Portal and Innovation in Gaming
Last night I picked up and played through the new game Portal all in one sitting. Granted, it’s a short game that’s based on a really radical gameplay concept, but it’s easily one of the most compelling gaming experiences I’ve had to date. I’ve barely done any gaming all year, but this is something that I just had to give a whirl. I’ll let the game’s trailer give you a taste at what it’s all about.
Amazing, isn’t it? This game was created by a couple aspiring game designers from the gaming school Digipen, that garnered the attention of big-time game development company Valve Software who hired them immediately.
The game is now being bundled with the great ‘five for the price of one’ valued Half-Life 2 Orange Box that also includes Team Fortress 2 and the next episodic chapter of Half-Life 2. One hell of a deal if you ask me.
Portal just goes to show that it doesn’t take a huge development company to come up with a great idea. Though it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the financial backing of one 
Usability Testing for Gaming
Wired published an interesting piece (questionable title aside) on the usability testing Microsoft is putting Halo 3 through to catch bugs, exploits, and to improve the player experience, How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play.
PS3 Folding@home accounts for 56% of total project power
Update Mar. 25: Looks like the PS3’s are now hovering around 75% of the total power of the Folding@home project. Very impressive!
With the most recent update from Sony, PlayStation 3 owners now have the ability to run Stanford’s Folding@home distributed research project, and what a difference they’re making already! Statistics pulled from Stanford today show that the mere 13,000 or so PS3’s out there who have begun running the Folding@home program are now accounting for around 56% of the project’s total computing power. There’s several million PS3’s out there, so it should be amazing to see what will happen with this project once those others get their consoles up and running! [via Gizmodo]
Will Wright on Spore at SXSW
Will Wright, creator of the Sims and Sim City, talks about interactive storytelling, procedural content generation, simulating life and the power of computers as a catalyst for imagination at this year’s South by Southwest (SWSX) festival. I always find it awe-inspiring to watch Will Wright give demos of the technology he’s working on, if nothing else, for the passion he has for everything he does. Some videos of the keynote are up already as well. [via Waxy.org]
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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