Because each new steps in game use the keyboards differently with only 6 keys. Because the music is crazy and the visual novel makes no logical sense when you tried to link both. GIRP by Bennet Foddy Because this is what e-sport should look like. Because it makes you “girp” you keyboard just like if you were climbing it. Because the challenge is accessible to any kind of users. Dinosaurs didn’t have keyboards but it they would, they wouldn’t break it (just like you are about to) by Sophie Houlden Because it explains why the dinosaurs died and disappeared form earth.

Because the way it request you to use the keys makes you feel you are running like a dinosaurs. Because even if the game can be hard to beat, the concept pleased everybody. Chase Goose by Hideous Because we wanted a really hard challenging game in our selection for the tough people. Because it requires endurance from the player and we knew people will play it together (to beat the high score! Because the graphics are rad, the music is cool and the ton is quite funny. pOnd by PeanutGallery Because we wanted something quiet and relaxing after all those challenging games (yes we know this is a lie). Because it only use the space key and we wanted to have a one button game. Because we like turtles (and purple squids). If you are around Paris this month, come pick a look. The exhibition  held at the Théâtre de l’Agora in Evry is extended until 24^thMarch. The access is totally free and you can play as long as you want.

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!

In a couple of weeks there will be an exhibition with 5 of our games at Théâtre de l’Agora in Evry (France). For this nice event, we have selected the following pieces:

-  PacMad

-  Aura

-  Chrysopoeia

-  Wonderpills

-  Galaxy Jumper

For each of those games, we are currently designing a cardboard arcade machine prototype that is cheap but still good-looking (or at least we hope it will look pleasant)! We are working on the build of the controller and the decoration of each prototype. Soon we will post a quick movie of our first prototype in action.

Here comes a little info we would love to share. One of our game, And The Rhino Says, is currently exhibited at the Théâtre de l’Agora, in Evry (France) until december 17, but the game is also shown in Germany during a “Carte Blanche” held at the Next Level Conference in Cologne. We are very proud to have this nice piece of our own mad mind exhibited in two place at the same time, and especially outside of France. If you are around Cologne, you will have only two days to go there and try it!

Unfortunately none of us has been able to attend the Next Level Conference this year, but if you have any questions about the game or the collective, please leave a comment here or write us an e-mail. We are always eager to share a talk and meet new people.

By the way, we would like to thank the Cologne Game Lab for their work on the indie games selection they’ve chosen for the Next Level Conference and especially Katharina Tillmanns and Krystian Majewski for their interest in our weird work.

“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!

Great news here : the national scene of Evry (aka le théâtre de l’Agora) invites us next year for a 8 months residence. It’s a pretty unique occasion, for a indie  collective like ours, to reach other kind of people and work with creators coming from performing arts,  such as  puppeteers, actors, dancers, VJs, etc.  Moreover, we intend to show up there some pieces of our current work and build a couple of weird games linked to the city of Evry. First cracker : what about a Evry Days Shooter hu ?

Well, I know what you may think : it’s bullshit, you don’t need to add art on top of it to have expressive and artistic games, because, by definition, games are able to express beauty, provoke, open questions and breccias. That’s, in our opinion, perfectly right. The interest of the formulation is precisely to open the debate, to question the (ancestral ?) relationship between art and games and to incitate to make   unconventional games. Plus, you can understand it in a way opposite to what we just said : maybe you don’t wanna make a game, but only a digital piece of art. But what if this creation is made of playable contents ? And more : can you even think about a piece of art which would not be playful by definition ? That’s the first reason why this event is so intringuing.

And consequently,  it will drive people from very different backgrounds : videogame industry, (non?)digital artists, engineers, VJ’s, architects, etc. In a few words, we can expect from this event to be a real melting pot. The event starts Friday, 5 pm. Hope to meet the most weird people of the planet there -)

P.S : in a future post, we will talk more precisely about Générations, a very special game we have made during the first edition of this event.

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.

