Category Archives: Conference

Viral Worlds at MIT 6 Media In Transition

The below was accepted for MIT 6: Media in Transition (April 24-26) but it needs work! Apart from the overblown title, I hope I can modulate the “Conventional media historians” line so it reads less like a target and more like a point of exploration..is it still de rigueur to mention Barthes Baudrillard D& G et al, or will they let me refer back to Spengler who is cerrtainly not text of the month..

Experientially Pollinating Virtuality and the Living Transcripts of Escape Space
Current notions of place, culture, and media, are all open to question. In terms of place: will the virtual supplant the real? Spengler wrote “This machine technics will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten — our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon.”


Perhaps Spengler was prescient yet not accurately domain-specific. In this carbon-guilty era, game-playing and virtual world inhabitation is fast approaching the numbers and profits of the tourist and moviemaking industries. Architecture schools teach studio design using game engines, gamers play at home rather than in arcades, and you can enjoy the scenery of Capri from the comfort of your desktop. The media history of virtual worlds is diverging due to the cognitively competing demands of reading text or exploring 3D space. Conventional media historians may attempt to reconcile this dilemma with terms like “narrative space”, but unless they themselves design, they are probably unaware of the profound design differences between virtual and real place-making.


How does place-based virtual action affect civilization and culture? Oswald Spengler attempted to carefully distinguish the two terms; civilization comprises the laws that allow people to live close together, in a city, civitas. Culture is what is cultivated or allows one to cultivate a setting, a local domain. Yet with modernization’s separation of people from agricultural production, civilization and culture are increasingly seen as conduct and taste or consumer-specific market. Architectural historians and philosophers aren’t qualified to tackle this writhing new field unless they are also experienced in the areas of interactive entertainment, user experience design, and learning / cognition theory.


Where to next? The ill-fated MIT Media Lab Europe pioneered early research in the area of biofeedback and virtual environments, it would take only a little leap to an era where audience-environment-players past present and future, all share not just data and rendered polygons, but also participate in embodied experience. Imagine biofed virtual worlds where the passive, subconscious and otherwise unpredictable embodied responses of the audience affect both the virtual world, and future players. I suggest the zenith of this development will be when we have genuine living scripts in virtual worlds: where players experience augments the [virtual] world history. So the concept of media transmission and storage changes to media pollination.


I can illustrate this development (Figure 1) with two case studies/projects, but I would like to spend more time asking the audience how we designers should tackle the issue of counterfactual creativity versus the traditional virtual of authenticity and authorial narrativity. And for media academics, are they trained to handle these changes? If there is a change in virtual worlds from the sterile and predestined to intermedial fusion of audience and player, will there be a call for new skills and boundary definitions in media history?
Footnote:  Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, translated by C. F. Atkinson, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1932, page 96.

February 2009 conference CFPs

1-Feb-09ISBA 12Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology (ISBSA)Istanbul Turkey12-Oct-09
2-Feb-09eCAADe Computation: The New Realm Of Architectural DesignIstanbul Turkey16-Sep-09
13-Feb-09Fave First International Conference on Facets of Virtual EnvironmentsBerlin Germany27-Jul-09
15-Feb-09Tag Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG)Stanford USA1-May-09
23-Feb-09NORDES 09Engaging ArtefactsOslo Norway30-Aug-09
28-Feb-09ANZAAE art works – mahi toi: scoping visual arts educationDunedin NZ20-Apr-09

Call for Journal Articles (CFPs or CJAs?)

#1 Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual World (Journal of Virtual Worlds Research)

Theme of Special ISSURE: Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual Worlds

Deadlines: Abstract – November 30, 2008. Full manuscript – January 15, 2009

Publication Date: March 1, 2009

#2 CFP: Technoculture, A Journal for Cultural Studies of Technology

Successful papers (or their equivalent in virtual media in a variety of formats) for this debut issue should focus on the ways humanists read technology in a range of historical periods and of academic and artistic disciplines as the subject of their work or as a special case of cultural studies. Topics for this debut issue could include depictions of technologies that treat a wide range of subjects related to the humanities and social sciences. Editors: Dr. Keith Dorwick, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette (kdorwick at yahoo dot com). Web Version: http://tcjournal.org

#3 The International Journal of Role-Playing (IJRP) is now accepting submissions for the 2nd issue, due out in fall 2009. Deadline for submissions is April 1st, 2009. Download the CFP as PDF here.

International Journal of Role-Playing Inaugural Issue

The first issue of the  International Journal of Role-playing is out! Sorry one has to download the entire issue (it does not say and should but I think the PDF is around 11mb). Anyway, my paper is an ongoing conceptual fermenter on what defines a world, and  useful distinctions between cultural and social presence.  I’d appreciate any feedback…

Title:

Roles and Worlds in the Hybrid RPG Game of Oblivion

Abstract:
Role-playing is both an important part of cultural learning (Hallford and Hallford 2001 pp231-236), and an important genre in computer games (Tychsen 2006). Roles are intrinsically related to the notion of social worlds, yet exactly how is not clear in the academic literature. There are few grounded theories in computer game studies on how role- playing works in sustaining and augmenting a thematic “world”, there are few clear descriptions of what “world” means in this context, and the social versus cultural dimensions of both roles and worlds are seldom delineated. I suggest that the cultural and social dimensions of both real world and virtual world playing are important, and that commercial computer role-playing games (CRPGs) offer more opportunities to support deeper cultural aspects of role-playing.

