Grand Text Auto

The Games, Learning, and Society conference v. 4.0 this year in Madison Wisconsin gathered an insightful group of educators and designers who are intent on making a difference in the domain of learning and play. I ran a workshop there for Values at Play, and many of the panels during the full two days of conference-going were amazing.

Among the best of the panels

On Wednesday June 4th, our Values at Play advisory board met to discuss year two of the VAP project:
Tracy Fullerton (USC, Co-founder and director of the EA Game Innovation Lab), Celia Pearce (Georgia Tech, Director of the Experimental Game Lab), Katie Salen (Parsons, Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play), and Jesper Juul (video game researcher at GAMBIT, MIT), together with myself and Helen Nissenbaum (NYU) and students at the Tiltfactor lab. We discussed

This Sunday in NYC, Hunter College is hosting The 5th Annual Grassroots Media Conference!
The Conference is a chance for media activists to come together, compare notes, and stratagize. It’s always worth attending. This year, the Tiltfactor Lab will be facilitating a game design workshop

Check out the NYTimes supplement Taking Play Seriously from the 2/17/08 NYTimes Magazine. It’s a brief update on current thinking on play from psychology to education.

Lauren Collins’ 21 January 2008 article, “Friend Game: Behind the Online Hoax that led to a Girl’s Suicide” seems to me as significant and timely an examination of online culture as Julian Dibbell’s

There is a new call for proposals out for the 2008 Vienna Games Conference, to be held October 17 – 19th this year! The theme, “Future and Reality of Gaming” (F.R.O.G.), is incredibly interdisciplinary, intended to forge bridges between industry and academia. Representatives from design, industry, theory, culture, and education will be sharing their current findings and innovative models for thinking about games and for making them.

The organizers are seeking proposals from a range of folks including those who work in the areas of Education, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, the Arts, HCI, Media and Communication Studies, Philosophy, Social Science….

“Interested authors are requested to submit an extended abstract of approximately 1500 to 2000 words due 28th of March 2008 exclusively as email attachments (doc-files or rtf-files) to eva.frick@univie.ac.at.”

The organizers promise an engaging and convivial atmosphere, and knowing these particular organizers, this conference

Want a Better World? Build a Better Game! Social Impact Game Contest 2007
Submissions due January 1, 2008

The Values At Play project is now accepting submissions to its first Social Impact Games Contest! Values At Play is a three year investigation of social values and games. Selected contest entries will be archived and available for public play in the Values at Play Game Library.

Winning games will be archived and promoted by our not-for-profit team. Contest judges will include game designers Katie Salen, Jesper Juul, and Games for Change President Suzanne Seggerman.

The Values at Play research project launched version 1.0 of its website, http://www.valuesatplay.org, which offers a wealth of game design and scholarship about games. Valuesatplay.org has also begun accepting submissions for its Social Impact Game Contest.

are there args going on all around me, or am I paranoid? Wait, don’t answer that!

This ad says, “the secret of the L-system is our amazing growth formula” and mentions Lindenmayer… Who talks about L-systems in Times Square advertising? : )

someone has to mention the South Park Guitar Episode, I’m afraid. As of tonight the only clip on youtube is this legit preview. I found the closeups profound, and the sound, ah, the sound of the plastic interface… Meanwhile, Jonah Brucker-Cohen forwarded me this. Seeing as I’m from Milwaukee, this strikes a particular, ah, chord. Don’t you cry no more!

Hi all, watch for materials emerging from the Center for future civic media at MIT (C4FCM) made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

“The Center for Future Civic Media aims to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information.” The group, led by an MIT team spanning Comparative Media Studies (Henry Jenkins) and the Media Lab (Mitch Resnick, Chris Csikszentmihalyi), has a goal of developing new technologies that support

I’d like to make a preliminary announcement about our site– including the “gametalk” blog, our growing game repository, our games contest (which will be annnounced formally here shortly), game designer interviews, and curriculum material for the Values At Play initiative at Hunter College+ NYU. Check it all out at the Values at Play site. Of note is a recent team blog post on the new Manhunt by Jay Bachhuber. Enjoy, contribute, and let us know of any glitches!

I just gave a presentation today at The CineKid Festival, an annual Film, Television and New Media Festival for Children that is held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (with approximately 30 satellite festivals held in cities all over the Netherlands).

The New media programme consisted of the great Cinekid Media Lab (which had both art installations as well as popular software and hardware such as Wiis), and seminars.

