Ginger Monkey Blog: Project Cafe Mussings

Ginger Monkey Blog: Project Cafe Mussings: "First things first; the following is pure speculation. I have never seen a Project Cafe devkit, I’ve not signed a Wii 2 NDA and nobody has t..."

Project Cafe Mussings

First things first; the following is pure speculation. I have never seen a Project Cafe devkit, I’ve not signed a Wii 2 NDA and nobody has told me anything about a console called Stream.

I’m writing this because when it comes to new gaming hardware I am a turbo nerd who enters unparalleled levels of arousal in the run up to a big-announcement E3, especially when it comes to new Nintendo hardware because they usually blow all minds.

So, letting my imagination run away with itself, here are my top tips for possible features of Nintendo’s new baby:

AR in your living room

One of the most striking features of the 3DS is the AR technology.  In case you don’t already know, the console comes with AR games built in and a stack of Nintendo themed playing cards to use with them. You simply place a playing card somewhere in the real world and point the handhelds stereoscopic camera lenses at it. The system uses the card as a reference point in order to magically project virtual elements into your real world through the 3DS screen. Better still; the surface the card is on can be warped, folded and transformed to become part of the landscape of the game, blurring the boundaries between the real and the virtual in the process.

With Nintendo’s new console apparently packing a 6 inch touch screen on the controller itself, it’s easy to imagine how this concept might be taken even further (assuming the controller also has a rear facing camera).

Instead of using a playing card as reference, the controller could use the entire surface of your TV. The fact that your TV is self illuminating makes it easy to track in almost any lighting conditions (in the same way as the glowing ball on the Playstation Move controller) and the relatively large surface area means entire scenes could potentially spill out of your TV and invade your living room.

Throw in gyroscopes inside the controller itself (like the 3DS has) and you have some intriguing possibilities for interaction – you could even have friends and family walking between the controller and the TV to interact with the game world on your behalf.

Even if this isn’t one of the main features Nintendo push, as long as the controller has a screen and a camera there’s probably very little to stop developers from creating these sorts of AR experiences. Also consider this; the 3DS already has the necessary hardware for the job, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen Nintendo allowing their handheld console to enhance the experience of their home console or act as an additional control device (I’m thinking Gamecube and GBA here).

3D without glasses

The 3DS screen is brilliant. It provides an astonishing sense of depth without any blurring and, as Nintendo loves to point out, it doesn’t require special glasses. Could the screen on the new home consoles controller use similar tech? If so, how might this combine with AR? Maybe we’ll discover games which project out from your TV in glorious 3D through the controllers screen?

Stream to tablet

One of the rumoured names of the new console is Stream, and we’re pretty confident that it will involve streaming content to the controllers screen from the console. When you think about it the potential here is quite staggering; consider the following facts:

1. People talk about cloud gaming services like OnLive being the future, but the infrastructure just isn’t there to make it work big time yet
2. Nintendo have concerns about the iPhone / Android market and have publicly stated very recently that they think cheap apps are damaging to the industry

The main problem with OnLive is latency. If you are too far away from a server then the quality of experience is going to suffer, or maybe not work at all. Of course in your own home you could probably stream HD content straight from the console to the controller, useful for times when the Missus has The Only Way is Essex on TV and you want to be able to play your favourite games. But even more broadly, what if your console can serve your games over the internet? If you are within the local vicinity of it (i.e. the same town or city) as you probably will be most of the time, then latency would still be relatively low. Better still, the small screen on the device means the video being streamed is also lower resolution compared to OnLive meaning you could potentially stream full games using the full grunt of the home console to the screen while out and about.

If the controller turns out to be a swish tablet design which looks at home next to an iPhone but with massively more impressive gaming performance then you could have a recipe for an aggressive Nintendo sucker punch to counter what it sees as a threat from smart phones with cheap apps. Nintendo games on the Nintendo controller/tablet would look and perform like the premium experiences they are and make cheap apps look, well, cheap.

What if Nintendo goes even further and sets up a network of hotspots to serve games from when out of range of your console? What if other peoples console could share the grunt of serving your game?

Okay so I’m not really taking into account all the technical and practical hurdles such as how the controller would connect to the net. As I said, this is all just pie in the sky speculation, but then Nintendo is a pie in the sky kind of company. If the rumours are true and Nintendo is planning to recapture the hardcore with its new beast, then don’t be too surprised if come June you’re casting aside your apathy towards the Wii and are once again a disciple ready to worship at the Nintendo altar.

As so it begins... by tackling THAT question

Are games art? If I had a penny for every time I seen this question printed, or heard it asked, or saw it attempted to be answered (with varying degrees of cliché and ambiguity) I’d have bought out Activision by now.

Indeed, a couple of months ago I was delivering a talk on games development to a room full of enthusiastic, slightly drunk students when somebody near the back raised that very question. 

"Oh God, not the art question" I replied. No sooner had the words left my lips than I felt remorse. I hadn't intended to sound embittered and the sight of the questioner shrinking in his chair with awkward embarrassment tugged on my little ginger heart. Quickly, I clarified; "Sorry I didn't mean to imply that it's a bad question, it's a very good question - it's just that it's impossible to answer without a definition of what art actually is".

So I thought, what better way for Ginger Monkey to begin his march into the world of videogame blogging than by tackling the question that just won't go away.

As I said, in order to decide whether or not videogames are art, we need a definition of what art means. Now whatever we do, let’s not going running to art critics, especially not advocates of so called fine art. As pointed out to great affect in 'What Good Are The Arts?' by John Carey, fine art is not superior to anything else that might claim to have some meaning. The fact that those who advocate it claim that it is, and that only a few enlightened people such as themselves can truly appreciate it says more about those people than it does about the objects of their affection.

Aside from dismissing this snobbery, Carey also meticulously examines and dismantles almost every formal attempt at a definition of art. Indeed he finally settles on this rather disappointing (by his own admission) but perhaps inevitable definition of art:

“Art is anything that anyone has ever considered to be art”

So by that definition, yes, videogames are art. However it’s not very satisfying is it? Even if we accept this conclusion it doesn’t really make us feel any better about the medium we love. What we’re really seeking is recognition.

Perhaps we can find the answer by applying a little game logic to the equation (I believe gamification is what the kids are calling it). It’s just like a YouTube video; 5 hits and you can claim it’s art as long as one of those 5 considers it to be, 5 million hits and (assuming a lot more people consider it to be art by implication) you can claim that not only is it also art but it’s probably much better art than the clip with 5 hits.

Similarly, any game you care to name is most likely art by Carey’s definition, even if it’s only the creator who thinks so. I know for example that the demo I created to get my foot in the door of the industry is a terrible, terrible videogame and I am certain nobody in the world has ever considered it to be art. To me however it’s a reminder of my hopes and dreams, my struggles and triumphs, my naivety and my talent every time I look at it. Perhaps to me alone it is art.

I digress. The point is this. How many games do you think a LOT of people think are art? How many games have moved a generation? How many games have exposed some new truth about existence to millions of people?

The answer of course is not many. However, we few who have been moved by a game or maybe just those of us who have watched them grow and evolve at an astonishing rate; we believe they are capable of it.

Those of us with the foresight and imagination to see where they can take us in the future already know that games are going to become the art form of the 21^st century, just as film became the art form of the 20^th century against a remarkably similar initial backdrop of general apathy and cynicism.

So let’s forget the art question for a while and just enjoy the ride, because like everything else it’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.