Games are the new cinema, they are breaking free from the console and hitting the streets. These games are a new way of exploring ideas, meeting people and having fun. Hugely social, they are a new entertainment form.
Fresh from a summer of running games at festivals in New York and London we've launched a new game production company Simon to deliver these new games for corporate and entertainment clients.
Simon games come in all sorts of flavours: some use technology, some are refreshingly lo-fi but all involve players competing and collaborating out in the world: on the streets, in (car) parks and down the pub.
Our new website is on the way. Meanwhile, feel free to call or drop us a line if you want to chat about how games can help your business or organisation.
"A Geography of Impertinence" is a web-based tool for studying the Spanish experience of piracy and contraband in the Early Modern period. The website will allow users to interactively discover key points in the geography of piracy, using a set of Portuguese maps from the 1630s. The tool is also designed to serve as a gateway into — and as an annotation platform for — a variety of literary, historical and historiographic documents. By navigating between maps and TEI-encoded texts, users will have the opportunity to explore the history of foreign incursion into Spain's vast possessions in this age of European imperial expansion and competition.
Environmental Psychology student Aga Skorupka is preparing a 3d simulation of one of the Graduate Center building floors, aiming at revealing particular characteristics of built environments that influence the process of wayfinding, or how people find their way in certain environments.
Using a combination of real-time audio processing and 3D modeling software, music student Zachary Seldess will create virtual 3D sound environments that, via a local area network (LAN), can be experienced and altered in real-time simultaneously by several users.
Artistic Exchange: A Timeline of 16th Century Flanders, Spain, and Latin America will be a dynamic timeline exploring 16th century art historical connections between Flanders, Spain, and Colonial Latin America and is currently in its preliminary stages of development. This project will utilize MIT's open source tool, SIMILE Timeline, to provide a broad visual picture of the historical period.
Using the Max/MSP/Jitter programming environment, Music Composition student Nathan Bowen hopes to change the concert audience experience by allowing audience members to help determine the outcome of the performance. Dividing the audience into two teams, each team will be assigned the task to get their video game character to cross the finish line first and prevent the other team from gaining ground.
Effluvium is a musical exploration of the phenomenon that occurs when a listener's ear mechanism transitions between interpreting its input as several higher frequencies and a single low frequency. At the New Media Lab, music composition student Paul Riker will reconstruct Effluvium with dynamic video using MAX/MSP/Jitter to create a visual 3-D representation in real-time.
This project examines an ongoing land conflict in the small town of Caledonia, Ontario, Canada. The conflict centers on land that was granted to the Six Nations Confederacy in 1784. Today, the Canadian government and the Six Nations Confederacy both make vastly different claims regarding the ownership of this land. Using GIS mapping techniques, Flash software, and database methodology, this project will provide an online, interactive exploration of this conflict.
Lead by Professor Joan Greenbaum and doctoral candidate Gregory Donovan, this project aims to engage the New Media Lab community as participants in the process of understanding how ideas bud, build, bewilder and change. The 'NML Research Blog' is a virtual space where this exploration can take place.
Many social service programs for dispossessed populations are underutilized because potential clients are unaware of numerous available resources. Marcos Tejeda, Sociology, aims to provide a comprehensive listing of city organizations, including adult and youth homeless organizations, free health clinics, detoxification and substance abuse treatment programs, soup kitchens, and mental health services.
Phylo explores the origins of contemporary philosophy by looking at historical relationships between individuals, institutions, and ideas. Doctoral candidates David Morrow and Chris Alen Sula combine data visualization tools with a digital archive of dissertation information, faculty appointments, and publication metadata. The result is a free, open-access tool that gives important context to philosophical ideas.
In The Lost Museum, intrepid visitors can explore a virtual reconstruction of legendary showman P. T. Barnum's American Museum and investigate the mystery of who burned down this NYC landmark in 1865. Educators, students, and history enthusiasts can explore a rich archive of historical documents and present-day scholarship that reveals the marvels and scandals surrounding Barnum and his museum, as well as the social, political, and cultural history of the mid-nineteenth century city. 
The history of New York City from Dutch settlement to the present is the focus of this website that combines informative exhibits, incisive primary documents, interactive graphics, and educational curricula to uncover the many and varied layers of the city's past. Working with the collection of the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library and Reading Room, two GC History students produce this website, which has become a favorite on-line source for NYC history. 
The majority of UK women are already highly proficient in their use of the Internet, with the average woman having been connected to the web for six and a half years, while 71% of UK women go online every day.
AOP has appointed Tim Cain as Head of Research and Insight, reporting to Liz Somerville, the Acting Director of AOP. 
The study of 'mobilities' is a newly emerging interdisciplinary field in which Lancaster University is developing particular strengths. The concept of 'mobilities' encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life. Recent developments in transportation and communications infrastructures, along with new social and cultural practices of mobility, have elicited a number of new research initiatives for understanding the connections between these diverse mobilities.
Technological, social and cultural developments in public and private transportation, mobile communications, information storage and retrieval, surveillance systems and 'intelligent environments', are rapidly changing the nature of travel and of communications conducted at-a-distance. As mobile connectivity begins to occur in new ways across a wide range of cyber-devices and integrated places, so we need better theorization and research, especially to examine the interdependencies between changes in physical movement and in electronic communications, and especially in their increasing convergence. 
These changes are having many effects. The human body is transformed, as it is enhanced by communication devices and likely to be 'on the move'. Changes also transform the nature of 'local' communities and of the commitments people may feel to the 'nation'. And the global order is increasingly criss-crossed by tourists, workers, terrorists, students, migrants, asylum-seekers, scientists/ scholars, family members, business people and so on. Such multiple and intersecting mobilities seem to produce a more 'networked' patterning of economic and social life. 
On the retail front, gaming set records with a total of $18.9 billion in 2007 — about 50 percent over 2006 retail sales, according to NPD. Console, accessories and software sales are to thank for the industry's success, and there are no signs of slowing. CEA predicts sales for hardware will remain steady at $6.4 billion while software bounds upward to $11.5 billion, bringing the total predicted sales for 2008 to $17.9 billion.
