This large conference, scheduled in Amsterdam July 25 to 27, features an interesting track on Gaming:

“As gaming becomes more pervasive we are challenged in our job, learning and personal life by the growing
access to virtual spaces and communities that offer opportunities for everyday needs and aesthetic
experiences.
‘Creative Industries’ have a need for design measures that reveal new interaction methods,
scenario metaphors and in-depth co-creation. This conference bring together research and best practices in
creative media design for this new challenging field.
Gaming appeals to our wits, our senses and emotions; game design is provoked to engage our expressive and
experiential capabilities. Theoretical, empirical or semiotic analyses of games may help to explain how.
Effective design needs evaluation methods for exploring new concepts. Game design also needs the testing
of usability, playability, and methods for involving players.
Gaming also appeals to our social needs. We see developing communities and social networks around (online)
games. Recent research indicates that game and sociability design can stimulate social capital in these
communties. New platforms and interfaces for gaming may create new ways of shaping our social world.
Games are becoming a more substantial part of training and education in different sectors. Serious games
need rich, engaging (social) interaction, but still a lot is to be learned on the trade-off between various
design criteria, and the need to blend existing genres into unpreceeded future worlds.”

here is the call for papers, deadline 31 March 2008

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conference, games, social interactive television

Post for my friends in London, in the remote eventuality that they actually read my blog:
apparently London is trying to enter the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition, with the largest gathering ever of games characters on March the 18th.
If you are interested, you should show up at the Millennium Bridge at 10.30 am dressed as your favorite game character, from Ms Pacman to Mario to Katamary Damacy (?) to feature in this epochal event. This is not, I repeat, this is NOT a joke.

(courtesy of Tech Digest)

“The UnLtdWorld Research Lab is the world’s first dynamic mapping and graphing of social entrepreneurship, and of social and environmental issues. The Research Lab will also operate as an open platform allowing any individual or organisation to access and use the metadata for external projects, and for partners to inform targeted applications that interact with relevant segments of the network, both on UnLtdWorld and beyond.”

I understand UnLtdWorld opened just maybe some weeks ago? So it isn’t very populated yet. Nice idea though.

“The UnLtdWorld Research Lab is the world’s first dynamic mapping and graphing of social entrepreneurship, and of social and environmental issues. The Research Lab will also operate as an open platform allowing any individual or organisation to access and use the metadata for external projects, and for partners to inform targeted applications that interact with relevant segments of the network, both on UnLtdWorld and beyond.”

I understand UnLtdWorld opened just maybe some weeks ago? So it isn’t very populated yet. Nice idea though.

Semi-serious post: when I saw this announcement for a bamboo bio-degradable phone, shortlisted at this year’s 2008 Greener Gadgets Design Competition (!)

this other image immediately came to my mind:

this is robot Bender in Futurama, an episode entitled “Obsoletely Fabulous”, in which he decided to downgrade to wood as a protest against new robots on the market. Eventually he ends up on fire.
While this is still fiction, the bamboo bike is a reality: conceived by the Earth Institute engineers of Columbia University and tested in Ghana and Kenya, Bamboo-Bike can be assembled in less than a day from natural materials. check it out www.bamboobike.org

Are material objects going to become as volatile as digital support and as rapidly aging as software? Technologies are already pushing forward one new model after the other, mostly for profit reasons. Still, just 30 years ago a sign of status would have been, for instance, a designer’s lamp to keep in the living room, and the main value for many objects was their durability. Now flexibility and replaceability (and the last trend, sustainability) are the most advertised qualities. How is all this reflecting to culture, is remediation enough to keep up with the times, or is this really the end of history as we know it? (Too bad Horkheimer and Adorno said it already in the 60ies).

Technorati Tags: futuristic, media activism, personal, sustainable

some links on this interesting newcomer on the game scene: Human Data as a Playfield: the Passively Multiplayer Online Game from Terranova.
PMOG, that’s the name of this production by GameLayers, claims to transform ” our web surfing into ongoing social play. With a Firefox plug-in, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions.”

