated by the Belgian interactive artists Auria Harvey & Michaël Samyn (Tale of Tales). This isn’t surprising when you know who is behind the Notgames manifesto! Anyone is invited to submit their games, but beware friends, do not send any kind of traditionnal game. Be creative and experimental! Add some inventiveness & madness to your usual creation, push up the boundaries of your imagination and try to destroy every conventional concept we can easily find in the video games industry. Here comes a short quote by Katharina Tillmanns, one of the initiators of the event and member of the Cologne Game Lab:

“We understand NOTGAMES as an avantgarde thinking towards game design. We are inviting you to submit and present videogames that stretch and/or overcome boundaries of the contemporary videogame culture. For our EXPO we are looking for extraordinary interactive works of art that do not primarily rely on competition, goals or rewards but focus on atmosphere, story, emotions, expression, meaning and beauty.”

Here at OLR, we plan to attend the event because we really believe this will probably be THE most important date of this summer in Europe for the alternative games scene and we certainly don’t want to miss it! So if you are interested to join the event, just read the official page of the Notgames Fest to know how to submit your games and if you are just curious and want to attend the exhibition, let’s meet there on August 16!

Oh, and of course, some of you will have noticed that this festival will be hold in parallelle to the Gamescom 2011 and the GDC Europe 2011, but seriously, who cares, huh? The web will give you everything you want to know about those conference, press annoucnement, and co… but for free! So, we hope to see you at the Notgames Fest in August!

Paint by number 2.0: In the last post we’ve talked about Metagame at the GDC, but there was another kind of partcipative event which took place at the north building of the Moscone Center. It was named Painting with Pixel and was supposed to be a participative artwork builds by the attendees. At first, we thought it was not bad at all: to give the opportunity to anyone to create or re-arrange “pixels” in any kind of images on a wall surface could have been interesting, but it wasn’t really a do-it-yourself as it seems.

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This year, we were at the Game Developper Conference,  San Francisco. It was a wonderful opportunity to try weird games, meet crazy people and of course, assist to the IGF. Just the first day we met a lot of academics and researchers from Computer Science (e.g. Michael Matteas) to Games Studies (e.g. Celia Pearce or Jose P. Zagal) and many notorious figures of the current video game scene such as  Ian Bogost, Jesse Schell, Jane McGonigal, Raph Koster, Brenda Brathwaite, etc.

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