/Threaded/ Game for a laugh
10/12/2006 | Filed under Discover > Threaded
Gaming geeks eagerly await the new consoles, but the very best games are actually re-enacted outside, in the real world.
A few months ago, the Bomb Squad was called to a town in Ohio to ‘defuse’ 17 suspicious packages. Five teenage girls claimed responsibility for making and placing the boxes, which were wrapped in gold paper with question marks sprayed on the sides, and were in danger of facing criminal charges.
The girls, however, were just playing a real life version of Super Mario Bros and had found a website with instructions for creating replicas of the blocks as they feature in the game (www.qwantz.com/posterchild). The people behind the site argued that they just wanted to “bring a smile to people’s faces, to get them to connect with their neighbours, to bring colour into an otherwise grey urban landscape.” Although it was just a harmless bit of art, in the same sense as it is to translate emoticons back into human expressions (www.emoticonman.com), it didn’t really work out in Ohio (although the girls weren’t charged in the end). This is a shame. Really, the police should have known that all over the world, people are playing real-life versions of computer games. The web, after all, is swamped with videos of people re-enacting Counter-Strike (www.dumpalink.com/media/1118152812), Resident Evil (www.pistolwimp.com/media/48684) and Grand Theft Auto (tinyurl.com/7wr2x). People run around in self-made costumes, bump into walls and their legs continue to move when they fall over.
A couple of years ago, a group of students caused a buzz on the web when they invented the large scale urban game Pac-Manhattan (www.pacmanhattan.com), a real-life version of the 80s sensation played in the streets of Manhattan. It used Wi-Fi, open source software and mobiles. It obviously inspired people all around the globe, because now you can find students in full Pac-Man costumes chasing each other around their library (umpatriots.com/pacman/pacamajig.mp4) and their lecture halls (www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0HNFLoMiM0).
In fact, Pac-Manhattan proved so popular that its creators from New York University are now planning a real-life obstacle course based on Super Mario Bros that you can navigate with a power assist harness, essentially a bungee system (www.nintendoamusementpark.com) to experience super powers. Just like in the video game, you can jump high up in the air (up to 12 feet), collect coins and magic mushrooms. The students hope that Nintendo and Disney will help them to develop this project.
Notsonoisy, a Swiss design company, took a different approach to creating real-life video games. They spent four hours in a theatre taking 390 pictures of 67 people and ended up with a three-minute stop-motion film of Human Space Invaders (www.notsonoisy.com/spaceinvaders). It’s pure genius and even better than last year’s Pong, which only required seven human pixels (www.notsonoisy.com/pong).
Mega64 regularly produces what co-creator Derrick Acosta calls “Jackass with video games” (www.mega64.com). The premise of the skits, which include real-life Tetris (www.mega64.com/tetris.htm), real-life Paperboy (www.mega64.com/paperboy.htm) and real-life Ghosts ‘n Goblins (www.mega64.com/ghostsngoblins.htm) is that a mad scientist, Dr Poque, creates a gaming console, the Mega64, that can tap into the human mind. His crew beta test the machine and “endure the digital insanity and learn why video games and the real world should never mix.” They film themselves in the streets of San Diego and interact with unsuspecting members of the public who are unaware of the hidden camera.
The show was supposed to eventually appear on telly but, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t find an interested network. Mega64 now features exclusive clips on its site and produces DVDs, published through Something Awful (www.somethingawful.com).
So, don’t bother waiting for the PlayStation 3 and the Wii. The real excitement happens in the outside world. Re-enacting vintage video games is the latest rage – even Ohio knows this now.
