Every Tuesday I like to take some time to focus on the hardworking and dedicated “YouTubers” within the gaming community, well that or I just link a fun or entertaining video. This week features two videos, one showing off the creativity of the Ohio State University Marching Band with their video game inspired halftime performance and the other, a tech demo for some really interesting technology which completely removes animations from a game and replaces it with nothing but 100% physics. I guess this week is all about how games can influence more than just what many would call mindless entertainment, they can also inspire other types of art and technology as well.
These days it isn’t uncommon to see video game culture make its way into other aspects of entertainment. Judging by the crowd’s reaction in this video, many are familiar with the themes explored by the members of the Ohio State Marching Band. It really does show how far games have come. There was a time when these types of themes would never have been mixed in a setting like this, but now all of a sudden everyone seems to love it. You can see that most of those watching had at some point been exposed to these games, even if they themselves aren’t gamers. The marching band clearly put a lot of time and effort into this performance (especially that horse wow) and I hope it’s the beginning of a new type of halftime expressionism for all of us to enjoy. Did anyone every really think they would see the day when a giant Pikachu would be cheered at a college football game? Source: Reddit
This second video doesn’t really look that impressive until you realize what it is. It’s a tech demo for an FPS which has no animations to speak of, meaning ever single movement and effect is produced by the game’s built-in physics. What does that mean? Well seeing as animations require an enormous amount of memory, this game is able to reproduce more life-like actions with a fraction of the memory used normally. It’s still just a tech demo, but if software like this catches on it may allow developers to use all that extra memory for other things or simply create games with vastly less memory than normal. As the video states it’s all still being perfected, but it looks like it could be something to pay attention to for the future.
