Future festival: Edinburgh Interactive 2010
Edinburgh Interactive's focus was on digital distribution and what it might mean for games developers and publishers Every year, in the midst of the fringe festival, big names from the games industry come together at the Filmhouse for Edinburgh Interactive – two days of conferences on the future of interactive entertainment. At the same time, on Festival Square, forthcoming titles are made available for the public to play; on showwere Nintendo 's Christmas big hitters, PlayStation 3 's new 3D-enabled titles and Microsoft Kinect . The overwhelming theme was digital distribution, validated succinctly by Igor Pusenjak of iPhone phenomenon Doodle Jump who charted his game's course from underground sensation to 4 million seller. At the close of the first day, Square Enix 's Ian Livingstone chaired a controversial debate on whether the future for developers lay in communicating directly with customers without publishers intervening at all, while Jerry Johnson, of Xbox LIVE , went on to explore how Microsoft's online service had evolved from simple gaming to a full entertainment hub involving Sky, Facebook and Netflix movies. It's by no means a clear-cut issue, but the debates suggested that huge individual successes are leaving smaller developers genuinely confident that digital distribution will enable them to move ahead without publishers in the future – a potentially huge shift for the gaming industry. Elsewhere, Sony Computer Entertainment 's CEO Ray Maguire, who led a session on gaming in 3D, acknowledged the crucial state of flux the distribution debate had illustrated. Edinburgh had offered, he said, a window on the "transitions that the industry is going through, rather than just today's product… we used to call ourselves the video game industry, but we're a million miles away from that. We're the interactive industry now." Games Nintendo PlayStation Xbox Microsoft Computing Sony Kelly MacDonald guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Future festival: Edinburgh Interactive 2010
Charlie Brooker | Batten down the hatches. Augmented reality is on its way
Who wants to see poor people? Soon, technology will allow us to airbrush them out According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don't know, "augmented reality" is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time. Being a gadget designed for people who'd rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It's incredibly useful, assuming you'd prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than stop and ask a fellow human being for directions. The Nintendo DSi has a built-in camera with a "fun mode" that can recognise the shape of a human face, and superimpose pig snouts or googly eyeballs and the like over your friends' visages when you point it at them. You can then push a button and save these images for posterity. For a while, it's genuinely amusing ("Look! It's dad with a pair of zany computerised bunny ears sprouting from the top his head. Ha ha ha!"), until you realise there are only about six different options, two of which involve amusing glasses. If you could customise the options, you could make it automatically beam a Hitler moustache on to everyone in sight, which would improve baby photos a hundredfold – but you can't customise the options, probably for precisely that reason. You could print the picture out and draw the Hitler moustache on yourself with a marker pen, but that wouldn't be very 2010. But while current examples of augmented reality might sound a tad underwhelming, the future possibilities are limitless. The moment they find a way of compressing the technology into a pair of lightweight spectacles, and the floating signs and bunny ears are layered directly over reality itself, the floodgates are open and you might as well tear your existing eyes out and flush them down the bin. My goggles would visually transform homeless people Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
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Charlie Brooker | Batten down the hatches. Augmented reality is on its way
Which games console is right for you?
Should you go for an Xbox, Nintendo or PlayStation 3 – or play on your computer? Nintendo Wii With its TV remote-style controller that can be wielded like a bat, sword or even a gun, the Wii offers a perfect introduction to videogames. But the graphics aren't as pretty as its two more technologically advanced rivals, and really ground-breaking Wii games come along very infrequently. Microsoft Xbox 360 (pictured) If you fancy something more heavyweight with the best games portfolio and aren't scared of using a "joypad" to control the action (primarily with your thumbs), the Xbox has the edge over Sony's PS3. But the £150 Arcade version is all but useless without a hard disk – go for the £200 Elite model.
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Which games console is right for you?
How Tetris conquered the world, block by block
That addictive puzzler Tetris – created 25 years ago by Russian Alexey Pajitnov – has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that conquered the world Twenty-five years ago, inside the bowels of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a young artificial intelligence researcher received his first desktop computer – the Soviet-built Elektronika 60, a copy of an American minicomputer called a PDP-11 – and began writing programs for it. But not numerical ones. He ended up creating one that would infest the dreams of those who played it, spurring addictions and even the suspicion that it was a Russian plot to divert the youth of America in a pointless exercise. "I started to put together all kinds of mathematical puzzles and diversions that I had loved all my life, since I was a boy," says Alexey Pajitnov, talking to the Guardian from the Russian capital. Pajitnov, then 29, thought the puzzles were fun, but after a few experiments there was one roughly-hewn game that stood out from the others. "The program wasn't complicated," he says. "There was no scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn't stop.
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How Tetris conquered the world, block by block
Have we already seen Microsoft’s secret plan for E3?
It's less than a month until the E3 convention , where Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and others will unveil their latest attempts to show off gaming goodies that will part us from our cash. Rumours are starting to fire up all over the web, but one of the most interesting came recently when Engadget breathlessly reported the "wild" possibility that Microsoft could unveil a motion-sensing peripheral . Clearly the Wii has opened the door to innovative control methods for the mass market, but, said Engadget this could go even further: Instead of detecting the waggles of Wiimote-like controllers, it detects full body movement and sound, sans controllers... [capabilities include] * Full body and hand gesture control of games / characters. * In fighting games you kick, punch, duck, dive, jump and so forth with your body. * It also picks up small hand gestures like pinching, grabbing and scrolling. My first thought was that I'd seen this before: with a system from Israeli company 3DV, who created the Z-cam - a three-dimensional camera system that I wrote about last year (I'm not the only one to have made this observation..
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Have we already seen Microsoft's secret plan for E3?
Gadget-spotting: The inexact science of stuff
How do gadget experts sort their iPods from their Sinclair C5s when it comes to picking the next big success story? "MiniDisc is dead – exclusive look at the new disc format that will bury it," reads the magazine coverline