Half-Lives (2009)

Half-Lives used a specially modified version of Valve’s Software’s Half-Life, which I wrote to keep track of a player’s position, health, and quick saves. After collecting this data, I wrote a sketch in Processing that would overlay this information on top of a snapshot taken at the time of death. The color of the line represents the player’s health (full at green and empty at red). White circles represent save points, and red circles represent deaths.

As Half-Life automatically loads the last save file after death, we see this represented in the visualization with the ‘cursor’ returning to the last-drawn white dot and drawing onwards from that position. When viewed as a sequence, the visualization is almost organic in appearance — like a tree branching out from a seed.

The final image has all of the attempts overlaid onto a single image.

This visualization was designed to be displayed on UCSD’s ultra high resolution display, the HIPerSpace Wall.

World One (2008)

World One is a small Flash visualization I created that takes the idea of a “world” in Super Mario Bros. to its literal extreme. It loads graphic and level data from a Super Mario Brothers ROM file and displays it as a planet. Moving the mouse further from the center of the screen causes the view to zoom in. Because of the less-than-legal nature of distributing ROMs of commercial video games, I can only provide screenshots of the visualization in action.

(full-size (1280×1024) image)

Mario Universe (2006)

Mario Universe was an interactive new media work that revealed some harrowing truths about scale and the human condition.

Yak Man (2008)

Yak Man was an interactive piece that had two audience participants controlling Pacman and a ghost by making sounds into a microphone. The ghost player had to wail like a ghost, and the Pacman play had to repeat “Nom nom nom ” in order to get the characters moving.

Friend Feed (2009)

Friend Feed was a Second Life based project that took a customizable Linden Scripting Language based Sign and made it continually update its text with recent Facebook Friend Status updates, bypassing any privacy settings, and effectively broadcasting these messages publically. The project was realized using both a combination of LSL and a Java-based servlet to parse Friend Status updates from my Facebook Friend Status updates.

8-BITar Hero (2009)

8-BITar Hero was a project completed in just two months from UCSD’s Recombinant Serendpity exhibit that took place early June, 2009. 8BITar Hero is basically Rock Band except with a Nintendo emulator generating the music and levels.

Gameplay levels that are procedurally generated from the act of playing a game. One person plays NES games on an emulator, others play a Rock Band game with levels that are generated algorithmically from the audio code of the NES game. The focus here is the generative nature of the game, and the process by which the levels are created.

You can find information regarding 8-BITar Hero, as well as a development log of the project at the 8-BITar Hero website, located here.