Blur+Sharpen Tuesday 3/22 @ 7:00PM

BLUR + SHARPEN presents TIME MACHINES
Tuesday, March 22, 7:00 PM
Ron Howard Screening Room
Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts

Blur + Sharpen returns this Tuesday night with a program devoted to experiments with time in a series of short films, music videos and commercials. Time has become an obsession for many filmmakers – why? In part, artists are responding to our culture’s accelerated pace and the ensuing emphasis on instantaneity and disposability. But they’re also visualizing a new temporal consciousness, with attempts to show the instant or frozen moment seen in bullet time effects, or the contradictory stasis and movement in the use of open flash, or the tension between forward and backwards time, extreme fast and slow motion, and spatio-temporal fragmentation.

The pieces collected for the “Time Machines” show express some of the transformations in the cultural conception of time. Works include the pinhole camera bullet time videos of Finnish artist Liisa Lounila, the Timetrack project of Chris Cunningham, and the temporal distortions of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. Also screening, Daniel Askill’s award-winning short We Have Decided Not to Die and Michiel van Bekel’s amazing 360 degree Muybridge update Equestrian.

www.iml.annenberg.edu/blursharpen

Evolving forms of entertainment

Good article by Douglas Rushkoff on new directions for entertainment:

"How mobile can -- and should -- change the way we think about entertaining ourselves and each other...A playful mobile device need not entrap its owner within its own RAM. Rather, it can connect the owner with other people, the environment, or the temporal reality in new ways. Who is available? What is around me? What's going on right now? Instead of enter-taining, these devices might do better to inter-tain us -- that is, hold our connection to other people, places and things.

The mobile intertainment device depends not on captivation, but on introduction, orientation, and interconnection. Although very few companies are conceiving of mobile fun in this way, the early interest in services from UPOC and Dodgeball prove that people are seeking a different sort of fun through their phones -- a fun that involves experiences with other subscribers rather than some company's content."

TheFeature :: That's Inter-tainment

FILE 2005, Sao Paolo, Brazil

MARCH 17TH 2005/// SAO PAULO/// BRAZIL///

FILE - Electronic Language International Festival is opening registrations for its 6th edition. It will be held at SESI Paulista's cultural space, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from October 3rd to 22nd, 2005. Call for entries are open from march 17th to April 17th, 2005. Submissions are free and open to professionals, researchers and students of the electronic language.

In the last five years, FILE has shown what's been happening in the global networks related to digital and electronic arts, becoming a reference for studies and research on new media. It has exhibited web art, net art, artificial life, hypertext, computer animation, real time teleconference, virtual reality, soft art, games, interactive movies, e-videos, digital panoramas and electronic art installations and robotics, through interactive and immersive rooms.

FILE-SYMPOSIUM has become a meeting po! int in the city of São Paulo, proposing discussions and tackling the electronic-digital culture in its relations to art, science and technologies.

FILE Hipersônica, the festival's sonorous branch, is on it's 3rd edition and intends to elaborate connections between the world of images, the world of sonorities and the world of texts. Sound installations and real time performances will be presented by a number of groups and collectives, comprising both erudite and pop electronic music, but also electronic compositions, sound poetry, radio art, video music and sonic landscapes, as well as Djs and VJs presenting their sets through specific apparatus and installations with experimental and immersive projections.
For more information visit: website

ISEA 2006 - Interactive City Early Call For Proposals -- DUE 23 APRIL 2005

ISEA 2006
Interactive City
San Jose, California, USA
1-14 August 2006

EARLY CALL DUE: 22 April 2005

ISEA INTERACTIVE CITY CFP: http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/

GENERAL INFO ABOUT ISEA 2006: http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/

ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) is a large, international,
two week long, conference and festival situated at the critical intersection
of art and technology (see http://www.isea2004.net for last year's festival
details). In August 2006 the 13th ISEA will be held in San Jose,
California. ISEA spans a broad range of work from critical theory and
application papers, interactive demonstrations, videos, installations,
performances, and emerging music to name a few. In 2006 ISEA will feature
four themes: Interactive City, Community Domain, Transvergence, and Pacific
Rim. Each theme will of course manifest itself at ISEA in the form of
papers, demos, performances, etc. Each of these topics will also feature a
2 day event immediately preceding ISEA to further focus the topic and go
into more critical depth. This announcement is for the early call for
proposals within the scope of the Interactive City.

