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The New Forms Festival starts tomorrow evening, although the official opening ceremony is Thursday. On Saturday I will be presenting a new paper, Remaking Each Other’s Dreams: Player Authors in Games (doc file), and moderating the Graffiti, Hacking and Subversive Art Practices roundtable.

Posted by cloo @ 04:19 PM EST [Link]

Susumu Tachi's cloak of invisibility-- begging the question: will videogames become more realistic, or will reality just become more like videogames?

Posted by cloo @ 10:16 AM EST [Link]

Speaking of Bejewelled, and because returning my Lecturer's appointment made me mentally compare my current salary to the all-time salary scale, brought to mind my three month stint at Ardesic (what I refer to as my "dot-com job.") Like almost all other dot-coms, they're long since gone, but their domain name is up for grabs. So I bought it. What the hell, I have remaining credit on a gift certificate from my web service provider (my other park is syntacticsugar.com, I'm really just a collector at this point). A small price to pay (well, actually no price to pay) for a bit of nostalgia: it seems everyone has their "I was a millionaire for 15 minutes" tech-bubble heyday story. By far my most interesting, bizarre, short lived, employment experience.

Ardesic: to burn intensely without consuming :-)

Posted by cloo @ 12:42 PM EST [Link]

This isn't new, but I didn't catch the last bit in my previous go-around. It's an interview with Talmadge Wright, from February, about Counter-Strike gameplay:

Before now, he said, many studies of game playing have been skewed by hidden agendas. "There's a cultural motif that underlies the critiques that go on around this," he said, "the idea of mindless activity is given short shrift in culture where productivity is given the highest praise."

I think this needs to be underlined. One thing I'm wary of in game and play research is the need for everything to be educational, or meaningful, or social or productive. What about games doing nothing? If I can't be doing absolutely nothing productive when playing a game, when can I? I have to say, a lot of my media consumption is more Hermes than de Certeau: the TV goes on so I can get used to hearing human voices at 6am, I couldn't tell you why I purchase trashy ladies magazines for the plane, except that I find them somehow calming. I once had one of those infamous dot-com jobs at which for all intensive purposes I was paid to play Bejewelled for 8 hours a day. I couldn't even describe how to play the game now-- I don't remember. I don't think I was paying attention...

If I haven't linked to it before, Wright (Boria and Breidenbach)'s paper is in Gamestudies: Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games:
Playing Counter-Strike. It's one of my all-time favorites.

Posted by cloo @ 12:17 PM EST [Link]

Found It's a Mod, Mod World from February's IEEE Spectrum (not to be confused with the identically named article from Gamespot). The article goes into the case against a publisher of Duke Nukem user-made mods. Although an initial ruling found the mod compilation was not a derivative work, upon appeal this ruling was overturned:

"Kozinski found that because 'the displays assumed a concrete or permanent form in the map files, they were derivative works.' The ruling set a precedent: no amount of modification to a copyrighted or patented game element voids the owner's rights."

I'm not particularly concerned about compilations per se, but does anyone else find this pronouncement a bit (sweeping? concerning? provoking?)

Posted by cloo @ 08:45 PM EST [Link]

Justin Hall of game girl advance (among other forums) argues for online norms (rather than harsh technological restrictions) regulating cheating in multiplayer games. I for one wholeheartedly agree, if only to strike a balance between fair play and the creativity and proliferation of player-created objects. I would like to see this play out in smaller multiuser games (like Counterstrike), where you know who you're playing with. And if you want to play and cheat, put the challenge back in it-- play with other cheaters! I know, I know, that ruins the fun...

Posted by cloo @ 06:07 PM EST [Link]

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