Minecraft video game to get Tate art 'worlds'

LONDON - Fans of the hugely successful Minecraft video game will be able to play inside worlds envisioned in art from the collection of the Tate museums in Britain with free-download releases of two 3-D "Tate Worlds" starting on Monday.

Players in Minecraft, developed by Swedish company Mojang, can build nearly anything imaginable block by block in a digital world.

"Minecraft is a wonderful game which embraces imagination and creativity," Jane Burton, Creative Director of Tate Media, said in a statement on Thursday.

"It has captivated millions of children and young people across the world. In playfully reimagining art in Tate Worlds for Minecraft we hope to introduce a new generation to inspirational works from Tate's collection."

The first two paintings inspiring the Tate worlds are Andre Derain's 1906 "The Pool of London" and Christopher Nevinson's 1920 painting of New York, "Soul of the Soulless City".

Derain's painting is a scene of a cargo ship and tenders with London's famed Tower Bridge in the background, while the Nevinson shows skyscrapers with the tracks of an elevated rail line starting in the foreground and running into the distance.

In "Tate Worlds: Soul of the Soulless City", players will enter the 1920s New York depicted in the painting and board a train taking them past New York landmarks of the time, then fast forward into the future as skyscrapers rise all around, Tate said.

"The sights and sounds of the 'Roaring 20s' will accompany the journey as the players build a skyscraper, join construction workers for a dangerous sky-high lunch and race to catch a movie," the museum said.

Six more "Tate Worlds" maps will be released over the coming year on the themes of 'Play', 'Destruction' and 'Fantasy', inspired by well-known artworks, the museum said.

These include John Singer Sargent's "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" (1885-6), Peter Blake's "The Toy Shop" (1962), John Martin's "The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum" (1822) and Cornelia Parker's "Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View" (1991).

The "Tate Worlds" were created in conjunction with "leading Minecraft mapmakers", the museum said, and will be available for download at (www.tate.org.uk/tateworlds).

Microsoft announced in September it is buying Mojang for $2.5 billion.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

On the hunt for the next Minecraft

TOKYO -- The staggering $2.5 billion that Microsoft has just shelled out for Minecraft and its quirky graphics will be foremost in developers' minds at the Tokyo Game Show this week, where simple yet immersive games are expected to figure heavily.

After seeing the tech titan bid to cash in on the 100 million people who spend hours constructing their own Minecraft worlds and share them online, industry figures will be looking for the next big thing at the four-day event.

Asia's largest digital entertainment exhibition, which kicks off on Thursday in the vast hangar-like buildings of Makuhari just outside Tokyo, will have a whole section for gaming with a social side.

It is already big business -- games played online or accessed through sites such as Facebook are hot on the heels of traditional consoles and are set, by some estimates, to overtake them in terms of revenue in the not-too-distant future.

"Nowadays most games have some social features included in them, which has led to an increase in the number of end-users," said market research firm Reportlinker.

The research company dates the take-off of social gaming to the success of Farmville, a simulation game hosted initially by Facebook in 2009 in which users build farms with their friends.

The global video game industry was worth a whopping 6.3 trillion yen (around $59 billion) in 2013. A full 70 percent of that is through downloads via console, PC or smartphone, according to Japanese game specialists Enterbrain.

"Games have moved from the console package to the data packet," said Enterbrain.

This trend is set to grow in the future -- analysts at technology research company TechNavio forecast that the global social gaming market will grow an average of 18 percent every year until 2018.

'Chat with friends'

In Japan, popular entertainment platforms Gree and DeNa/Mobage owe their success to social gaming, which they developed widely on Japanese flip-phones before smartphones came on the scene.

Online messaging app Line, launched in 2011 as a communication service to rival US-based Skype and WhatsApp, has also branched out into games, whilst Japanese Facebook-precursor Mixi relies on its socially connected electronic diversions to survive.

Each of these "big four" companies on the Japanese gaming scene boasts from 25 to 40 million users in Japan.

"The defining feature of social gaming in Japan is that it is scattered disparately between several hundred different developers" who contribute to these platforms, explained Serkan Toto, a specialist on the Japanese game market.

Japanese people play social games to "kill time" or "to chat with friends", pastimes that generate profit -- mobile social gaming in Japan was worth 360 billion yen ($3.3 billion) in 2013, according to Cesa, a Japanese association working in the sector.

This means that social gaming is hot on the heels of the more traditional market of consoles and their physical discs, which was valued at 410 billion yen ($3.8 billion).

But the dividing line is becoming increasingly blurred.

The success of Sony's latest home console, the PlayStation 4 (PS4), can be attributed to "incredibly immersive gaming experiences along with deep social capabilities and entertainment provided by our network", said Andrew House, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, back in January.

The console has sold 10 million units in under 10 months.

Gamers will be flocking to the four-day Tokyo Game Show to try the latest offerings in long-running sagas created for Sony PS4, the Microsoft Xbox One or the Nintendo Wii U.

Pocket consoles such as the PS Vita or the Nintendo 3DS will also be represented.

Some 220,000 visitors are expected at the exhibition, where more than 400 exhibitors will be displaying their wares.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com