Grand Text Auto

According to “Game News”‘ report on the Nielsen Entertainment’s third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study (released 2 days ago),

Hi All, for those in London for the London Games Festival, the [giantJoystick] is front and centre –check it out! The LGF is a week-long celebration & offers a series of events across multiple locations showcasing the ‘hottest’ games, seminars and people helping to shape the UK gaming industry. The World Series event @ LGF is hosting a lounge for viewing the staged tournaments & features the [gJ].

Digital artist Jonah Brucker-Cohen has a retrospective of sorts on exhibit in Montréal; the show, “Deconstructing Networks,” is a collection of projects which shift perceptions of network interaction and experience. Works in the exhibition include “Alerting Infrastructure!,” a website hit counter that destroys a building (in fact, the Oboro Gallery site is linked into this; visiting the Oboro exhibition announcement will contribute to the work in the gallery!); PoliceState, a fleet of radio-controlled police cars whose movements are dictated by “suspicious” keywords scanned on a local network;
Wifi-Hog,

It was an intense weekend here in NYC where the Come out and Play Festival 2006 was in full swing. I played game designer Frank Lantz’s IDENTITY game, a game of secret organizations, covert intelligence, suspicion, trust, cooperation and betrayal… upon joining the game, every player is assigned to one of 5 secret organizations and given a unique codename, and the goal was to find out other player’s organizational affiliation and identity…

Hi, I’m @ The Virtual 2006 on Rosenön, an island in the archipelago of Haninge, south of Stockholm. Lisbeth Klastrup and I just ran a workshop called “Using the Critical Play Framework: Values in Experience Design” at the conference. The material emerged from my most recent collaborative project concerning values and game design, just funded in the Science of Design program at NSF (hurray!). Most of the conference is focused on developing user experiences; our workshop task was for teams to design a game to get off the island; for the design stage, we assigned the four teams to do their game design with particular human values in mind.

There is a great set of posts readers may wish to check out at the IDC list about situated technologies, ubiquity, games, war, and the ISEA interactive city project. Insightful stuff & worth the read.

well, the opening of Game/Play at London’s House of Technology Termed Practice [HTTP] 22nd July was fantastic! This was the premiere of my [giantJoystick] (see below… ah… you can’t miss it)

as well as several amazing screen-based games pieces.

I was impressed with the games in the show,

The Games for Change Conference in NYC, June 27 and 28th, is not only covered here by the NY GTxA offices, but in popular news venues such as cnn as well. That’s great for the budding movement! Last night there was a fab party at Rockstar games. Wednesday June 28th featured again a great line up of speakers discussing games for social engagement and social change.

Games for Change (G4C) has launched the early registration website for its 2006 conference on “Social Change and Digital Games.” The 3rd annual event will be co-hosted June 27th and 28th with the Parsons The New School for Design in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Baby Boomer Gamers!
You are invited to participate in a survey about the play preferences and patterns of video and computer game players of the “Baby Boom” generation…

attention ! New York publisher looking for graphic novelists/ manga artists and writers

Thanks to coverage on Gamasutra, I shall merely note last week’s Girls ‘N’ Games thinktank held last week on the UCLA campus. The event consisted of an intense day workshop followed by a conference. I’m cited along with some fantabulous colleagues including Brenda Laurel, Tracy Fullerton, Justine Cassell, Mimi Ito, Carrie Heeter, and Celia Pearce, only to name a few. Look forward to a book emerging from the event…

Meanwhile, I’m in the throes of formal assessment on the RAPUNSEL project! We’re working with over 80 kids at a particularly cool school. molto interressante!

I know you are out there…

Greetings from Karlskrona, Sweden, where I’m a visiting distinguished scholar at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. While my students at Hunter College NYC are busy prepping for their graduate reviews (crits) mid-May, I’ve been making the rounds with folks here in the Literature, Culture and Digital Media program. Past scholar visitors to the program have included Kate Hayles, Jesper Juul, and Jay Bolter.

(large scale chess demo derby, Stockholm)

[reas’ process-ed work “Path 14”]

Some observations drawn from Friday’s keynote lecture at the 2006 iDMAa + IMS Conference- HumanSystems | DigitalBodies follows!
For the last two years, Casey Reas has been writing software utilizing the principles of emergence and simple machines and ‘vehicles’ which develop neural systems. His work is created these days primarily using Processing (surely blogged about before on gtxa)…

This week the International Digital Media and Arts Association will have its annual conference, code> humanSystems/digitalBodies. CEB Reas and I are keynoters among many interesting presenters and topics – check out the schedule, and I hope to see some GTXxters there!

Mark Tribe and Reena Jana’s new book, New Media Art is due out this month from Taschen.

