Grand Text Auto

I’m reading Marilyn Yalom’s book _Birth of the Chess Queen_, which documents the game of Chess in several incarnations. Yalom conducted original research on many continents trying to discover a) when ‘Queen’ pieces were introduced to the board (prior to the introduction of the Queen, the spot was occupied by the King’s vizier), and b) how religious, social, and cultural changes coincided with this shift. It’s a fascinating survey of medieval history, especially Spanish history, where changes to the chess board were particular interesting given the mix of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds there.

IGDA has released their new report: Game Developer Demographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity on Oct 18. You can download it as a PDF.

Update from the Road: The Microwave International Media Art Festival is in full swing here in Hong Kong, focusing on “Culture as Play”; the program consists of two media art exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and a conference on new media. The game art exhibition space in City Hall is organized like a game level or maze; it’s quite a large space, really nicely set up, and positioned to receive many visitors to the government and cultural Hall. The exhibitions and screenings run for a month.

Oct 26-27th, the first annual Game Writers Conference will be held in Austin TX. A former Human Code person, (where many a fab person worked), Susan O’Connor, is the chair of this year’s conf. It’s going to be a great chance for writers to meet face-to-face…for writers from other disciplines to find out what game writing is all about…for devs who want to make more engaging games…and for students who want to meet the writer of Half-Life 2!!

As you all probably know, the Second Life environment created by Linden Labs is an amazing example of social environment, game, meeting place, and cultural phenomena. Linden Labs have been at the forefront of intellectual property debates in online environments, because users own their own content in SL. Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs is giving a talk entitled “Building a World with Digital Atoms” October 7th in NYC at 11:30am, 251 Mercer Street room 109. The talk is open and is sponsored by NYU’s Dept of Computer Science and the Tiltfactor lab at Hunter College. Please join us!

Did you know that Milwaukee was an early adopter in the free wifi movement, wiring downtown parks as public hotspots (modeled after the Long Beach free zone)? During my recent trip to the city known historically for beer and brats, the Violent Femmes, Liberace, MacArthur, and yours truly, I was surprised about the current urban-tech makeover the place is undergoing. Its almost a little Seattle. I had no problems finding free wifi in cafes, my hotel, and even the classic old school diners had wifi in their gardens. A healthy independent music scene, a plethora of used bookstores, great second hand shopping, and several local coffee roasters have turned my seventies rustbelt childhood home into a hip, albeit short on pretention, kind of town.

I’m investigating the work of poet Jackson Mac Low among others influenced by algorithmic and computational processes, and found his “Young Turtle Asymmetries” poems online; these are generated by chance operations and are “nonstanzaic” poems of which the printed formats are notations for solo or group performances. The scores are the best part! Mac Low’s son Mordecai has an interesting article looking at his father’s poetry, noting that Mac Low’s approach to poetry was related to scientific and technical problem solving methods.

Hi all, its difficult to dwell on digital games and art in the middle of such an immense disaster. The part-15.org group is coordinating to get some communications infrastructure back to the region. This is one of several link to donate time, equipment, $ or supplies.

Second, here’s a short article about blogging through Katrina , and a damage blog including a site to track missing persons. Humid City is a network for survivors.

This past week, an incredible group of women met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London as part of the workshop/talks in the Cybersalon series put on by London’s SMARTlab and the ICA. The participant’s backgrounds spanned disciplines from game design to mobile technology design to arts activism to organizational collaboration. To fuel the discussion, speakers (including yours truely) were asked to choose their favourite misused word in technology-culture and speak about it.

greetings from London in the middle of all this. London is completely locked down!
I have been here completing my PhD thesis work entitled ‘Playculture’. The work is the first attempt to create a feminist game design methodology through the triad of art practice, critical theory, and activism/intervention.
My viva voce at the SMARTlab on Tuesday 5th July was successful, with esteemed examiners from the US, UK, and Germany! (This is the ‘dissertation defence’ in the British system.) While here have also participated in a Furtherfield / ID Runners workshop on areas of work where art, cultural production, technology, personal development and social action all overlap, and a panel at the ICA (separate post forthcoming). . . lots of excitement!

In my research on a new collaborative project meme.garden (with d. howe) I happened to re-explore some ‘commonsense’ databases including the commonsense project at MIT, “open mind.” After various approaches to making effective search engines, this one–with its reliance on real people’s knowledge aggregated over time–seems promising.

Yet such a system is rife with problems, as one can imagine. It is criticised by some net researchers and bloggers for containing too many ‘garbage’ entries to be efffective, and just plain factual errors by those who might even mean well.

Where is the hard data about women in the games industry? In a 2004 New York Times article, the approximate number of women in the US games industry is estimated to be 10%. But where is the hard data? Send on if anyone has it. Also, while I’m sure everyone heard of Lowenstein’s call for new kinds of games at E3, I wish to repost it as a reminder that the issue of gender and gaming runs deep and is multifaceted: a more

I’m at DIGRA 2005, and listening to HoLin Lin, a Taiwanese sociologist at National Taiwan University.

Lin and her team interviewed almost 60 players in internet cafes. She notes how much parents have control over children’s and teen’s gaming. In fact, she notes that the most common complaint of children living at home was surveillance. In addition, boys generally enjoy priority of computer access.

for the next two weeks, i’ll be reblogging at the eyebeam reblog site.

