Category: other

Things that really don’t belong in the other categories.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin speaks at NYU on September 17

The NYU Game Center in combination with The Games for Learning Institute presents Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

Date: Thursday, September 17th from 6:00PM to 8:00PM

Place: 721 Broadway, room 006, lower level

RSVP: gamecenter@nyu.edu

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a prominent game scholar with a particular interest in the
intersection of fiction and play.

He is author of “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies” (MIT Press, 2009) and has edited four books, including “Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media” (MIT Press, 2007), with Pat Harrigan, and “The New Media Reader” (MIT Press, 2003), with Nick Montfort.

At NYU from 1994 to 2000 he was a research scientist at the Center for Advanced  Technology, artist in residence at the Media Research Laboratory, and part-time graduate student in the Gallatin School. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Expressive Intelligence Studio in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The talk is open to students, faculty, and the general public. We welcome everyone, whether your research and teaching is related to games or you are simply curious about this rapidly evolving field. Please come, and feel free to bring any interested NYU colleagues.

The NYU Game Center is housed in the Skirball Center for New Media at the Tisch School of the Arts and is a collaboration between Tisch, NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. The Center is supported by generous grants from an anonymous donor, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sharon Chang and the TTSL Charitable Foundation.

The multi-institutional Games for Learning Institute studies the educational use of digital games, and investigates their socio-cultural, cognitive, and emotional impact. They develop design patterns for effective educational games that industry partners can draw on to assure high quality when designing their own games for learning.

My new Job at the New York University Game Center

From August 1st, I will be moving to a position as a Visiting Professor at the brand new New York University Game Center.

I am looking forward to teaching, researching, and helping build the new program there!

(It is obviously also sad to leave the GAMBIT lab at MIT where I’ve had a great and productive time with my wonderful colleagues the last year and a half.)

Here is the official announcement from NYU:

The NYU Game Center Announces the Appointment of Game Studies Scholar Jesper Juul as Visiting Professor.

The Game Center, an independent multi-school center at New York University for the research, design, and development of digital games, established in fall 2008, has announced its first visiting faculty appointment, the Danish games studies scholar Jesper Juul.  His position as visiting assistant arts professor is effective August 1, 2009.  Juul is currently a video game lecturer and researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

In addition to teaching an introduction to video games course, Juul will help to lead the effort to develop and implement an overall pedagogical plan for the new Game Center, including designing curriculum, planning facilities, and identifying new faculty.  He will also lecture and give talks.

A respected scholar as well as a prominent authority in the field of game studies, Juul is the author of two books: A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (2009 MIT Press) and the influential Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005 MIT Press).  In addition, he has contributed chapters to a number of books as well as having authored numerous articles and papers on games and culture, delivered several keynote addresses, and been an invited speaker at many talks.

Juul has taught extensively at the IT University of Copenhagen and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   He earned an M.A. in Danish literature from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen.

The NYU Game Center is housed in the Skirball Center for New Media at the Tisch School of the Arts and is an all NYU collaboration of the Tisch School, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and Polytechnic Institute of NYU. The Center is supported by generous grants from an anonymous donor, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sharon Chang and the TTSL Charitable Foundation.

Please stop using Endnote. Switch to Zotero

I am a big fan of the reference management program Zotero. Now Thomson Reuters, makers of the Endnote program has sued Zotero developer George Mason University because the new version of Zotero can import Endnote databases.

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters’ EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.

Really. Thomson Reuters believes they own the references that their users have entered into Endnote?  Others have suggested to boycott Endnote, and I support that.

Update: The MIT Libraries have a writeup here.

Games to try to Hate. (What is the Pink Floyd of video games?)

The previous post discussed indie games as being the punk rock of video games. I chained this to the “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt that Jonny Rotten apparently wore once. And I said that we should wear “I Hate World of Warcraft” t-shirts.

But really, what is the Pink Floyd of video games? What should the t-shirt say; what games should we hate?

I take it the late 1970’s objection to Pink Floyd was that they were rather pretentious, stodgy, had too big and expensive sets. I am a big fan but I see the point. So what is the Pink Floyd of video games?

The obvious line of attack is to go for the good big-budget titles on grounds of their big budgets and hardcore sensibilities:

  • I hate World of Warcraft: one game, incredibly expensive, you actually subscribe to it as not to have other games.
  • I hate Grand Theft Auto IV: Rehash of the formula, decent voice acting and story, huge budget, but same-old, same-old.

On the other hand, Pink Floyd was always in somewhat “good taste”, which would lead us to an attack on exactly the games considered to be good taste:

  • I hate Wii sports: Excellent game design, fun for the whole family, content that no one could possibly object to … but that is exactly the problem! Where is the edginess, where is the depth?
  • I hate Okami or Rez: Smooth and “wonderful” graphics, conventionally “edgy” but really … who cares about mythical sun goddesses or mainframe computers?

What is the Pink Floyd of video games? (You don’t have to really hate it, just bring out your inner punk!) What should the t-shirt say?

Fuel Efficiency as a Game (AKA: Games are the Poetry of Action)

The rising price of gas is quite the issue in the US these days. What to do?

Make it a game, of course.

Wired writes on hypermilers, people who compete in getting the most mileage:

Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It’s a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He’s getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.

He’s a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. “It’s like a videogame,” he says. “Can I beat my new high score?”

As I read it, “game” here implies all the features in my game definition, but it can also be described as an attitude, a way of seeing the activity of driving the car as an opportunity for optimizing a strategy, with the optimization in itself being pleasurable.

I have been thinking about describing it in this possibly pretentious way:

Games are the poetry of action.

Meaning: In the same way that poetry has a focus on the qualities of language itself rather than on conveying meaning (Jakobson), games have a focus on the qualities of action itself rather than on what the action can achieve. Or put more simply: games are autotelic (performed for their own sake), like poetry is autotelic.