Very interesting experience in Tampere, at the annual Seminar, this time on the topic of “playful experiences”; the title must have sent several people’ s creativity spinning, as it is a very ambiguous concept.

Chaired by Frans Mayra, Olli Sotamaa, Aki Jarvinen, Oskar Juhlin, several stimulating interventions, my humble contribution was “Playfulness and trust in the Obama campaign on Facebook: bringing civic engagement into play”.

Only another paper, by Maaike De Jong, related to play and playfulness as a philosophical concept; I was expecting more work along that line, instead Olli Sotamaa talked about Little Big Planet and co-creativity, Annakaisa Kultima about the latest developments of the “expanded game experience” concept: she and other Finnish researchers, I remember only Kuittinen, published this key paper in 2007 about casual games that developed the idea of casual games being just a part in a larger scheme, called “expanded game experience”.
Jessica Enewold presented a really cool research on playing mums, and also Markus Montola’s presentation was very inspiring, on the general concept of play; I wish I could remember more presentations, these were my highlights

Here is the programme

Quite fascinating: a student of game design by the name of Robin Burkinshaw created the universe Alice and Kev, two emotionally disturbed Sims who have been put in a desolate setting with just a couple of benches and who are trying to survive without money with just their Sims skills. The creator says: “a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over”.
Are artificial lives then becoming alive?

Next week I will be going to a conference in Urbino called “Modernity 2.0″ - the topic is socio-cybernetics and many papers seem to be related to Luhmann, Gordon Pask and similar; I will be presenting the paper “The Obama campaign on Facebook: playful conversation, trust, and civic engagement in social networks”, wanting to explain some aspects of the culture of play visible in social networks, and how this can possibly influence electors.
There will be at least another three papers on various aspects of Barack Obama election campaign, so it is going to be an interesting and challenging event.
The conference is organized by Fabio Giglietto and Michael Pateau, and two of the keynote speakers are Danah Boyd and Giuseppe Longo.

Technorati Tags: conference, event, media activism, personal, social networks

I am an online student! I am glad it’s online because I heard there are 700-something students, and in real life it would be a real mess.

this is the course:

Ian Schreiber, is offering a online summer course on game design. Game
Design Concepts is a large-scale online version of a course normally taught
in a university classroom, focusing on both the theory and practice of core
systems game design. Participants include high school and college students,
college educators, and professionals both inside and outside the game
industry. Class begins on June 29 and continues until September 6. For
complete schedule, syllabus and registration instructions, visit the
official course blog

As the first experiment of its kind (? correct me if I am wrong), this course is going to open a lot of perspectives on open education, I will be taking notes all along

Like we didn’t have enough reality shows, or we didn’t spend enough time online anyway, the spanish developers of Tengaged has created the world-first reality social game.

The game is very straightforward. When you sign up, Tengaged prompts you to create a cartoon-style avatar, reminiscent of Nintendo’s Miis. The avatars appear a bit bland — with limited customization options — so it shouldn’t take very long.

The staying power of this Big Brother-style game is hard to predict. Since it was brought to our attention in January, Tengaged has been fairly active. We expect to see more features added so it may retain its existing user base, and perhaps attract more as well.
(from Inside Social Games)

As my Facebook Friends know very well, I have been recently obsessed by the hoax TV news clips by The Onion Network; here are a couple of them related to game culture, in fact they don’t sound very different from the news in italian television

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

I love this one,

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

This one instead is a very probable future application of user generated content for crime detection..

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

The third book of the trilogy edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Waldrip-Fruin, after “First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game”, and “Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media”, is out.

Henry Jenkins interviewed the authors, and the results are interesting, take a look

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/an_interview_with_pat_harrigan.html

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/authoring_and_exploring_vast_n.html

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/authoring_and_exploring_vast_n_1.html

McDonald launched a new interactive sign in Piccadilly Circus where passers-by can interact with images displayed on McDonald’s giant LED screen. Is this video a hoax or not?

It has been a long time since I thought I had something to say about cross media and play; in fact I am still looking for an academic job, applying here and there, and the focus of my research has kind of shifted towards play and playfulness in social media, especially with regards to Facebook.
This means that this blog from now on will relate to the social aspect of media and user generated content more than before. There is some kind of a red thread connecting these different topics, as I would like to consider them all within the frame of a culture of play, in which the modalities of play are expanded to non-play environments and employed in non-play practices (see all my last papers about the Obama’s Facebook campaign).
Anyway, time to start again.

Layoff, game about inflation and precarious work, designed by Mary Flanagan.

They are part of this really cool Values at Play project; why don’t they have anything like that in Europe?