I swear the people in the office next to me must think I’m sort of freak!! I keep howling out with laughter!! Yeah…motivation is quite low when everyone else is on Easter vacation! But I just love this stuff!!!

Lego Counter Strike 1:

Great fun!!!

I’m re-reading Ren Reynold’s “Intellectual Property Rights in Community Based Video Games”
and I had to take a little thinking breather, because I’m trying to get my head around the whole ‘arthor & work’ issue. I’m having a hard time agreeing with the unbelievably smart Mr. Reynolds when he states:

“The alternative position – that of Player as Author, is similarly difficult to sustain. If one is to assert that a player is the Author of a player-character, then under the present codifictaion of Intellectual Property law, the player characters must be a Work.
Player-characters require human endeavour in their creation and development, but while endeavour is a necessary condition of a Work, it is not sufficient. A Work must also be original and recorded in an appropriate form.
But the originality of any player-character is difficult to sustain because while player-characters do have unique elements e.g., their name. Other elements are simply field with a set and finite range of values, such that it is more than likely that for any given character there exists a digital-doppelganger in all but name
Thus there seems no defence in law for the position of a player as the Author of a player-character as player-characters are not Works”

My initial thoughts are “What bollocks!” – but as I’m playing around with the words, history, experience, individuality, story, narrative (still playing around with it actually – so I’ll get back with a good argument soon) – I started thinking about the word ‘digital-doppelganger’. What an odd choice of words for an Englishman, I thought and shared my amusement with Mr. Delicious who responded with a link to Wikipedia which gave me a few minutes of chuckles! Wikipedia is just sooo geekily charming! There are just no limits to what resources can be put into it!

I mean there’s the ‘famous reports of the Doppelgänger phenomenon’ where you can find the useful information that “Abraham Lincoln told his wife, while shaving after his election as president, that he saw an image of himself in the distance fade away while shaving in front of a mirror. He believed this to mean he would be elected to a second term but would not survive’.

And here’s the one that really got me going!! ‘The doppelgänger phenomenon in popular culture’ and there’s a list of literature, film, television, VIDEO GAMES (yay) and other media. I ofcourse had to have a look through this list and some I recognise the piece, but can’t think of doppelgängers and some I’m just REALLY suprised are in here!!!
“Neighbours episode “The Joy Flight”, Janelle briefly sees Dylan’s doppelganger when he is involved in the plane crash”. He he…I remember Neighbours!!

So I guess I’m thinking…should I maybe for the first time ever contribute to Wikipedia starting a list of academic papers mentioning the phenomena?! Or maybe I should start my own definition of what a’ digital-doppelgänger’ is. But that’s kinda hard to do when I don’t believe in them!!

Yeah…I’ll shut up now and get back to work!

I’ve always enjoyed Aleks’ Guardian Game Blog pieces so I’m suprised that I haven’t picked up on this earlier, but I guess some things just need to be unnoticed till it’s the right time!!

Anyways!! She’s a PhD student at the Department of Psychology at University of Surrey and she’s “examining the relationship between communication patterns and group processes in the diffusion of information through an online community” and she is “currently exploring the social networks of virtual world Second Life, which displays unique, emergent social properties reflective of offline social life” – EXCELLENT!!!! ;)

Her blog is: Social Sim

The words are from a Videoludica interview of the amazing Ian Bogost, author of ‘Unit Operations’.
I’ve been a fan of Mr. Bogost and Water Cooler Games ever since I was introduced to game studies and I truely can’t wait to read this! I mean, you just know it’s gonna be great when you read such truely inspirational words like:
“Unit operations are expressive techniques that build meaning out of configurations of encapsulated parts, or ‘units’. In computing, unit operational expression is akin to procedurality. In games, we usually call them rules. But I wanted a more general concept for discrete, interlocking units of meaning. The book is fundamentally about comparative criticism, and unit operations is my attempt at a concept that allows critics to read literature, film, games, art, and other media as processes.”
I am sooo jealous of students coming into computer games studies now! There’s just so much exciting going on – it’s going to be such an adventure looking at the different ways of looking at games and their true meaning (if there is one – he he!). And I’m kinda hoping that several different academic disciplines at the university will be looking at games.

Found the interview through information guru Tony Walsh – thanks yet again!