The Association of Internet Researchers is finally having its conference in Europe, specifically in Copenhagen, next October. Deadline for abstract submissions is February 7, call for papers here

The video and audio podcasts from Future of Entertainment 2 (MIT Comparative Media Studies and Convergence Culture Consortium) are available.Scheduled speakers include: Jesse Alexander (Heroes), Danny Bilson (The Rocketeer), Marc Davis (Yahoo!), Mark Deuze (Indiana U), Raph Koster (Areae), and Tina Wells (Buzz Marketing Group).

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

Cross media as an academic topic is definitely gaining ground: a conference about Cross Media Storytelling is going to take place November 23-25 in Mechelen (half an hour from Brussels).

The program features many interesting scholars from around the world and an interesting angle between academic and professionals, addressing narrative issues from all sides.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media

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.

Definitely Picnic is all but a no-frills conference. A central salon looking like a slightly under-toned Biennale, wall sized projections, giant faces half open, performance actresses with heart-shaped heads, human avatars you can control though a mike (the Girlfriend Experience), press rooms with floors made of wood scraps, and above all the omnipresent RFID tag machines proposed by Mediamatic, to put to good use the RFID tags you would be given at the conference.

My favorite has been of course the Friend Drink Station, that would print free drinks coupons, too bad I accidentally deleted all the pictures from Amsterdam, and I can’t find a picture of it online.
Here is the iTea Table, that would show information about you to others when you sit,

and the photo booth, to take pictures of you with somebody else and have the pictures immediately published on Flickr and the profiles of both (you need to be enrolled to the Picnic network in order to access all this fun stuff) would become connected on the Picnic network, and so on.

Oh well. This and more you could do with your RFID tags; at the end of the first day, after a lifetime of spy stories and movies, I felt so nervous that I slipped my tag into a nearby lady’s bag on the bus. Just in case.

Very strange conference this Picnic conference - after months of network building on the picnic network site, and very cool network features, like when you see to each event the profiles of the other participants, I was almost hoping you could rank the presentations, before and afterwards. The apparently chaotic organization made so that at each meeting you would meet completely different people (ok, I was missing the main conference, there must have been a stable group there). Anyway, that really felt the social network come alive, the natural emergence of the popular, and the spontaneous aggregation.
I still wonder if that strong feeling of “2.0″ has been only a side effect of a slightly messy although charming organization or a planned strategy to give that “In” feeling. In the latter case, wow.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, Web 2.0

In spite of the warning provided by Christy/cross-mediaentertainment.com last year, I did go to Cross Media Week, mostly because all the side events were free and open to grant-less cross media buffs like me (thank you Picnic) - I followed very interesting presentations about virtual worlds, social networks, online journalism, iTV and advertising, environmental activism, but still the “core” of the conference seemed to be some sort of gravitational void, with many interesting people talking about many interesting things (all the talks are now available at the Picnic website), but often forgetting to even mention cross media.
It is clearly important to promote the concept of “cross media”, even just as a buzzword, among the professionals, although it was very clear almost nobody had actually a reflection on the topic; I guess in Europe the term “cross media” is still interpreted as some futuristic pitch or just another word for repurposing - I wonder what the dutch cross media gurus Monique de Haas and Jak Boumans say about that.

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the Cross Media Week aroused much interest without actually saying what is cross media, from the point of view of structure, production, or business models (actually there is a presentation today about business models, will post about it later); this is why I am going back to Amsterdam next month to the workshop Crossmedia Games @ Cinekid to explain all about it OK, some of it.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, futuristic, iTV, social networks, virtual worlds