About this Video
Kevin Slavin spoke at Postopolis!, an event organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. A list of available videos from the event can be found here.
Kevin Slavin is serious about games. At one point in this presentation from Postopolis!, he even mentions something about video games bringing peace to the Middle East. He does not seem to be entirely joking.
Slavin is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of area/code, a video game development shop in New York. Slavin is also one of the creators of Big Games, a developer that sees no real difference between the virtual and the real, and works with both to create games that allow users to communicate in enormous, sometimes global, social networks. Slavin’s world — and ours — is one in which games give people a “chance to work things out socially that cannot be solved any other way or might not care to do any other way.”
A world where “special annotation is geo-located information, authored by everyone, accessible everywhere.”
Take Plundr, for instance, laptop-toting players can move onto different “islands” as they move around in real space.
There’s also Crossroads, a two-player cell phone game where players “capture” intersections in Manhattan by physically moving around them. An imaginary digital entity named the Baron Samedi is onto these intersections too. Seeing this rival on his or her phone, the player will, says Slavin, instinctively “look up to see the Baron. You can run up Hudson, being pursued by something invisible.”
Although this seems like one more step in the infinite pursuit to fuse the real and digital worlds, Slavin insists that his goal is “not to drive somebody further and further into a virtual world. It is to find new ways to use this one.
