One more website to keep an eye on, Launched by the IGDA ARG SIG, looks pretty promising, with very understandable definitions of ARGs, a lot of tips for designers, an History of ARGs and much more.. As a bonus, the mighty Christy Dena is in it, check it out www.argology.org.

I am not sure if it is just an accident, or if Crossover Labs have anything to do with cross media production, but, seeing that they are directed by the digital media evangelist Frank Boyd, I would suspect they do. Calls are open.

DailyLit sends you books through the email, in an interesting evolution of the itinerant library.

One last experiment has been the participatory reading of Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, and Tom Peters’ 100 ways to Success/Make Money.

You can follow any of the three

TwitterID: DailyLitMagicK
Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

TwitterID: DailyLitPride
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

TwitterID: DailyLitSucceed
Tom Peters’s 100 Ways to Success/Make Money

also through RSS feed.

(actually I was sort of disappointed, finding out that all they do is to refer to a web page with the chapters. I was hoping in some adaptation experiment, oh well, keep your expectations down and you’ll never be disappointed)

Funny article on the age-old (well, 15 years old at least) question: what is the difference between ludology and narratology?

The Great Divorce

This is the kind of introduction to digital culture that makes me wish I were born in the 1990ies.. Nice.

http://www.deenalarsen.net/fundamentals/

New column in the “Persuasive Games” series by Ian Bogost for Gamasutra and the world

“Philosopher of language J.L. Austin called the kind of speech acts that describe things constatives. Most ordinary speech falls into this category: “Roses are red, violets are blue.”; “I wish I were Zorro.”; “Finishing all his kale so reviled young Ernesto that he lost his interest in the éclair.” These acts describe the world but don’t act upon it.

more on Gamasutra

I missed the deadline, but still, this conference sounds mighty interesting, here is the preliminary programme.

One more call: ChART conference in London, very interesting theme

Here is the call, deadline May 30 :

This year’s CHArt conference takes seeing as its theme and the associated questions of vision, perception, visibility and invisibility, blindness and insight - all in the context of our contemporary digital culture in which our eyes are assaulted by ever greater amounts of visual stimulus, while we are also increasingly being surveyed, on a continual basis.

For the twenty-forth CHArt conference we are looking for papers that reflect upon these issues. We welcome contributions from all sections of the CHArt community: art historians, artists, architects and architectural theorists and historians, curators, museum professionals, scientists, cultural and media theorists, archivists, technologists, software developers, educationalists, philosophers and any others who have a stake in the question of seeing in a digital culture.

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conference

Oops, the call for papers list wasn’t over yet:
Futureplay has a submission deadline at the end of the month (June 30)

and the Interactive Storytelling conference in Erfurt (putting together the two previous European conference series TIDSE (“Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling”) and ICVS (“Virtual Storytelling – Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling”). Submission deadline also on 30 June 2008.

Here is the call:

Research papers, case studies and demonstrations are invited that present novel scientific results, new technology, best practice showcases, or improvements to existing techniques and approaches in the multidisciplinary research field of interactive digital storytelling and its related application areas, e.g. games, virtual- / online worlds, e-learning, edutainment, and entertainment.

ENOUGH CALLS!!

Technorati Tags: Call for papers, conferences, games, interactive fiction

After missing a number of European events (sadly the Breaking the Magic Circle seminar in Tampere and the Philosophy of Games conference in Potsdam, oh well) I made it to lovely Edinburgh, for an interesting though small two days conference on “Play” - from psychology to literature to videogames, hosted by the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.
It was astonishing to see the productivity of a multi-disciplinary approach (and not just because that is “my” approach as well).
The panel to which I participated, with the presentation “Playful Culture and Glamorization of Everyday (Virtual) Life: Elements of Play in Facebook Applications” (you can download it here) went on smoothly from a presentation on adult play in psychology, to play in Situationism and artistic modding. While not everybody knew about ludus and paidia, still I wonder if such a general (and productive) discourse would have been possible in a very strict “game studies” ambiance.
I wonder also if such an approach to play can be reproduced in media studies.
Here is the full programme.