February 7, 2004
Variety o’ Links
New Products:
Tamagotchi keychain pet is back: Using infrared portals, the new Tamagotchi Plus will be able to mingle, chat and date, marry and have babies with other Tamagotchis. The original version sold 40M units. (via Slashdot Games)
Singles! Flirt Up Your Life! is shipping soon. Pick two characters to live together from a cast of twelve, and using a Sims-like interface try to coax them to get it on. Includes nudity and romantic erotic situations but no pornography. (full index of screenshots) (via GameGirlAdvance)
Artist Lynn Hershman, pioneer of interactive art and recent Prix Ars Electronica winner, will be exhibiting Agent DINA at the Virtual Minds symposium in Bremen, Germany, March 12-14. This may be an extension of her Agent Ruby project.
Cancellations:
A massively-multiplayer version of the latest in the Myst series, which now includes a player avatar, called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, is being cancelled after its short-lived debut. However the game itself in non-MMP form, developed by Rand Miller and Cyan, is still available. (I didn’t know it existed till now!) (via Slashdot Games)
The DoD has cancelled the LifeLog project (posted about on GTxA here and here), “an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence, including just about everything an individual says, sees, or does”. (via KurzweilAI.net)
Conferences:
Under Construction: Digital Literatures and Theories, April 14-16 in Barcelona, submissions due Feb 10. (via Ludology.org)
A conference on multiplayer games, Other Players, Dec 6-8 at IT University of Copenhagen, submissions due August 1.
Int’l Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC 2004), held Sept 1-3 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, submissions due March 20.
Program of last September’s Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2003), held in Irsee, Germany — I missed this one, we never linked to it last September…