The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations,
even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the
advent of 24/7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space
into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the
computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the
xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something
more. Not something planned and canned, like another confectionary
spectacle. Something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will
transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation.

The Interactive City seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not
merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their
formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to
walking in someone else's shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games
with a global audience, projects for the Interactive City should transform
the "new" technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous
networks, and locative media into experiences that matter.

We are initiating an early Call for Proposals that manifest but are not
limited to the spectrum of ideas below. Interactive City proposals should
embrace aspects of the city of San José and/or the surrounding metropolitan
San Francisco Bay Area specifically.  We are seeking projects that are large
in scale, require advanced or special planning and/or permissions, or
projects seeking early review.

Let us experience your vision of the Interactive City!

MORE INFO: http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/

Summer at ITP

George Agudow emails to say "We have some very cool stuff available this summer -- both DanO and Tom are teaching -- registration is already underway and will be ongoing until the start of classes. NYU has some pretty good deals on summer housing for students as well http://www.nyu.edu/summer

Please tell anyone who may be interested to call (212-998-1891) or email me anytime (george.agudow@nyu.edu).

Harvard Rejects 199 Accused of Hacking

This article has inspired lively debate: Has Harvard over-reacted? Please comment.
Boston Globe March 8th

Harvard Business School will reject the 119 applicants who hacked into the school's admissions site last week, the school's dean, Kim B. Clark, said yesterday...A half dozen business schools were swamped by a wave of electronic intrusions Wednesday morning, after a computer hacker posted instructions on a BusinessWeek Online message board. Harvard is the second school to say definitively that it will deny the applications of proven hackers. ...

'Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world," Clark said in yesterday's Harvard statement. ''To achieve that, a person must have many skills and qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment, and a strong moral compass -- an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this website have failed to pass that test."

Elizabeth Goodman @ ZML circa 3:30pm Thursday

Elizabeth Goodman of Intel Research and "Familiar Stranger" fame will be dropping by the ZML around 3:30pm on Thursday for a chat with students interested in mobile media. Bring your cuppa.

Fringes vs. Basics in Silicon Valley

Electronic Arts, responding to this financial shift and to its labor critics, plans to announce this week that it will depart from tradition by beginning to pay overtime to some workers. Those workers would no longer be eligible for options or bonuses...

"This tears at the employment model that Silicon Valley was built on," said Rusty Rueff, the director of human resources for Electronic Arts, which has 5,800 workers. Overtime pay will move game developers "out of a culture that emphasizes entrepreneurialism and ownership and into a clock-watching mentality," he said...

[EA] said it was reviewing its total compensation structure, including who receives stock options, and that it would begin paying overtime to some workers in lieu of bonuses or stock options.

Company executives pointed to amenities, including the gym, nutrition-conscious cafeterias, and flexible work structures that let employees take breaks to use the on-campus pool tables, video game machines, basketball courts and masseuse and acupuncturist. They also said employees were compensated not just with salary, but with a bonus that can be 5 to 30 percent of salary.

Mr. Rueff, the human resources executive, conceded that the bonuses and stock options in some cases would be less than an employee would receive if paid in overtime. But he said options and bonuses continued to enable employees to be part of the entrepreneurial foundation of Silicon Valley. He said the company was now reassessing its entire compensation structure, including who gets stock options.

