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WP-M wishes you a Happy 4th of July!

Many of you guys know Eddo Stern, whose work in included, also former fellow c-level'er Cyril Kuhn is as well.

http://lagunaartmuseum.org/Current-Exhibit.html

WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon explores various forms of cultural production based on World of Warcraft in particular and on gaming in general. While surveying Warcraft's Fifteen-year history, the exhibition looks at artistic practices that have been influenced by game culture. The actual works by the producer of World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment (headquartered in Irvine, California), provide a starting point and reference.

Fourteen international artists were selected to consider this movement with the following themes in mind: elements of desire, the collapse of fantasy, medievalism, creative critiques, and public intervention. Artists in this exhibition take on the visual marker of World of Warcraft to consider, implications of gaming, and their greater impact on our culture. In addition to the works of these artists, fan art and the growing culture of machinima (computer animation that uses the graphic engines from video games) will be explored in this exhibition.

Several smart theoreticians associated with artificial intelligence (and me, a designer) will be presenting papers.

Hear about:
How AI of Thief could be modified to incorporate belief about other people's beliefs.
How Civilization 4 was modified to score citizen health and happiness.

July 12, in Pasadena

Workshop: "Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning 2"

09.05-09.15 Opening
09.15-10.00 Michael Young: "The Representational Challenges of Fictional
Worlds"
10.00-10.30 COFFEE BREAK
10.30-10.50 Amitabha Mukerjee: "Discovering symbols from interactions
- easier than explaining interactions via symbols?"
10.50-11.10 Nadine Guiraud, Andreas Herzig, Emiliano Lorini: "Speech
acts as announcements"
11.10-11.30 Break
11.30-12.15 Lenhart Schubert: "From generic sentences to scripts"
12.15-14.40 Lunch Break
14.40-15.00 Jos Uiterwijk, Kevin Moesker: "Mathematical Modelling in TwixT"
15.00-15.30 COFFEE BREAK
15.30-15.50 Rafael Pérez y Pérez: "Emotions in Plot Generation"
15.50-16.10 Ethan Kennerly: "Computing Quality of Life in a Social
Management Game"
16.10-16.30 Ethan Kennerly, Andreas Witzel, Jonathan Zvesper: "Thief's
Beliefs"
16.30-16.50 Break
16.50-17.10 Martin Magnusson, David Landén, Patrick Doherty: "Logical
Agents that Plan, Execute, and Monitor Communication"
17.10-17.55 Leora Morgenstern: "Traveling Through Time and Logical AI:
Toward a Formal Theory of Time Travel"

http://www.illc.uva.nl/GLoRiClass/index.php?page=8_2


If you're interested, for better rates, register by June 12, 2009 at http://ijcai-09.org/

http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/games/20090523-intermedia.php

The games developed in CTIN 484/489 from the Spring are available for download. It was a great batch this semester, so please check them out.

Some images from my first (thesis) collection of mod vignettes: sept08 - may09

For anyone interested in serious games, activism in games, learning in games, etc. the 2009 Sixth Annual Games for Change Festival is a must go. This Festival brings together the world’s leading foundations, NGOs, game-makers, academics, and journalists to explore how best to harness this incredibly powerful medium to help address the most critical issues of our day, from poverty, climate change, global conflicts, to human rights.

This year's speakers include:
Sasha Barab, Professor in Learning Sciences, IST, and Cognitive Science, Indiana University
Ian Bogost, CEO of Persuasive Games and author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
Heather Chaplin, journalist (NPR, NYT) and author of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.
Nick Earl, General Manager of Electronic Arts Redwood Shores Studio
Mary Flanagan, Director of the Tiltfactor Lab
Tracy Fullerton, Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games
Judith Helfand, Independent filmmaker
John Nordlinger, Senior Research Manager, Microsoft
Ian Rowe, former head of Public Affairs at mTV
Katie Salen, Executive Director, Institute of Play; Associate Professor, Design and Technology Department, Parsons The New School for Design
Seth Scheisel, New York Times game critic and technology journalist
Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Constance Steinkuehler, Assistant Professor Assistant Professor Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
Clive Thompson, Contributor, The New York Times, Wired
Eric Zimmerman, Award-winning game designer, Co-author of The Rules of Play

Congratulations to all the IMD teams that participated in last week's GDC: Kid the World Saver and The Unfinished Swan were IGF finalists. Ian also presented The Unfinished Swan at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. And, of course, the Reflection team won the IGF Mobile Next Great Mobile Game contest!

Reflection began as an intermediate project and is now being developed further in the advanced projects class. Here's Peter checking out the latest build.

From the folks at Come Out & Play -- I encourage anyone working on large-scale games to think about applying. This is a great conference!! Here is the info:

The 2009 Come Out & Play Festival, now in it's fourth year, will be running the weekend of June 12-14 in New York City. This year's festival is being graciously hosted by The Tank.

Come Out & Play is a three-day festival of street games.  The festival seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play. We want to bring together a public eager to rediscover the world around them through play, with designers interested in producing innovative new games and experiences.  Oh yeah, and we want to have city-size fun.

Right now we're accepting applications for games.  We like to feature everything from the low-tech to the high-tech.  We're primarily interested in fun, innovative games that make interesting use of the city.

The festival spreads out across New York City, but will be based primarily around Times Square.   This area is rife with spaces where great games could run--from Grand Central to Bryant Park to the West Side Piers--just waiting for the right game designer to put them to use.