January 2009 conference CFPs

9-Jan-09Media in Transition 6stone and papyrus, storage and transmissionMIT USA24-Apr-08
10-Jan-09Edutainment 2009E-Learning and Games (Edutainment 2009)Banff, Canada9-Aug-09
12-Jan-09DHSWriting Design: Object, Process, Discourse, TranslationHertfordshire UK3-Sep-09
15-Jan-09Thinking After DarkWelcome to the World of Horror Video GamesMontreal Canada23-Apr-09
15-Jan-09ICED 09Design has never been CoolStanford USA24-Aug-09
20-Jan-09siggraph 2009siggraph 2009New Orleans3-Aug-09
30-Jan-09Critical/DigitalCritical Digital: Who Cares(?)Harvard Boston17-Apr-08
30-Jan-09IADIS Game & EntertainmentGame and Entertainment Technologies 2009Algarve Portugal17-Jun-09
30-Jan-09Interact 200912th IFIP conference on Human-Computer interactionUppsala Sweden24-Aug-09

Game academics, FIGHT!

I can’t say I really know if this is a genuine polemic punchup or a cleverly disguised troll a melange, but it certainly is interesting.
Ian Bogost attacks Roger Travis’ escapist article for (I think) attacking him and others for creating game studies as a discipline to rule them all, rather than retreat back to the warm feverish embrace of “mainstream culture” (whatever that is).
It all derives from “Opinion: Ceci N’est Pas Une Gamer” so perhaps one needs to read that first.

I guess I came across this as Associate Professor Roger Travis is a classics scholar using (designing?) games for history-based learning…

I can’t stand gamers.
No, that’s not quite true. I can’t stand the concept of gamers.
And no, I’m not some anti-gaming nutcase …
Hell, I like videogames so much that I’m doing a friggin’ PhD in game studies.
– Douglas Wilson, in GameSetWatch, April 2008

Should we care if Douglas Wilson, a doctoral candidate in game studies, hates us? I think we have to…The problem with game studies – the thing that gives rise to opinions like Wilson’s – is that the effort to create and maintain the discipline is keeping gaming from winning the respect it deserves. Against all appearances, scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture.By pretending that game studies stands alone as a unified discipline rather than at the nexus of various other fields, scholars of game studies (and those of departments that call themselves things like “digital media studies”) are institutionalizing exactly what Wilson feels: antipathy to the real culture of gaming. The more entrenched the notion becomes that gamers are abnormal and defective, the longer it will take for real works of art like Sins of a Solar Empire, BioShock and, yes, even Halo to vindicate gaming as a worthwhile pursuit.”

Reflections on water for game engines

In my search for water physics in game engines for our boat designers I came across updates to the open source Ogre 3D engine (now in Direct X also I see). Anyway, it visually looks impressive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLD1k0SHow4&feature=related
some more effects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woHZRUlOQqo
a programming book (with worrying reviews): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597109

OZCHI and SIGGRAPH ASIA

Natural swimming pool, Litchfield National Park, Darwin

The OZCHI conference featured keynotes from Paul Dourish, Gary Marsden and Fiona Ingram (Sensis Australia) but I only had time for a talk by Dourish before rushing off to SIGGRAPH ASIA in Singapore.

At OZCHI Truna, David, Marlyn and I hosted a workshop on designing digital aids for engagement in natural places.

We would have to get feedback from the 9 participants to be sure, but I thought it went really well, and now I know a little more about workshops I would love to host one again, in fact I may even suggest one to as demo for archimuse in Indiana. Paul Dourish seems to be moving towards the cultural implications of CHI and yet I think to myself his notion of culture seems rather vague but then I missed the first 30 minutes of the talk (for once, not my fault!)

Cairns and Palm Cove (where we were staying) is picturesque, had a great time diving on the great barrier reef, and in Singapore there were many people offering to show me around so I will have to think of ways to repay them.

After Singapore Eric Fassbender took me on a tour of walks and swims in Darwin (Litchfield National Park) and if Litchfield is anything to go by, Kakadu must be spectacular. Saw quite a bit of the wildlife and even some oddly toothed locals. And the fresh food Saturday market (Parap) was awesome.

Darwin also has a brand new conference venue facility on the marina (with seafood restaurants on the jetty nearby) but sorry my camera was full!

What Can We Do With Interactive Movie Making?

What are the parameters of interactive film? There has been some interesting discussion on storytelling versus authorial control of the camera at 3rd person cinema. There is now also the ability to create your own trails in video via interactive video object animation. Not to mention the crowd-pleasing opportunity to place your own face over video characters along with your voice.

December Call For Papers

DEADLINECONFERENCETHEMELOCATIONSTART
1-Dec-08CEPE 2009 Corfu
Computer EthicsCorfu, Greece27-Jun-09
1-Dec-08EKSIG 2009 London
Experiential Knowledge, Method and MethodologyLondon UK19-Jun-09
15-Dec-08C&T 2009 Penn USA
Communities and TechnologiesPenn USA24-Jun-09
15-Dec-08WCCE2009 Brazil
9th IFIP World Conference on Computers in EducationBrazil27-Jul-09
15-Dec-08CAA 2009 Virginia USA
Making History InteractiveVirginia USA22-Mar-09
15-Dec-08NorLit 2009 Stockholm
Aesthetics, Language And Politics In An Age Of Digital MediaStockholm Sweden6-Aug-09
19-Dec-08FDG09 Florida USA
Foundations of Digital GamesFlorida26-Apr-09
23-Dec-08IADE conference Lisbon
5th UNIDCOM/IADE designLisbon Portugal1-Oct-08

News update

I have been invited to a panel in Cairns for OZCHI in December, and will present a paper at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore Dec 12. So I may not have time to update this site with new conference calls etc. I have been fortunate to be awarded an American-NZ grant for mid mid April 2009 to give a talk at IUPUI Indiana and at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the grant is prestigious but not exactly lucrative so to help cover costs I am keen to present at other places as well!