At the same time, Electronic Arts said that if workers began demanding too much, the company would be forced to find new sources of labor, possibly outside California or even across the nation's borders, where labor costs are lower. Already, more than half of Electronic Arts' 5,800 employees are outside the United States, including 1,700 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

"We can do this in Vancouver, Montreal, or Orlando," said Jeff Brown, vice president for Electronic Arts. "We're not even talking yet about China."

nytimes article or continue reading for the full transcript:

----------------------------------------------

SAN FRANCISCO, March 8 - It was a lunch-hour scene not uncommon on Silicon Valley corporate campuses. A video game programmer curled a dumbbell and checked out his biceps in the mirror. Nearby, two colleagues walked on treadmills, chatting, while another young man leveled karate kicks at a boxing bag.

Those employees of Electronic Arts, the world's largest independent video game maker, were spending their break one day last week in a big, modern company gymnasium that would put many private health clubs to shame. But lately critics at the company, and at other employers in the Valley, say such perks put a cozy face on what amounts to a white-collar sweatshop.

Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, Calif., has become the focal point of a debate over whether technology companies are exploiting workers by demanding long hours and using on-campus fringe benefits while skimping on tangible benefits like overtime pay, and rewarding worker loyalty by sending jobs to cheaper labor overseas.

The debate has called into question the longstanding Silicon Valley compensation formula in which long hours were soothed with stock options and bonuses. But with no technology boom to fuel stock prices, and new accounting rules making options much more expensive to grant, stock options are no longer the currency that has fueled the traditional Silicon Valley work ethic.

Electronic Arts, responding to this financial shift and to its labor critics, plans to announce this week that it will depart from tradition by beginning to pay overtime to some workers. Those workers would no longer be eligible for options or bonuses.

The move, while not unprecedented in the Valley's recent lean years, is certain to be watched closely by executives at other technology companies.

Electronic Arts concedes that the move breaks with tradition. But it says it is acting more in response to employee pressure than because the company considers it the best way to handle labor relations.

"This tears at the employment model that Silicon Valley was built on," said Rusty Rueff, the director of human resources for Electronic Arts, which has 5,800 workers. Overtime pay will move game developers "out of a culture that emphasizes entrepreneurialism and ownership and into a clock-watching mentality," he said.

Electronic Arts, like other Silicon Valley companies, uses revenue per employee as one measure of efficiency. The company said it had $1 million in sales for each of the 3,500 development studio employees last year.

The clash between Electronic Arts and its employees was prompted by an online essay late last year by the wife of a game programmer. She accused the company of driving its workers to the point of collapse. The lament, widely circulated and discussed, has ignited an industry debate over whether there is a need to rethink the rights of high-technology labor.

In the past, unions have gotten little, if any, traction trying to organize at technology companies. And few experts see much chance even now of old-style trade unions catching on in the new economy. But there is little question that a new labor base has been galvanized by critics who say that as Silicon Valley has come to be dominated by big public companies that respond mainly to Wall Street's quarterly scoreboard, the corporate gyms and other campus perks may be relics of a partnership with workers that no longer exists.

Several hundred workers and managers from the video game industry met at an all-day seminar in San Francisco on Tuesday to discuss quality-of-life issues. The gathering, a rare public acknowledgment of the depth of the worker unrest, was part of an industry conference this week for game developers.

The tone was far from rabble-rousing. The focal point was crunching - referring not to gym exercises, but to the intense period, usually lasting months, just before the release of a new game. During that time, the animators, artists, designers, engineers, and all the others involved in producing a video game are rushing to meet the unforgiving deadline for getting the product to market on the schedule promised to distributors, retailers and shareholders.

With few exceptions, industry executives and employees agree, crunching is part of a video game's life cycle - often a very painful part. Workers say they put in 60, 70, even 80 hours a week, with no days off, throwing themselves body and mind into the long march and in many cases fueled by caffeine or even stronger stimulants.

"It's soul crushing," said a senior executive at a small public video game company who has spent 10 years in the business. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said he had watched developers become increasingly disillusioned. "This is much more of a mass-market industry."