Let us explain how things were working during the event. When you arrive at the GDC main hall you pick up your badge and you also get a bag full of useless junks (not goodies): advertising flyers, advertising bag, advertising notebooks, advertising catalog, etc. However, you also get one small coloured pixels which could be cyan, magenta, yellow or black (we’ve got a yellow one as you can see on the up-left picture). With this pixel comes a small instruction on the back of the wrapping telling:

Apply your pixel to the color-coded wall in the North hall (lower level) of Moscone Center.(yup, it’s that easy).

C = Cyan

M= Magenta

Y = Yellow

B = Black

As you can read, you have to “apply” your pixel to a “color-coded” area, which means you are not supposed to be free to do whatever you want with you pixel. You just have to stick it on the correct square without trying to compose your own piece. It’s a very mainstream approach to what they call “collective art installation”. Fortunately some people didn’t “play” it by the rules and drew their own images on the wall using pixels already stuck on the surface. The intended picture of the wall has been designed by the pixel artist Jude Buffum who was walking around the wall (we guess that was him, but we aren’t 100% sure) in order to replace every pixels that wasn’t in its due position. So each time someone has tried to change the rule-based installation, the artist-bot was here to put order and to be sure that things stay as they “has to be”. This part was disappointing and reminded us these old “paint by number” canvas which emphasize a mindless conformity to what painting or art is.

Space Opera: This year was celebrating the 13th edition of the Independant Game Festival and as usual many incredible indie game project have been exposed. The full list of participant to the IGF is available online and I will only focus on some of these games. I tried to play to each title and talk with their creators, but it wasn’t always easy to reach the screen to play games because of the huge amount of people gathered in front of the IGF booth! In my opinion, a revival of the spatial performance was noteworhty in many projects. B.U.T.T.O.N (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Okay Now) by the Coppenhaguen Game Collective is a pure revival of classic party games because it requires a physical involvement  of each player to achieve a serie of challenges. It could have been done without any digital material and just use a real game master or even a random stack of challenge cards, but the creators decides to use these digital frameworks because a Xbox or a PC are by defintion already full of playful references (well, at least this is a guess).

There is also a great importance in the physical participation of the player behind a video game such as Niddhog by Messof. It requires the players to share the same physical space (just like we did with the old 2 player games we had during the 80′s & 90′s consoles and that is not a surprise to see Nidhogg is meant to be played with NES’ controllers). The game has been designed to be played in specific place such as exhibition, festival, party, etc. and not on a website or at distance. Both participants have to be at the same place to share a game and I’m sure if the game was played in other way like one-versus-one online  it would not be as fun and involving as it currently is!

Even if SpyParty by Chris Hecker was still in alpha version and will probably be a work-in-progress for a long time, the way he presented it at the IGF booth was really interesting (in fact, it was almost the same installation devices he used for Penny-Arcade Expo 2010 in Seattle). SpyParty is an asymmetric multiplayer espionage game, dealing with the subtlety of human behavior, character, personality, and social mores, where player 1 (the spy) have to act as if he was an AI character in front of player 2 (the sniper) who is attentively watching the whole scene in order to find which character is the one played by player 1 (he has only one bullet and if he shoots the wrong guy, he just loses). The game was exhibited with two large screen back-to-back. Both players was able to get a short peek to the face of their opponent but wasn’t able to see its actions or its screen. So it is a face-to-face challenge that involves both participant to share a common space but use a digital framework to interact between them. When you are playing a game of SpyParty, you have this weird emotion of feeling the other who is just in front of you and never really know if this last suspucious action was made by an AI character or by your human target (sniper’s viewpoint) or you are never sure if this oppresive laser beam is curently pointing you because you are unmasked or if it’s just bluff (spy’s viewpoint). There is a thick tension you can feel between both players and this tension is happening in the same shared space. I can’t be 100% sure of my argument but I guess this kind of game would lose a lot of its interest if the game was played at long distance and not in the same space.

Those three games remind us how strong and effective the players’ physical presence can be in a multiplayer game and how the physical space can be used by both game designers and players. Online multiplayer games are good for sure, but we should try to reconsider how physical space and playful performances can be a part of the game and player experience.