Basically you earn “datapoints” while surfing the web, you can steal your friends’ datapoints, then you have missions, to make or follow “paths” online, you shop for tools (in order to get even more datapoints) and all the information automatically generates a profile of the real “you”, sort of shopping metaphysics.

Here is the game’s caption: This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!

Jeremy Douglass PhD dissertation ” Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media ” is out for download, actually I am a bit late, it has been there since the end of November, oh well. I found it really awesome for the wealth of examples in a still not too well known field of interactive fiction, and somehow bringing what I thought to be some underground phenomenon into the light. Funny how the same name of interactive fiction can convey “looks and feels” as different as Jeremy’s examples and the case studies in Nick Montfort’s capital “Twisty Little Passages”. I hope to see the book soon

Technorati Tags: books, educational, interactive fiction

Writer Response Theory calls it “shameless peer promotion”, I pass it on as it is: Christy Dena appears in a special issue of Convergence (February 2008), edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze, with an article entitled, “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games.” Christy has also created a website to host further discussion of the article.

Henry Jenkins notes from his talk in Tampa about how “the new media landscape was enabling the emergence of new kinds of public intellectuals”.
He actually makes a very useful list and links of academics and intellectuals with that “special something”, that in this case is an actual grasp on cross media, I copy and paste some names.

Douglas Rushkoff, who has translated his insights into Biblical Studies into the Vertigo comic book series Testament, using the forums around the book to spark intellectual exchanges.
Howard Rheingold – Howard Rheingold’s Video blog and recent article for MIT Press/MacArthur book on using participatory media to increase civic engagement – has increasingly turned towards blogs and videopodcasts as a platform for what I call “just in time” scholarship, responding to contemporary debates and controversies from a theoretically informed perspective.

Alex Juhasz – interview on my Blog – has used YouTube as a platform to teach a class and frame a critique of YouTube’s particular vision of participatory culture.

Randy Pausch – Final Lecture on YouTube (Part 0, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10) and Blog – is battling terminal cancer. His public summation of his life’s work and his discussion of his life philosophy has enjoyed enormous circulation via YouTube, leading to his appearance on Oprah and a contract to produce a mass market book.

Peter Ludlow – Second Life Herald – helped to establish a “town newspaper” for the virtual world, Second Life, and in the process, helped the community reflect on its own practices.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson – two distinguished film scholars, now retired – use their blog as an extension of their succesful textbook, offering real time responses to developments in contemporary cinema.

I referenced several young scholars who were gaining wide recognition for their work while still finishing off their PhDs through their public roles as blogger:
Jane McGonigal
danah boyd
danah boyd recently announced that she would no longer publish her work in any journal which “locks down” content, a gutsy move for someone at the start of their professional career.
I mentioned that many of our own Comparative Media Studies graduate students have also built wider followings through their blogging activities:
Ilya Vedrashko — Ad Lab blog
Michael Danziger — Visual Methods blog
Sam Ford – Convergence Culture Consortium blog

Thank you Professor Jenkins! more on the original post

Technorati Tags: cross media, educational

Channel 4 launched Bow Street Runner, an online game to match with the major historical TV drama City of Vice.
Players explore 1754 London as a police officer of the time, solving crimes and learning history.
Bow Street Runner is the first game to be launched by the channel, and the first of a series of cross-platform offerings for the “educational” (daytime) audience of 14-to-19-year-old.
Commissioning editor Matt Locke describes how Channel 4 new approach will reverse the 360° approach (that’s BBC, as we know), and will create cross-platform offerings with TV outputs as one element only, instead of thinking the various elements, like TV content, ARG, as separate bits and pieces adding up to create the 360° effect (my impression is that Locke had The LOST experience in mind).
A new major “traditional” media company entering the cross media scene is indeed an event, I wonder if yet another definition of cross media will come out of their approach.