Such toil is not unique to the video game industry. Lawyers crunch on the eve of a trial, as do investment bankers in the midst of a deal. But lawyers and bankers tend to be better compensated for their efforts than $70,000-a-year game programmers.

Game developers, though, once worked in relatively small companies and took enormous pride in the products they created. Now, amid a consolidation that has put the video game business in the hands of a few big public companies like Electronic Arts and Activision, and in which best-selling titles can cost $10 million to $20 million to create, many developers say they feel like cogs in someone else's machine.

Last July, a group of employees filed a lawsuit against Electronic Arts, asserting it is required under California law to pay overtime for hours worked during crunches. The suit is pending in state court.

But it was the online essay, published anonymously by the employee's spouse, that provoked widespread debate about working conditions at the company.

In an interview, granted on the condition that she or her husband not be identified, she said that her husband is an engineer who makes $50,000 to $70,000 a year. She calculates that if he were paid overtime, he would have received an additional $15,000 to $20,000 in overtime for working six, sometimes seven, days a week over a period of several months.

Her essay on the Internet received some 4,000 responses and comments. Many supported her position ("White-collar slavery is alive and well in the games industry") but many others took exception ("If you don't like a job, quit").Subsequently, at least two other employee lawsuits have been filed in the video game industry, including a second one against Electronic Arts and one against Sony Computer Entertainment of America, which is based in Foster City, Calif., and employs about 1,400. Sony declined to comment.

Electronic Arts also declined to comment on the suits. But the company said it was taking the crunch-time concerns seriously. It said it was reviewing its total compensation structure, including who receives stock options, and that it would begin paying overtime to some workers in lieu of bonuses or stock options.

Mr. Rueff, the human resources executive, said the company had changed its approach to project management to make sure deadlines were met earlier in the product cycle of a video game, to reduce the crunch-time pressure.

Electronic Arts, for example, is currently developing a game based on the "Godfather" movies and has added 7 new project managers to the staff of 130 assigned to the project. But even while addressing workplace issues, the company disputed the notion that it is running a sweatshop.

Company executives pointed to amenities, including the gym, nutrition-conscious cafeterias, and flexible work structures that let employees take breaks to use the on-campus pool tables, video game machines, basketball courts and masseuse and acupuncturist. They also said employees were compensated not just with salary, but with a bonus that can be 5 to 30 percent of salary.

Mr. Rueff, the human resources executive, conceded that the bonuses and stock options in some cases would be less than an employee would receive if paid in overtime. But he said options and bonuses continued to enable employees to be part of the entrepreneurial foundation of Silicon Valley. He said the company was now reassessing its entire compensation structure, including who gets stock options.

At the same time, Electronic Arts said that if workers began demanding too much, the company would be forced to find new sources of labor, possibly outside California or even across the nation's borders, where labor costs are lower. Already, more than half of Electronic Arts' 5,800 employees are outside the United States, including 1,700 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

"We can do this in Vancouver, Montreal, or Orlando," said Jeff Brown, vice president for Electronic Arts. "We're not even talking yet about China."

The threat of sending jobs overseas is one reason that workers need to start thinking about organizing into unions, said Marcus Courtney, the founder of WashTech, a Washington State-based union that is trying to organize technology workers. Since 1998, the union has attracted only 450 members around the country, who pay monthly dues of $11.

The idea of organizing labor in the technology sector is an uphill fight, said Gina Neff, an assistant professor at the University of California at San Diego, who studies labor issues in the new economy.

Ms. Neff said technology workers themselves had typically been reluctant to organize because they believed they were decently compensated, they liked the industry's dynamism and they felt that as educated people they had individual bargaining power. But those dynamics might be changing as the technology industry matures.

Video game workers "have some of the best jobs the American workplace has to offer," Ms. Neff said, "and still their individual power is not enough to guarantee good workplaces."