At the ICT summer school in Stockholm, Espen Aarseth noted in his talk “How to Analyze Games: A Metamodel” (Sunday 5 June) that there are as many ways to study games as there are reasons to study them, and that, for example, game players would want very different things from game analysis than, for example, an academic studying games; thus, methods must take these vast differences into account.

Aarseth offered tentative, broad approaches to creating methods which could be used to study games, spending a good deal of time asking overarching questions about art (are games art?); he emphasized that art is modelled on a “king of the hill” style competition where an artist’s job is to claim the superior position. Several artists in the audience disagreed with Aarseth.

Aarseth also noted that communities (from academic fields to online groups) are formed by exclusion. Overall, the tone of competition proffered in games themselves seems to have infused the discussion. of the field.

Michael Joyce began his talk at the ICT summer school in Stockholm by distinguishing his talk “Red Shelves and texts held in confidence: Networked Collaboration as Medium and Artefact” from yesterday’s talk by Espen Aarseth.

Several new offerings in New York City for those interested in studying and making games.

In conjunction with the Tiltfactor Research lab at Hunter College,

I’m going to be offering two courses: one is game studies foundations, and one is focused on making social impact games for the web.

Parsons also has a new game track in their Design and Technology MFA program!

A quick surprise: the number one downloaded audio book on a favorite p2p. network right now is The Bible- Old Testament- Complete. Just thought I’d share. It appears to be hedging out Tom Clancy, Anne Rice, Tolkien, and Harry Potter.

Winners of Turbulence’s Comp_05

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. announced the winners of its Turbulence Comp_05 Juried International Net Art Competition. Five works were selected.

One work is from a French Team consisting of Markia Dermineur and Khalil Bennis (with others) (Markia worked with Stephane Degoutin on Googlehouse) . A second work is from Troy Innocent and Ollie Olson with the Shaolin Wooden men and Harry Lee (Australia). A third work is an Urban interention work from Brazil featuring several artists (Ruiz, Freire, Delacroix, Djahdjah, Carlos, Murmur, and the Wells). The fourth project is “Gothamberg” by Marek Walczak, with Wattenberg, Selbo, Paul, Lehrer, Kindvall, and Crow) from the US– a project which appears to extend Walczak’s Apartment project to larger realms. I’m very excited that a project I’m developing with collaborator Daniel Howe is among this great company, for it succeeded in the competition as the fifth work. This project is called [meme.garden] and is an affective search engine tool-artwork.
Let the production begin!

Electronic games are a new topic of study in the field of information ethics, and an area that my collaborators and I have been working in to ultimately make more socially conscious games.

The International Review of Information Ethics journal has a call out for a special issue on the subject!

Deadline for abstracts: June 30, 2005.

Pioneer in computer music (incl early computational sound generation + composition, musique concrete, etc) James Tenney will be presenting work in nyc on Sunday, May 8, 2005 at 8:00 PM

james tenney’s “postal pieces” (1965-71): a rare performance of Tenney’s Postal Pieces (1965-71). Postal Pieces is supposed to be “a remarkable series of eleven works printed on postcards.”

After spending several hours in the Apple Store Soho a week ago and being bombarded with the classic dancing silhouettes from various ipod ad campaigns from all directions, I must disclose my discomfort with depictions of the body, race, the individual, and general ‘hipness’ these campaigns infuse into the sale of albeit charming products.

I was a visitor to Apple Soho the day after the New York Times reported that 50 iPods have been stolen on NYC subways this year due to owners being easily identifiable (the distinctive white earbuds). Luckily, iPod theft represents a smaller number than cell phone theft on the subway… This is also after realising that with over 10 million iPods sold in Feb 2005 every single person in this city, and then some, could wear the thin white sash as a badge of honour. There are great figures online for the success of the iPod, such as “1.79 iPods sold every minute in 2003” and 300 million downloads from the music store marking an extreme shift in technology and cultural distribution/consumption. In fact we now have fans making ads for Apple.

If you are traveling to Boston for the Cyberarts 2005 events, please make a stop to see work at the South Shore Art Center in Cohasset for the TechArt II show. The TechArt ongoing exhibition series in conjunction with the Boston Cyberarts Festival proves to be a vital source of new ideas about technologically-informed creative work which reflects on computer-centered culture.

Some of the themes which emerge in TechArt II are recurring in the field of digital art as a whole: computers paintings, computer-assisted filmmaking, robotic machines and environments, and computational architectures were all themes. Highlights include

Hello all, I’m at CHI 2005 and have enjoyed catching up with Georgia Tech, RPI, UWashington, and Oregon colleagues–including GTXTers Michael M and Andrew S!! I’ve found the serious games panel and the social interaction panels to be engaging and relevant. I presented a new paper in the “Social Behaviors” session written with Howe and Nissenbaum on the topic of ‘values in design’– specifically, designing a socially-oriented game while at the same time incorporating and verifying particular values within the game design.

Recently I was asked if the US military funds commercial games (ie not America’s Army, but are there cases of contracting commercial games)? Does anyone know? Meanwhile, I have been visiting the darpa game development group http://www.dodgamecommunity.com/. Their “articles + research” page might be a helpful to some~.

Please visit the exhibition “Thank You”—an activist art project conceived by Danish/Australian/U.S. group Wooloo Productions (I’m in it!). It launched yesterday on World AIDS day, December 1st, 2004.

Thank You “confronts its audience with the relationship of exchange between Africa and the West. Dealing specifically with issues of exploitation and disease, the project utilizes possibilities afforded by online technology to illustrate the absurdity of today’s co-existing economic reality.”