Parking Wars: the game is an advergaming for the upcoming A&E television series Parking Wars about metermaids and parking reinforcements (!) ; the game is a Facebook application to promote the show, in which you have to put cars in your friends’ streets and if the cars stay long enough they start earning money - as Ian Bogost points out, this structure really takes advantage of the social network structure, and, I might add, it adds a whole new dimension to the cross media product. When are we going to see content creation through Facebook applications? I mean, micro-content adding up to some story universe? Has it been done already?/news courtesy of Water Cooler Games

A new version of Freedom Fighter ‘56 game, educational game based on the Hungarian Revolution, includes a graphic novel based on the game’s story. The publisher is Lauer Learning, although I think the creative work is by The Inspiracy. The books “56 stories” contains 56 personal recollections of the Hungarian Revolution, with original photographs, sketches, an original map, timeline, and glossary.I wish I had these sort of things at school…

I HAVE to post about this : a Christmas tree Pacman-style and Pokemon decorations (from Geekologie) - we want more!

Arden, the world of William Shakespeare, and also of Edward Castronova who conceived the online experience, has been released last week, together with Castronova’s book “Exodus to the Virtual World”.You can play it here.Various press releases highlight in turn its educational potential, the power of virtual worlds as “theme” social networks, the power of interaction and play in learning and so on. The question on how much can virtual worlds fall into the category of “gaming” is still open.At first sight Arden might fall under “adaptation” rather than transmedial storytelling, but in fact the player is engaged in creating new subplots within the storyworld, so the whole experience is truly cross media. I just started playing, will update later.A post on Terranova by Castronova says that as an experience “it’s rather boring” (it’s just a quote!) and that several of the playtesters said “Where are the monsters?”Apparently the lack of monsters were badly affecting the game experience. The answer to that was to take back Arden I and release Arden II: London’s Burning, which was initially conceived as a game.(This would answer somehow the question if virtual worlds experience can be considered as “gaming”, and the answer would be a sound “no” - more debate to follow)So, what you can see now online is Arden I, boring, apparently (I didn’t say that), but of immense interest for the academic community.

Another event related to the Magic Circle, this time in Tampere, from the Hypermedia Lab - my source is the Terranova blog, anyway here it is:?Breaking the Magic Circle?Call for Papers: Game Studies Seminar, Tampere 10-11 April, 2008One of the classic theories of games and play was presented by Johan Huizinga in his work Homo Ludens (orig. from 1938). Huizinga wrote about the free and voluntary nature of play, how it is “an activity connected with no material interest” and how it “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space”, involving and absorbing players utterly into a separate world set off from the “ordinary” life, while being created and maintained by communities of players.Huizinga’s view has become widely known within contemporary game studies, and it is often referred as the ‘Magic Circle’ view on games and play. This concept has also been widely criticised, as it has become increasingly obvious how various “games external” areas play an important role in digital play, and also because digital games have become more widely enmeshed with and applied into various economical, educational and other social and cultural processes and uses.”Breaking the Magic Circle” seminar invites presentations from multiple?> points of view, including theoretical as well as empirically based studies into that question or expand existing conceptions regarding digital games and play. Particular fields of study might include, but are not limited to:• pervasive, mobile or location based gaming,?• alternate reality gaming?• casual, non-immersive or coincidental forms of play,?• professional gaming,?• money gaming, betting and gambling within digital games and play.The seminar is fourth in the annual series of game studies working paper seminars organised by the Games Research Lab in the University of Tampere. Due to the work-in-progress emphasis, we strongly encourage submitting late breaking results, working papers and/or submissions from graduate students. Early considerations from projects currently in progress are most welcome, as the purpose of the seminar is to have peer-to-peer discussions and thereby provide support in refining and improving research work in this area. After the seminar, separate consideration will be given to various options of publishing the seminar papers.The papers to be presented will be chosen based on abstract review. Full papers are distributed prior the event to all participants, in order to facilitate discussion.The two-day event consists of themed sessions that aim to introduce current research projects and discuss ongoing work in studies of games, play and their relation to surrounding phenomena. The seminar will be chaired by professor Frans Mäyrä (Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere). Paper commentators include researchers Markus Montola, Aki Järvinen and Simon Niedenthal, associate professor of interaction design.The seminar will be held in Tampere, Finland and will be free of charge; the number of participants will be restricted.Important Dates• Abstract Deadline: January 15, 2008?• Notification of Acceptance: January 30, 2008?• Full Paper deadline: March 27, 2007?• Seminar dates: April 10-11, 2007Submission GuidelinesAbstract submissions should include maximum of 1.000 words (excluding references). Abstracts should be send to info-gamestudies{at}uta.fi as plain text only (no attachments). Guidelines for submitting a full seminar paper will be provided with the notification of acceptance.Our aim is that everyone participating has been able to read materials submitted to the seminar, therefore the maximum length for a full paper is set to 6.000 words (excluding references). Note also that the presentations held at the seminar should also encourage discussion, instead of only repeating the information presented in the papers.Tentatively, every paper will be presented for 10 minutes and discussed for 20 minutes. -

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conference, cross media, games, locative games

Last year in January a very cool, cosy and international event by the name of “Philosophy of Games conference” took place in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Next year it is going to be in Potsdam, Germany, less than an hour from Berlin, May 8 to 10, and the call for papers is now open - 2008 is the year of the magic circle, for some reason.

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conference, event, games

The Cinekid festival was great - fantastic choice of films and seminars, and the main area at Westergasfabriek was lovely, a real children’s heaven (or maybe parents’?)
The area devoted to educational projects featured, together with chemistry, physics and biology, a preponderance of projects related to climate change and global warming (I wonder why….)

virtual tennis can be played indoors

here is how it feels to live at the North Pole

here is the “Climate Casino”

Yours truly gave a talk today about “Cross Media between Games and Storytelling”, slides available at the Mediamatic website, here - note: it is very interesting how the fact that I don’t belong to a specific institution makes it extremely difficult, bordering to the embarrassing, for people to introduce me. I really wish the situation will change soon, or that while keeping on at some point I will earn the difficult title of “independent scholar” (Mary Laure Ryan is one, but, well, she was at MTI first, AND she is Mary Laure Ryan.. oh well…)

Technorati Tags: cross media, event, personal

The goal of this workshop from Mediamatic, starting today in Amsterdam, is to create cross media games - the tools employed will be machinima software, virtual worlds such as Second Life, Sims2 and World of Warcraft, and 3D modeling software such as Mediasandbox and Linden scripting.
Julian Oliver and Friedrich Kirschner kicked off the workshop talking respectively about augmented reality and mixed reality (finally I understood the difference, thank you Julian!) and about the software Mediasandbox.
Interesting how cross media is considered only tangentially, we’ll see tomorrow.

Today I found in the spam mail an invitation to “the virtual world of gambling”.
PKR offers “the most advanced poker rooms, stunning 3D graphics” etc, with fully customizable avatars. I am wondering if they are aware they are selling two games at the same time.


Or maybe the virtual world medium has already become so transparent (a 3D avatar is already as obvious than an icon in a chat?) and the audience is already so blasé that the main attraction of PKR will be in fact playing poker?
If so, are we going to see 3D environments hosting cooking lessons, meditation, gardening and what not?
Anyway, I am not sure virtual worlds are automatically cross media, nor that they are automatically games, this is indeed a very grey area that need further investigation.