This is new to me…and oh…how beautiful!!! I’m truely touched!
”
It’s just…beautiful! Anti war graffiti in such a ‘reality-like’ war game? Amazing! And as they state:
and
“Reality is up for grabs. The real needs to be remade by us.”
I’m such a sucker for movements like this!!! Gives me so much hope! And I’m going to stop now before I get all sappy!!
Will Wright (omg I’ve become a groupie haven’t I?) spoke at BAFTA on “The Future of Games” and David Hayward was generous enough to blog his great notes (bless him!). Inspiring, as expected! “They teach systemic thinking. Players learn to analyse and play systems of rules. They can also teach us to navigate the future. They could teach kids to think long term instead of short term.” Wooo haaa!!! But you know…sometimes I’m worried that we’re all just a bit too optimistic.
I’ve been a fan of The Long Now Foundation ever since I was introduced to it! For those who don’t know:
“The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”
They also host a series of seminars which are now available through podcast (yay!). Today I finally got around to listening to the Brian Eno and Will Wright seminar. What an inspirational force!! The combination of Brian Eno’s generative music (he mentions Wind Chimes as an example!!) and Will Wright’s Spore was just enlightening, amusing and extremely well…cozy, actually! At the end I started daydreaming about having them both around for dinner to discuss some more!
They’re attitude about their creations is pretty much summed up with Brian Eno’s “We make the seeds not the forest” comment. They were both really charming about their fascination of what they could learn from their fans. Eno has a great story about the re-release of “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” and how the record company came up with the unoriginal idea of adding some remixes. Apparently, David Byrne came up with the idea to instead make some content available for fans to remix themselves, which proved to be a big success! Yay! Ofcourse it would have been much better to have a visual handy when Will Wright was talking about Spore, but his words and mind are intoxicating nonetheless! Interesting to hear that he actually makes’real life’ models of his worlds! I’ve always felt really bad about knocking The Sims Online, because I truely am a Will Wright fan! But where The Sims gave the ‘player’ more creative freedom, The Sims Online did not. And I’m sure that has more to do with something he talks about here – simplistic and few rules. The Sims Online has way too many rules that just leave too little freedom for ‘fun’ – whereas The Sims, does not.
There was just so much interesting going on at this seminar – and I was busy chopping up lunch for the office while listening through it – so I couldn’t take any notes. Hearing Eno and Wright’s discussion on the verb ‘play’ was a true adrenaline booster! I only wish they could’ve gone on to discuss some more! There’s loads more worth mentioning like the creation of stories and narratives – and painting!!!
Personally I’m filled with positive adrenaline juices that have eluded me for some time now. Instead of treading myself more deeply into the dark depressive cold swamp and focusing all my energy in ALL the wrong places I’m starting to glimpse a path to dry land! Yay!!!
PS
Fredrik!!! I think you’d really enjoy John Rendon’s ‘Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short’ – just listened to it and I was moved! Think you’d enjoy it!
What joy!!! Definitely a welcome presence!
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and just a MUST READ!
I’ve just read his post “Fun vs. Engagement: The Case of the Great Zoombinis” where I was introduced to Scott Osterweil’s at The Education Arcade and his captivating podcast.
It’s so good to see discussions and research about learning and games beyond ‘just’ simulations. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for simulation games, but I do believe there is a clearer learning power in actual gameplay. And ofcourse this has been a topic for a long time – I guess I just understand the language so much better!
“What we did when we started designing Zoobinis was to try to think about our own experience with the mathematics of the game and try to access our own learning of it — trying to remember what it was like to encounter the subject in school or thinking about how we’d use the subject in our daily lives and try to identify times when we had been playful with the concepts in the past. In fact, most of us when we are trying to master something we find ways to be playful to it and in accessing our own playful approach to the material what we were really doing was finding the game that was inherent in the mathematics. Instead of putting math in the game, we tried to find the game in the math” – Osterweil
The excellent David Edery has compiled a list of why User-Generated Content is good for the gaming industry! I’m not even going to bother to comment – the list speaks for itself!
Mr. Bogost has written yet another brilliant post on the media coverage, which really needs to be read in full – I’ll cut’n’paste the summary here though:
“Most of all, I am deeply worried by this culture of ineffability, a culture that would rather not talk about anything at all for fear that it might make someone uncomfortable. This trend descends from Theodor Adorno’s argument that the holocaust becomes “transformed, with something of the horror removed” when represented in art, thus his famous statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. These events are considered “ineffable” — unspeakable, unrepresentable. It is a tired sentiment that we must move beyond. Of course topics like 9/11 should make us uncomfortable. Of course Columbine should make us uncomfortable. But that is no excuse to put these issues away in a drawer, waiting for some miraculous solution to spring forth and resolve them for us. If we do so, history is much more likely to forget them. I don’t care if we make videogames, films, novels, poems, sidewalk art, cupcakes, or pelts as a way to interrogate our world. But we must not fear that world.”
I’m literally on my way out the door from work but I just had to comment on this! By the way, is it nerdy not wanting to leave work on time because you wanna finish blogging? I’m beyond hope now aren’t ?!
But just look at this New Ties project:
The NEW TIES project is growing an artificial society using computer
programming
that develops agents–or adaptive, artificial beings–that have
independent
behaviours. The project is the first of its kind to develop a
large-scale and
highly complex computer-based society. The project’s results
may have larger
implications for information technologies design,
evolutionary computing
systems, artificial intelligence and linguistics.The project’s goal is
to evolve an artificial society capable of
exploring and understanding its
environment through cooperation and
interaction. The agents are sufficiently
complex and their environment
demanding, which enables them to develop a
communication system to learn how
to cooperate and to adapt.
Completely stolen from Mark Wallace’s blogg!
How cool isn’t this?!!!
So...Games For Health is hosting an event right before E3 (May 9th if you’re in the area). They’ve made a promotional video which I think deserves some attention here. You’ve got to admit that this is a brilliant initiative.
I’ve started my own secret campaign here in Bergen! I’m sending e-mails to different departments at the university on different games and topics I think are relevant to them. I very seldom get any response, ofcourse! But what do I have to loose?
Stumbled on to this great HipTech Blog which features this great video!! It’s a demonstration of how a table-top touch-panel and speech recognition could function for Warcraft III! It’s called ‘DiamondTouch’ and it’s by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratiories – yet another example of how computer games are contributing to innovation, if you ask me!! Enjoy!!
Remember What The Dormouse Said 