Details
Festival Dates: June 12-14.
URL: http://www.comeoutandplay.org
HQ: The Tank
http://www.thetanknyc.org/
354 West 45th Street, NY, NY
Application: http://comeoutandplay.wufoo.com/forms/2009-come-out-play-festival-game-submission-form/
Applications due: April 19, 2009

Have questions?  Email info@comeoutandplay.org.

My 1st GDC, my 1st SF trip.

Day 1


Welcome to GDC!!

This is the first time I tried to add my narration to my slides. There were so many technical issues happened during the making of this video. So if you hear sound glitches (some are pretty long), please bear with me. In addition, this was suppose to be a 8 minutes talk. However, I spent 20 minutes trying to elaborate each slides to more details which made the talk too long to watch : {

From readwriteweb:.

"Dan Hon is building a radical new future for one of humanity's oldest activities - the telling of stories. The modest young UK CEO's design company Six to Start won Best in Show at this week's SXSW Web Awards. The company's project, called Telling Stories, is a six part experiment with the book publisher Penguin. Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work".

Alexei Othenin-Girard, game designer and fan of Japanese culture, discusses design at the Pacific Asian Museum during their Samurai Re-imagined series.

Saturday, March 21, 2-5pm. It's in Pasadena, four blocks from the gold line.

The PATH ----- Launch Trailer from Tale of Tales on Vimeo.

Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn’s (2006 Emerging Fields) Creative Capital supported game, The Path, is inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, set in the modern day. The player controls not one, but six incarnations of the red protagonist. A story about growing, choosing and losing, The Path does not offer the player challenge through complicated game rules or grand goals. There is one rule in the game, and it must be broken. There is one goal, and when you attain it, you die. The Path is a psychological trip that is highly unsettling to some and gloriously revealing to others. Will you choose the path of needles or the path of pins?

For more information:
Story website: http://grandmothers-house.net
Trailer: http://ThePath-game.com
Development Journal: http://Tale-of-Tales.com/ThePath/blog

Game available at:
http://Tale-of-Tales.com, http://www.direct2drive.com/, and http://store.steampowered.com/

What makes a storyline interesting? What makes a reaction natural? What role do emotions play in game decisions?

These are some of the motivations behind the second workshop of Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning (LSIR2). On July 12, this is part of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Pasadena. IJCAI is sponsored in part by USC's Institute for Creative Technology (ICT) and Information Sciences Institute (ISI).

Have a well-articulated opinion? This July, want to speak in Pasadena? Submit your abstract by April 3.

Robin Hunicke, Malcolm Ryan, and Ben Smith are hosting a design workshop. In it, Marc LeBlanc's mechanics-dynamics-aesthetic's (MDA) framework is applied to a practical (and fun) design challenge. Essentially, MDA relates rules to play, and play to feelings. Being keen on this framework, I'm assisting the workshop, and we would be happy to help you there: GDC, Tuesday at 10 in Room 2002, West hall. See details.

And for those of you that rehearsed one of the exercises, thank you!

Speaker: Peter Brinson, Instructor of Cinematic Practice, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinematic Arts
Time: Wednesday, March 4, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: Matching Meaning and Mechanics

Peter will discuss his upcoming, The Cat and the Coup, an experimental documentary game focusing on an aspect of U.S. warfare that has little presence in game history - the covert military interventions carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency. Broken into historical chapters, the game explores the justifications for U.S. interventions, the actual violent coup d’états, the subsequent effects on the country, and the consequences of "blowback" on U.S. foreign affairs. Currently in production, the first level ("justifications") puts the player in the role of the cat of Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. On the night of August 19, 1953, the Prime Minister undergoes a CIA sponsored coup d’état. You accompany him through significant events of his life including living under house arrest, being convicted for high treason, undergoing the coup, meeting the President of the United States, and being elected Prime Minister. Future levels will document CIA coups in Chile and Cuba.

Peter Brinson is a game developer, filmmaker, and educator living in Los Angeles. His work explores the narrative possibilities found in animal protagonists, documentary play, and collective ownership. His films and games have exhibited in numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, Slamdance, Indiecade, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, and the Telluride Film Festival. Brinson attended the University of North Carolina and the California Institute of the Arts, and currently teaches in the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

Science gleans 60TB of behavior data from Everquest 2 logs

Some choice bits:

Mixing in the demographic information produced a few surprises. Gender turned out to be a negative influence on interactions: even after their low numbers were taken into account, female players avoided interacting with each other. Time zones had some influence; players in the same time zone were 1.25 times more likely to partner than players even one time zone apart.

But distance had a much larger effect; players within 10 kilometers of each other were five times more likely to interact. Contractor concluded that, for the typical player, the game simply offered a way of continuing their real-world social interactions in a virtual setting.

Mostly, the gamers seemed healthy; their body mass index was better than the US average and, although they were slightly more depressed than average, they were also less anxious.

Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, "They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players." They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.

//Again, the so-called cultural gap took place in the market?
//I just wanna point out that Monster Hunter is not Pokemon, at all!!!
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22340


Enterbrain, publisher of weekly Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, revealed the 100 best-selling video game software in the region in 2008.

Capcom's PSP action role-playing game Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G, coming to the States as Monster Hunter Freedom Unite this spring, was the top-selling title for the year, with over 2,452,111 units sold since its release in March 2008.