IM Forum Speaker for 3/9/05: Anne Balsamo

IM Forum Speaker for 3/9/05: Anne Balsamo

Title: Overview & Tour of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy
Location: 746 West Adams Boulevard (directions)
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 3/9/2005

The USC Annenberg Center's Institute for Multimedia Literacy conducts and supports pioneering research and development efforts designed to embrace the transformative potential of today's literacy - an expanded, multimedia literacy in which the ability to read and write in images, sound, interactivity, and movement is held to as high a standard as learning the reading and writing of text. To this end, that the Institute's scholarly projects and academic programs examine and articulate the social, cultural, and practical implications of what it now means to be literate in the twenty-first century.

IML Website
Anne's Bio

Play-Centric Games Education Whitepaper

This document shares the philosophy and thinking behind the creation of the EA Interactive Entertainment Program at the USC School of Cinema-Television. This is a program that combines a broad liberal arts background with specialization in the history, theory and practice of creating games and interactive entertainment. The purpose of the program is to develop critical thinkers and designers who can produce the next generation of interactive entertainment. The program's proximity to both the graduate program in Interactive Media and the School of Cinema-Television provides a unique opportunity to
integrate the creative process of traditional media with the new medium of games and interactivity.

The program embodies the concept of "play-centric design" which puts player experience at the heart of the design process and teaches a system of prototyping, playtesting and iterative design that has been proven in almost a decade of student work. This play-centric process, combined with the strong tradition of collaborative practice in place at the Cinema school, is the heart of the production cycle for the games program. Additionally, a strong emphasis on critical game studies will draw on the experience of the Critical Studies Division of the Cinema school. And, valuable input from the IGDA's Curriculum Framework has helped us to form the core topics for specialization and
elective coursework within the major.

Download paper (1.8M)

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

NY Times article

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."

...

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student in the university," she said.

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

RICK HERBST, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be the current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw his major as a way to learn about power structures and how individuals influence each other.

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not represented," said Mr. Herbst, who envisions a future in the public policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic skills to do exactly that.

At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily over the years, even while professional employment opportunities in the film business remain minuscule. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about 15,050 jobs for film producers or directors, which means just a few hundred openings, at best, each year.

Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has often turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the road to doing something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a film major from the University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled through years of uninspiring nonunion work managing crews on commercials, television pilots and the occasional feature before landing his noncinematic job designing advertising for Modern Luxury Media LLC, a Chicago-based magazine publisher.

"You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll work into this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more pigeonholed as a technician," said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.

For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job is no longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique - newly democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word "film" an anachronism - the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military.

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."

In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.'s film school to take advantage of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic skills as a new form of literacy. One such is David Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after a stint in the military intending to become a filmmaker, but - even after having had the producer/director Robert Zemeckis as a mentor - found himself drawn to the school's Institute for Creative Technologies, where he creates military training applications in a variety of virtual reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he developed was privately screened for the directors John Milius and Steven Spielberg, who wanted to understand the military's vision of the future.

"That was like a film student's dream," said Mr. Hendrie, who nonetheless believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely to accomplish on the studio circuit. "I found myself increasingly demoralized by my experiences trying to pitch myself as a director for films like 'Dude, Where's My Car?' " Mr. Hendrie said. "What I'm doing here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests I've always had, and in the end excited my passion more."

In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD that warned against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to show three dead bodies. That and the series of gruesome execution videos that have surfaced in the Middle East are perhaps only the most extreme face of a complex sort of post-literacy in which cinematic visuals and filmic narrative have become commonplace.

Melding easily with the growing digital folk culture, some film majors have simply taken to creating art forms outside the boundaries of the established film business. In one such instance, Wes Pentz, a k a DJ Diplo - a 2003 graduate of Temple University, where film majors are encouraged to invent new career paths in museums, leisure businesses and elsewhere - broke through with his trademark Hollertronix, a style modeled on cinematic soundtracks. "I think of my songs as having a movement, like I would watch in a film, and there's a narrative feel to them," said Mr. Pentz, who said he had learned to frame music differently because of his film school experience.

