GAMES FOR 5 JOYSTICKS

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS , DEADLINE: 7 NOV 2006 14 NOV 2006

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TELIC Arts Exchange is calling for submissions of video games written for 5 joysticks.

In most Hollywood movies, the viewer identifies with a lone protagonist throughout a more or less linear narrative. There is a similar pattern in many video games - each player is connected by a cord to a single avatar on the screen. Individual heroes gave way to groups and crowds as protagonist in certain movies, like Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, and TELIC is looking for games that cut the cord - or even better - tangle it up with everyone else's cord.

TELIC already has all the hardware (like the joysticks), you would just write the software. The games don't have to have strong narratives or even resemble any of the games on the market today. They can be abstract, frustrating, totally fun, musical instruments, pointless, homemade. We are looking for submissions that wonder what kind of games are possible when 5 people with 5 joysticks are sitting in the same room, looking at the same screen.

We will be hosting a screening of selected games at TELIC Gallery in November in conjunction with the Mario's Furniture - Version 2 installation by Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet. Games will be selected by Mushkin and Barnet, along with Fiona Whitton and Sean Dockray from TELIC, and Casey Reas.

Please email your entries to 5joysticks@telic.info as an attached ZIP archive and include any personal information you wish to disclose within the body of the email. Please don't submit any more than 5 games per person.

Technical Information

We have posted some code to get you started in Processing. The code emulates the 5 joysticks with a single keyboard so that you can test what the game plays like.

If you want to submit a game written in another language, it needs to be able to read data from a Virtual COM Port. The Processing code above documents how to handle the bytes that are read from the VCP and unpack those bytes into joystick data.

Please email any questions to 5joysticks@telic.info