Development Video #9 - CCTV Cameras
/A bit of a longer video, it's about the CCTV Cameras in the game, and since that connects to some of the themes and inspiration behind the game I took the opportunity to talk a bit about them. Each of the last few videos has been a bit of a different take on what the GG:SoR dev vid's are about, I'm probably going to continue along that vain. Making a game (any game) involves so many different processes, activities and ways of thinking and I hope that by taking this approach I can build up a broad and detailed view of what's going into making this one.
All footage is from our prototype, the final game will look more like these: 1, 2, 3.
Thanks to Emma Byrne for letting me use her fantastic photography of CCTV cameras in this video. You can see all the photos and read the accompanying essay by Cory Doctorow in her photo essay "Snitchtown" at http://snitchbook.notlong.com/
The Torontoist article on CCTV cameras that I briefly showed in the video is here. They do a great job of covering local public space issues.
The photos of plants were from my first time guerrilla gardening that I posted about a few months ago.
I mentioned that Shenzhen China is being used as a testbed for networked cameras employing facial recognition and software that alerts the police when an unusual number of people gather in one place. I'm unsure of how much of that has actually been rolled out so far but if you're interested in more info, here's a pretty thorough article on China's Golden Shield.
On the other hand if you're all like 'Whatever, F*@k privacy!', and you'd rather glory in the abundance of ubiquitous surveillance cameras available for your voyeuristic pleasure SurveillanceSaver lets you see through over a 1000 unprotected CCTV cameras around the world. You may not want to run it all the time, but I found it fascinating to view so many random places around the world in real time.... also kind of creepy when you realize how many of these things are listed on google without any sort of password protection.