Thursday March 30th I gave a presentation positioning “radical computing” amidst gaming and computer science at the Columbia University Women in Computer Science (WICS) group.

I met some wonderful students and faculty, including a few folks from Teacher’s College and of course the Computer Science department. Dr. Julia Hirschberg is one of the WICS mentors at Columbia and does fascinating work in spoken language processing. Most campuses have WICS groups — if one does not, I encourage folks to start one!

Daniel Shiffman has been making a series of visits to the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College. His screen-based interactive art installations have been exhibited at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Directors Club of New York, Galapogos Art Space, the Savannah College of Art & Design, and Tisch School for the Arts. He is also a producing director of Page Seventy-Three Productions, a non-for-profit theater company dedicated to producing and developing the works of emerging playwrights.

I’ve just returned from the Serious Games Summit 2006 at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Larger than ever, the Summit’s rooms were packed with a diverse crowd of indie and educational game developer folks (as well as some GTxA community! great to meet you!). The GDC had two full days of serious gaming and to their credit, Suzanne Seggerman and Ben Stokes encouraged the community to grow, grow, grow. They held a “birds of a feather” group on “Games for Change” and I was pleased to make new friends in this arena from places as near and far as the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, the University of Denver, RIT, The Art Institute of California-San Diego, among others–all of which have developed gaming curriculua (in fact the latest count shows well over 15 US schools with game-related bachelors and/or masters’ degrees, and growing).

At the National Science Foundation Joint Annual Meeting (NSF JAM 2006) , 900 scholars at this moment are meeting to discuss national and research efforts in diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This morning, Sara Martinez Tucker”, head of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, gave an inspiring talk looking at the growth of private funding for disadvantaged students. Martinez Tucker noted that 29% of Americans are receiving a college education, while 63% of new jobs require at least some college education. Numbers in particular science and engineering programs at the University level (such as computer science) are continuing to drop overall, and a drop in terms of the percentages of diverse students is also reported. The scholars presenting today point to the challenges of specific scenarios in equity; indeed, across the board the scholars, scientists, and even Congress people warn that the US is facing in leadership, innovation, and expertise in the coming years as US test scores in these areas also fall. Part of the challenge, noted Martinez Tucker, is context: familial/counseling, financial limitations, and places where diverse students can study in a comfortable environment are all key factors.

February’s Living Game Worlds symposium, held at Georgia Institute of Technology and hosted by the GVU and Ivan Allen College/LCC among others, was a superb thinktank, bubbling forth ideas, strategies, studies, art forms, and communities around computer games.

I’ll be speaking at several upcoming conferences in the coming month, including next week’s Living Game Worlds 2006 Symposium that Michael M. mentioned a few posts ago, to be held at Georgia Tech; the College Art Association’s annual conference in Boston (panel on Global Artistic Practices and Internet2 Technology), and the GDC Serious Games Summit with a great panel of educational gamers. Also of note in April is the International Digital Media and Arts Association and the Miami University Center for Interactive Media Studies “CODE” conference , where I will be keynoting. If you are a GTxAutoer and are at one of these events, come on over and say hello! I’ll be giving a sneak peek of new artworks, essays, and games for ’06.

esteemed community: I herewith establish the first and last semi-public call for submissions to my book project.

I am looking for people with interesting, well informed ideas on computer code for a book.

I’m editing a collection called _re:CODE_, the third in the series of theory and fiction volumes (reload 2002, reskin 2006 FORTHCOMING!! both with H. A. Booth). Doris Cacoilo is the assistant to the project. Like it might sound, re:CODE is about the social and cultural signifance of coding. The table of contents is quite full of great works already selected… but I think this may be an area of interest of to a few GTxA-ers, so in order to make sure we catch emerging thinkers, I wanted to shout-out.

Please note a few of the new games articles from the past week or so, such as “Pricey Games: Moms Don’t Play”, from the 21 December 2005 Washington Post, “The Year That Games Discovered Their Star Power” from 25 December 2005 New York Times, and “See Baby Touch a Screen, but Does Baby Get It?” from the 15 December 2005 NYTimes.

To keep up to date on the digital community for educators and activists, check out
The Digital Divide. The site offers a listserv and features blogs and projects that promote equity and access in both the use of and creation of new technologies.

its sunset at quarter to five out here on a 450 acre patch of land in Connecticut called ‘i-park,’ where i’m doing an artist’s residency. The sky is currently a mix of purple and deep deep blue. Several other artists are here, a ceramicist from Russia, a painter from Australia, and a sculptor from Wales at the moment. I’m pleased to be with people who are engaged with other materials unrelated to screens and cables.
It’s very quiet here.