The Cube is turning 2!

This Saturday 28 February, The Cube will celebrate its 2nd birthday! To mark the occasion, we want to share some of our favourite Cube memories, looking back over the last two years in pictures…

The development and construction of The Cube is a unique technical feat that took QUT developers more than two years to complete. One of the world’s largest interactive digital display systems, The Cube stands at two storeys high, and houses a whopping 170m2 of high-definition screens including 48 touch panels, which integrate with 14 high-definition projectors to reach a massive 115-megapixel resolution. Construction began in 2010.

In the lead up to The Cube’s opening, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak came to visit our Cubans! Here’s a pic from Wozniak’s 2012 visit – you can see the progress of Virtual Reef in the background!

In February 2013, our then Prime Minister Julia Gillard officially opened the SEC, home to The Cube. While here, Gillard tried her hand at some LEGO Education.

Robotronica in August 2013 was a big moment for our young Cube as it welcomed hundreds of STEM enthusiasts for an epic robotics spectacular featuring hands-on workshops, demonstrations, talks, debates, films, music and performances.

In just 2 years, The Cube’s public program team has delivered over 315 engagement programs, attracting over 11,320 participants. We hope that The Cube will continue to engage and inspire generations of thinkers and doers to come!

#GO423 Workshops: Build your own game controller and Coderdojo

A group of lucky children at the Game On Symposium got to design and build their own game controller using the Makey Makey, and their very own games using the educational coding program Scratch.

Kids got a chance to learn some practical skills and tools for electronic game making in a creative and collaborative way. Products like Scratch and the Makey Makey make it possible for children to create and build interesting and experimental games themselves straight away, and everyone had something fantastic to show off at the end of the workshops!

#GO423 Future Routes in Game Stories

This panel talked about games in stories, narrative devices and strategies, and how these extrodinary story makers create effective tales in the gaming platform.

Forced to create stories on the spot by cruel host Alex Butterfield, Christy Dena (2013 Cube Digital Writer in Residence) described to us the first ever robot made game, which will be very politically eclipsing. Joshua Boggs (creator of Framed) told us the twist ending of a time travel game made thousands of years from now, and Dan Graf (Games Designer at Halfbrick and founder of IGDA Sydney) gave us a spiel about how millions of years from now the Eiffel Tower will be thought of as a preserved skeleton of a giant land squid from millenia past. Good storytelling! These guys are the real deal!

On top of that the panel discussed the importance of matching gameplay with narrative themes and structure in order to avoid ludonarrative dissonance (a term so modern it’s definition can only be found on urban dictionary), the moral accountability of authors as games become more immersive and personally impacting with VR, and their own experiences of creating stories in games using experimental narrative structures, transmedia and personal gamer agency and choice.

Make sure to add to your “To Play” list the games mentioned during this panel for their advanced narrative success, one of which you may not have heard of:

Papers Please

Journey

Opera Omnia (too obscure to even have a logo?)