In the public policy arena, meanwhile, students like Yale's Mr. Herbst hope to heighten political debate with productions far more pointed than the most political feature film. Even a picture like "Hotel Rwanda," with its unblinking look at African genocide, is "a soup kitchen approach," Mr. Herbst said: "You're offered something to eat, but there are no vitamins." Bringing film directly into politics, he expects to throw objectivity out the window and change minds - perhaps not an unrealistic aim at a time when, in a bit of what a headline in The Wall Street Journal characterized as "film noir," the Edward D. Jones & Company brokerage has entered the fray over the proposed Social Security overhaul with a highly produced video.

To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make economic sense of film education, which in the past was often a long path to nowhere. "Most find their way, and the skills they learn from us are applicable to other careers and pursuits," Dale Pollock, dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, said of his students. "So we're not wasting their time or money."

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student in the university," she said.

Project Postmortem - CatchBob!

Here's a great example of something we should do more of - auditing in the form of a "post-mortem" a project called CatchBob! a treasure-hunt type, Wi-Fi based locative and collaborative mobile game Fabien Girardin developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. The document describes the whole development process, from the technical architecture to the user perception of the game. The document works very well for both technies and non-tech savvy people, explaining the whole process and results of the play testing.

CatchBob! Post-mortem

Be a Monster at the GDC!

For anyone who is going to GDC and is interested in being part of gameLab's "massively multiplayer offline game," here is the info from Eric Zimmerman:

Dear F.O.E.
(Friend of gameLab),

Hi. As you may already know, each year gameLab runs a massively multiplayer real-world game experiment at the Game Developers' Conference. This year's game is ConfQuest, our real-world RPG. And we're contacting you because we'd like to invite you to take a special role in this madness.

The core idea of ConfQuest is that players choose character classes and roam the conference looking for wandering monsters to fight. We're inviting you to take the role of a wandering monster. If you choose to accept, you'll be become a ConfQuest monster, such as a Rat, Faceless Enemy, 32-bit Boss, or Teenage Dragon. And as an additional thank-you, we're holding a prize drawing for the most-battled monster over the course of the game.

The game will take place Wednesday and Thursday during the main conference. Your participation during the conference is entirely based on your availability, so you'll be able to drop out of the game at any time for a session, meeting, or meal - you can simply hide the "monster ribbon" on your badge to suspend your game participation. And as you're a _wandering_ monster, you won't even have to change your normal conference activities. Simply go about your business and be ready to do battle with the foolish players who dare approach you.

If this sounds like fun, send us an email and let us know you're interested. If you want to play as a monster, you should attend the introduction meeting at 6:30pm on Tuesday in the lobby of the Argent Hotel (50 3rd Street, near the convention center). If you can't make that time, we are also meeting with monsters Wednesday morning at 8:30am at the ConfQuest HQ on the 3rd floor lobby of the convention center (that's in the morning right before the main conference starts).

Try to make one of these two meetings! Bring your friends! We need monsters! If you want to be a monster and you can't make either of them, that's OK. Just look for a gameLabber at the game HQ on the first day of the GDC.

We look forward to seeing and gaming with you at the
GDC.

- gameLab, eric@gmlb.com

The Disappearing Computer in CAM

The March 2005 issue of Communications of the ACMis dedicated to ubiquitous computing and location systems.
"Guest editors Norbert Streitz and Paddy Nixon (chair and co-chair, respectively, of The Disappearing Computer initiative) have orchestrated authors and projects from around the globe to present a variety of perspectives, reflections, and visions for building technologies that serve people in an unobtrusive way. They explain the goal of this section—and these ongoing programs—is to explore how daily life can be supported and enhanced through the use of interacting artifacts that form environments in which the computer as we have come to know it has no role. Or, as Weiser envisioned almost 15 years ago: "Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs." "

Accessing the full text online requires some registration, although there is a student option. I'm sure the libraries carry CAM.

Dyadin Appears on Cover Feature of Gamasutra

You can find it at the very top of the article. Can't miss it!