susana

As I haven't yet gotten around to blogging more concretely about Games for Change 2009 nor about Documentary Games... I'm thankful Ian Bogost has posted his notes from the panel.

Posted by at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please excuse tardiness and redundancy of this entry, but decided to post it for personal archiving reasons, as I realize now that I never did.

NPR interview "Online Game Peers into Life in Darfur Refugee Camp," by Michele Norris

Posted by at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

a very interesting read i just came across with many relevant thoughts to today's design discipline... a little disheartening (while remaining inspirational) considering these are J. Baldwin's words from 1991 and the situation/s he described might not be better today:

"When the environment protests by exhibiting intolerable degradation, the principal malefactors customarily dodge responsibility. Their captive designers abdicate. The corporate system is set up (designed!) to shield designers and their masters from financial ruin if protest grows strong. Corporate clout influences politics. Things are arranged so somebody else--most often taxpayers and the poor-- will foot the bill

Because the narrow-visioned thinking of specialists is well rewarded, particularly in academia, pernicious effects are invisible to those involved. The need for interdisciplinary effort is usually considered as a theoretical matter for future discussion, impractical, or as a turf-invasion to be repelled by bureaucratic maneuver. This situation is a veritable petri dish for culturing dishonesty and ineptitude.



The third force [he lists the first as "competition," the second as "specialization"] affecting an individuals effectiveness is the intuitively sensible urge to work for security. Security can he defined as ensuring the future will be to your personal advantage--another sort of "win." Our society condones the accompanying implication of selfishness. "Good old New England individualism"--long considered a traditional American value--may be translated as "I've got mine, and you can go to hell." This is not systemic thinking, It is not a useful mindset for a designer who needs to realize that true security is not to he had for anyone until all people live well, in a just and ecologically sustainable society."

full essay here

Posted by at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Games For Change 2009 Festival was great and enlightening this year, as it has been for its past 5 years. Full program here. A nice write-up about our "Documentary Games" panel here, from the Center for Social Media's blog. Also, check back with the G4C site shortly for videos of great panels and keynotes (NYTimes Nicholas Kristof and EA's Lucy Bradshaw).

Posted by at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A very interesting op-ed in today's New York Times, by Mark C. Taylor.

Taylor explains that the 18th century model of mass-production university education we inherited (from Kant) "has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization."

He proposes six major steps to a complete restructuring of American higher education...

1.. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural... There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

2... Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs... Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

Point #4 is of particular interest to our very own iMAP program:

Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

Posted by at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

... and to add to Tracy's post, there will be a panel on this year's Games for Change Festival entitled "Documentary Games" with Tracy, Steve Anderson, Emily Verellen and Judith Helfand, and myself as moderator. To reiterate Tracy's point, this is an incredible event, with a unique and exciting merge of game industry folks, NGO's, and academics.

Documentary Games:
As game theory and the practice of making games become recognized as valued pedagogical and cultural processes across a broad spectrum of disciplines, we see forthcoming a movement specific to a new genre — documentary gaming — which will position game systems within a framework that questions the practice, ethics, and identity of games. Can documentary best practices help us negotiate the socio-political and cultural significance of a game? Do the same ethical concerns and the validity of the “truth claim” affect games the way they have historically influenced the efficacy of documentary and journalistic media? Panelists: Steve Anderson, Assistant Professor, Director, Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. Program, University of Southern California; Tracy Fullerton, Professor, USC, Interactive Media; Emily Verellen, Senior Program Officer, Fledgling Fund; moderated by Susana Ruiz, Ph.D. Candidate, Co-founder, Take Action Games.

Any thoughts/suggestions about the notion of documentary games - I'd love to hear them!

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NetSquared in partnership with the UC Berkely Human Rights Center has put out an open challenge, called the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge.

The projects under consideration are all listed here and they need your vote! To submit your vote, you need to vote for a minimum of 3 projects, maximum of 5.

The list of projects is truly amazing and choosing 5 is not easy - I do though, want to mention the IJCentral project specifically because I know the team behind it and they are amazing folks completely committed to combating the entrenched culture of impunity for crimes against humanity. Their film documentary (which is in tandem to their IJCentral new media project) is titled "The Reckoning" and currently in the festival circuit, to be broadcast nationally on PBS POV on July 14th).

About the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge:

"Recent innovations in science and technology, especially mobile technologies, have provided human rights advocates, journalists, and scientists with new tools to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and disseminate this information in real time throughout the world. Cell phones, combined with GPS, cameras, video, audio, and SMS are transforming the way the world understands and responds to emerging crises. Handheld data collection devices, such as PDAs, provide researchers with new ways of documenting mass violence and attitudes toward peace, justice, and social reconstruction in conflict zones."

Posted by at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

IMD Alumn and thatgamecompany President Kellee Santiago featured in this CNN article

"From her games, she says, she wants players to take away the feeling that, like with any communicative medium, there is a relationship with a game..."

Fantastic!

Posted by at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A PETA Thanksgiving COOKING MAMA game!

It most certainly made me reflect on my planned celebratory meal. And I never quite felt so perplexed to be judged a saint...

Posted by at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense announced yesterday the cancellation of its highly successful and popular “America’s Army” online game and recruitment tool. The program has already been converted into a new game, operated by the State Department, entitled “America’s Diplomat.” State Department spokesperson Donald Demsfold called this “a pretty good step towards nurturing a generation committed to the principles of diplomacy and peaceful negotiation.”

Full article here.

HOWEVER, this should be viewed as well, as alas, it is all a Yes Men vision of a utopian near future, and created to urge President-Elect Obama to keep his campaign promises:

"The paper is dated July 4, 2009, and imagines a liberal utopia of national health care, a rebuilt economy, progressive taxation, a national oil fund to study climate change, and other goals of progressive politics."

Posted by at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)