Hasta La Ideas

Here’s a few key innovations in the massive and ever-growing video game industry. The blockbuster studios have laid down the hardware, but it’s the smaller indie joints that are ditching the TV screen and creating entirely new games out of the already-existing consoles, batons, wands and controllers. Just as Twitter became something beyond what Ev Williams had envisioned, video games are evolving with purposes never imagined by the original designers.

Here is a sample of the best new designs in gaming, according to MIT Tech Review.

Spin The Bottle: Bumpie’s Party

This game makes use of the Nintendo Wii motion controllers and the Wii-U console and has players compete in teams to play various mini-games. For instance in so-called “Rabbit Hunt” one team hides the Wii remote controllers and then the other team tries to find them, in only one minute, while the controllers emit random sniffing rabbit sounds. So the room itself becomes the set for the game. It’s a great example of how a hack of hardware can become a new game in ways the original developers never intended.

Private Eye

This game uses the new and powerful virtual-reality headset created by Oculus Rift (see video below of the Oculus Rift creator’s 90-year old grandmother playing with the VR headset). Inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window, it’s a detective game in which the player spies on occupants of a building from our wheel-chair (head movement is all you can do), knowing a murder will take place at 10pm. We then need to piece together answers by catching key details. What a refreshing change from the bloody war and killing rampant in most vid games.

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