Infinite Lives

Art duo Eva and Franco Mattes—AKA 0100101110101101.ORG—are the minds behind It’s always six o’clock. Each work in the exhibit conveys childlike mementos in unexpectedly violent ways. The overall effect is a little like what might happen if my old office cubicle exploded in an art gallery, but with more harmony and gravitas.

The show is on display at MU until June 29, so if you’re in the Netherlands in the next two days, you could drop in edit: I just realized that June was last month, and that I am exhausted.

I knew I vaguely recognized the artists’ names, and sure enough: their 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, a rumination on beauty within Second Life, was exhibited at a New York gallery in 2006.

Eva and Franco Mattes also exhibit what they call “synthetic performances” using their Second Life avatars. Each performance, in turn, is streamed live to a real-world audience.

• 0100101110101101.ORG – It’s always six o’clock (via)

Completing a game with the aid of infinite lives—even if the means of achieving those lives were made available by the original programmers—is, by definition, cheating. -Why Do We Cheat?

When I registered this domain a little over a year ago, the idea of “infinite lives” as a euphemism for cheating had already occurred to me. Maybe I’m in love with the notion of having unlimited chances to get something right, to pursue the best possible outcome. In real life, you have one chance. Entering a code for infinite lives is like time travel—it’s breaking the rules of time and space. It is, essentially, the ultimate cheat.

I’d been trolling 61 Frames Per Second, a rather young games blog, for posts by my friend Nadia Oxford. And via this post, I arrived at her recent article, Why Do We Cheat? It isn’t only a history of cheating-in-games; it is a rumination on cheating’s wherefores. After all, everybody cheats.

From the article’s introduction:

Every game has rules and a means of breaking those rules. Videogames, which are among the most complex games on the planet, feature suitably complex means of cheating. There are in-game codes, hacks, mods, code-altering devices, algorithms, walkthroughs, and many other means of breaking down a game in order to do what you’re not supposed to do.

To cheat in a game without a code or walkthrough requires real talent. I once witnessed Jeremy Parish and Jane Pinckard’s lengthy, animated discussion of Scott Sharkey’s admirable game-breaking genius. There is always a way to force a sprite outside of the boundaries of a screen or into actions that, according to the laws of the game, aren’t really permitted (or even possible). The trick is finding it.

Why do we cheat? When is a cheat code magical? Read on.

A few weeks ago, I loaded up Second Life. It was the first time I’d touched the game in about a year. I halfheartedly installed all the updates.

If you’ve ever tinkered with Second Life, this probably comes as no surprise: the service manages to hemorrhage almost all of its potential new customers, quickly. In fact, most new users are alienated by the whole experience within their first hour, thanks to an unnavigable interface loaded with super-cryptic nomenclature.

Perhaps the most unwelcoming aspect of the initial user experience is your avatar’s own appearance. It is textureless, low-tech, doll-like, and it brands you as a Linden newbie (until very recently, the default avatars were just terrible). And although the character creation tools are actually great, they take time to learn. I remember it seemed every attempt at designing a realistic body resulted in a bubble-ass. And at any length, the default hair is a she-male’s pompadour.

How could I have known during my very first hour of play that I was able to purchase not just clothes and toys, but also hair and skin and eyeglasses? The average new user has no idea how mutable his appearance really is—and by extension, how mutable his sense of identity is.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two Player Co-op has unveiled a brand new reviews segment, in which our friend Luana’s young daughter, Lorelei, assesses a video game’s playability and overall ‘fun’ factor. In the first episode, Lorelei gives the Wii title “My Pokemon Ranch” a piece of her mind. And as game reviews go, well, this is about as succinct as podcasts get.

Here’s a screenshot of Luana and Lorelei ranching in-game:

• Two Player Co-op Podcast: Lorelei Edition
• Luana’s photostream

In yesterday’s 1UP blog entry GTA4 Killed My Internet, this blogger really only meant to do a little GameVideos cross-promotion for the just-released GTA4 trailer. Still, the blog elicited an interesting back-and-forth among its readers, which we have lovingly reprinted in part just below/behind the cut. Read the rest of this entry »