Our all-afternoon seminar, “New Media: Make way for play” featured

In the NYTimes today, check out Matt Richtel’s article “Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church.” He describes how ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants are using the video game Halo as a recruiting tool…

The designer, artist, and architect “Le Corbusier” may be quite familiar to many of you, the architectural grandaddy (1887-1965) born under the name of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. Le Corbu altered world architecture forever with his modernist passion for clarity, line, modularity, and what can only be described as ‘legibility.’ His book, The Decorative Art of Today, was a polemic against craft and ornamentation in interior decor (translated by James Dunnett, published by MIT Press in 1987). His other works, The City of Tomorrow and The Modulor series were also published by MIT in translation. His 1925 “Plan Voisin” for Paris, for example, will be a familiar style of modernist urban architecture:

The new Le Corbusier exhibition in Tokyo at the Mori Museum —

The first time all drivers are gathered in the same place at the same time. Version 2.0 GTxA, here we come!

More photos from the fabulous opening on my flickr site.

A brief note of deep gratitude to all who attended the opening and symposium on friday. Fabulous discussion and play! We bloggers learned a great deal from the audience and from each other, not only about our blog but about our creative work and our research agendas. Thanks!

Update: Scott posted additional photos in a flickr set.

In our two-part Values @ Play Board game Modding Workshop at DiGRA 2007 Sept 25 and 27, Tokyo, Celia Pearce and Tracy Fullerton (representing the Ludica group), and I used the “Grow-a-Game” cards to stir up discussion on incorporating values into game design. This tool seemed to work very well in starting discussion, and will be expanded with the ongoing discussion and suggestions of those who use the cards.

Here is the group at DiGRA modding the card game “Pit.”

Michael Mateas and I are both representing at DiGRA 2007 in Tokyo. As you will see by the website, there are plenty of sessions here going on all week. I hope Michael and I can blog a few of the talks we found compelling.

Edward Castronova hosted an unusual interactive keynote yesterday, with a goal to demonstrate two things: the importance of the magic circle and fantasy, and the importance of creating sustainable systems.

My recollection of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference (DAC) 2007 is unfortunately a bit blurred by some type of flu contracted in either Perth, Kuala Lumpur, or Tokyo, where I am now at my desk, writing amidst sniffling. But due to Scott’s invocation, I must post! Because I’m in Tokyo for the next conference up, DiGRA, and that’s sure to generate more reasons to post soon enough.

As a typical and enjoyable DAC, a cross-section of practitioners and scholars were in attendance,

Recently, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) hosted the “Emerging Terrain in Games and Simulation” symposium, 13-14 April 2007, to inaugerate Rensselaer’s new Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Major, a new B.S. degree with enrollment beginning in Fall 2007. The program is among a growing number of such programs in the country and is designed to educate students for the game industry. After a tour, which included Katherine Isbister’s cool game lab, attendees played games at an open house style game night on Friday the 13th. Katie Salen began the symposium Saturday (pic by Jason Della Rocca)

so i am back, with news on the opening of a new, enormous musuem in Spain: Laboral: centro de arte y creacion industrial in Gijon, Asturias. This weekend, three inaugural shows initiated this new center/ museum: Feedback, curated by Christiane Paul, JemimaRellie, and Charlie Gere; Gameworld, curated by Carl Goodman, and Lab Cyberspaces Project, which had a jury choosing the works. I am exhibiting in two of these shows — Feedback and Gameworld. I will post images from the opening when I’m back in the US — shortly! Meanwhile, check out the website!

Georgia Tech has announced their annual Living Game Worlds III, this year themed “PLAYING WITH REALITY” @ 29th March 2007. It’s presented by the GVU Center and the Graduate Program in Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture, with Katy Salen and Tracy Fullerton keynoting.

Tiltfactor, the first academic center to focus on social activist games, celebrated its annual fabulous open house! Started in 2005, our mission is to research and develop software and art that creates rewarding, compelling, and socially responsible interactions, with a focus on inventive game design for social change.

There is a call for particpants out there for a workshop on Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games for the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference 2007. Submissions may address any “topic related to tangible or digital tabletop gaming, from game case studies, to research on sensing technologies, theoretical overviews, or the design of tangible objects for game interaction.”

What better time to post about Autostart than from an electronic writing ‘jam’ at the Kelly writers’ house at UPenn? Its been a fun two days here. Yesterday was filled with compelling