30 Great Gaming Geeks
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SCAN | Journal of Media Arts Culture
Scan Journal vol 7 number 1 april 2010 Fable 2 as Simulation, Game and Narrative: A Contest Adam Ruch The study of a videogame is a complicated undertaking. One must address many features of the artefact, ranging from story and narrative, visual aesthetic, and musical score, to gameplay mechanics and interface. Peter Molyneux's Fable 2 (2008) here will provide a case study for many of these features, as its mechanics design push its narrative to the edge of coherence. The position this game occupies between algorithmic and expository makes it a fertile area for examining new ways of "story-telling", including the use of narrative architectures, database narrative, or interactive narrative. Whatever term we apply, we must continue to apply stringent critical awareness to the material itself, as is the aim here. As this article will assume prior knowledge of Fable 2, it is highly recommended that the reader at least be familiar with the material here1 before proceeding. Better yet, play the game! Fable 2 is a classic example of the tendency of Peter Molyneux's games to err on the side of over-ambition. Molyneux is well-known for his bombastic press releases and zealous language when describing the mechanics of his games. Words like "completely" riddle his speeches, as well as "revolutionary" or "totally new". (Molyneux, Peter Molyneux Interview 2008) (Molyneux 2009) (Kikizo 2004) (Wilcox 2008) Molyneux's games tend to focus on "revolutionary" mechanics to create gameplay experiences (Black & White, Fable and Fable 2 all support increasingly dynamic AI features, for example). Fable 2 relies on its mechanics to create interesting gameplay, rather than on an original narrative. -
'Littlebigplanet' Wins Big at Video Game Awards 26 March 2009, by DERRIK J
'LittleBigPlanet' wins big at video game awards 26 March 2009, By DERRIK J. LANG , AP Entertainment Writer "Fallout 3" lead writer Emil Pagliarulo during his acceptance speech. "To all the nerds growing up in South Boston, don't play hockey. Don't join Little League. Stay in your room, read your Lloyd Alexander and play 'Dungeons and Dragons.' It all works out in the end." Selected by a jury of game creators, the Game Developers Choice Awards honor the best games of the past year. The lively ninth annual ceremony was hosted by "Psychonauts " and "Brutal Legend" developer Tim Schafer. The show was capped off with the debut teaser trailer for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," the upcoming sequel to the best-selling game of 2007. Other winners at the ceremony at the Moscone Video game enthusiasts attend the Game Developers Convention Center were Ubisoft Montreal's "Prince Conference Wednesday, March 25, 2009, in San of Persia" for best visual art, Ready at Dawn Francisco. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Studios' "God of War: Chains of Olympus" for best handheld game, EA Redwood Shores' "Dead Space" for best audio and 2D Boy's "World of Goo" for best downloadable game. (AP) -- "LittleBigPlanet" sacked the competition to win four trophies at the Game Developers Choice "Video Games Live" concert series co-founder Awards. Tommy Tallarico was awarded the ambassador trophy. Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, co- Developed by Media Molecule, the cutsey founders of "Rock Band" developer Harmonix, PlayStation 3 adventure game which allows received the pioneer award. "Metal Gear Solid" players to create and share their own levels was creator Hideo Kojima was bestowed with the honored for best game design, debut, technology lifetime achievement award. -
Video Games and the Mobilization of Anxiety and Desire
PLAYING THE CRISIS: VIDEO GAMES AND THE MOBILIZATION OF ANXIETY AND DESIRE BY ROBERT MEJIA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Kent A. Ono, Chair Professor John Nerone Professor Clifford Christians Professor Robert A. Brookey, Northern Illinois University ABSTRACT This is a critical cultural and political economic analysis of the video game as an engine of global anxiety and desire. Attempting to move beyond conventional studies of the video game as a thing-in-itself, relatively self-contained as a textual, ludic, or even technological (in the narrow sense of the word) phenomenon, I propose that gaming has come to operate as an epistemological imperative that extends beyond the site of gaming in itself. Play and pleasure have come to affect sites of culture and the structural formation of various populations beyond those conceived of as belonging to conventional gaming populations: the workplace, consumer experiences, education, warfare, and even the practice of politics itself, amongst other domains. Indeed, the central claim of this dissertation is that the video game operates with the same political and cultural gravity as that ascribed to the prison by Michel Foucault. That is, just as the prison operated as the discursive site wherein the disciplinary imaginary was honed, so too does digital play operate as that discursive site wherein the ludic imperative has emerged. To make this claim, I have had to move beyond the conventional theoretical frameworks utilized in the analysis of video games. -
Art Worlds for Art Games Edited
Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association Vol 7(11): 41-60 http://loading.gamestudies.ca An Art World for Artgames Felan Parker York University [email protected] Abstract Drawing together the insights of game studies, aesthetics, and the sociology of art, this article examines the legitimation of ‘artgames’ as a category of indie games with particularly high cultural and artistic status. Passage (PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, 2007) serves as a case study, demonstrating how a diverse range of factors and processes, including a conducive ‘opportunity space’, changes in independent game production, distribution, and reception, and the emergence of a critical discourse, collectively produce an assemblage or ‘art world’ (Baumann, 2007a; 2007b) that constitutes artgames as legitimate art. Author Keywords Artgames; legitimation; art world; indie games; critical discourse; authorship; Passage; Rohrer Introduction The seemingly meteoric rise to widespread recognition of ‘indie’ digital games in recent years is the product of a much longer process made up of many diverse elements. It is generally accepted as a given that indie games now play an important role in the industry and culture of digital games, but just over a decade ago there was no such category in popular discourse – independent game production went by other names (freeware, shareware, amateur, bedroom) and took place in insular, autonomous communities of practice focused on particular game-creation tools or genres, with their own distribution networks, audiences, and systems of evaluation, only occasionally connected with a larger marketplace. Even five years ago, the idea of indie games was still burgeoning and becoming stable, and it is the historical moment around 2007 that I will address in this article. -
Programming and Engagement Coordinator Kathleen Lacey, SWPACA Awards Coordinator and Michael K
#SWPACA17 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association 38th Annual Conference February 15–18, 2017 — Albuquerque, New Mexico Welcome 2017 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference Bienvenidos a Albuquerque! Welcome to the 38th Annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference—we are so pleased that you have joined us. We look forward to sharing the week with the diverse group of scholars who join us here in Albuquerque this year. We have a full complement of panels this year, drawn from our 71 subject areas and ranging in topic from adaptation studies to zombie culture. We hope you will have opportunity to sample a variety of these offerings. In particular, we would like to highlight the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary at this year’s conference. You can locate the Grateful Dead in Grand Pavilion IV all week, where they will be holding 14 sessions over the course of four days. Join them as they consider the intersections between the band and cinema, philosophy, and literature, among other topics. To further commemorate this anniversary, David Gans will perform on Friday night with Albuquerque's own Dead cover band Let It Grow, at Low Spirits (2823 2nd Street NW). Doors open at 8:00pm, and the show starts at 9:00. Thank you, Nick Meriwether and all of the Caucus faithful, for your continued contributions to our organization. We are excited to announce our inaugural SWPACA film series, taking place on Thursday and Friday in Grand Pavilion I-II. Invited filmmakers will be screening their original work, with question-and-answer opportunities to follow. -
ACADEMY of INTERACTIVE ARTS and SCIENCES (AIAS) to PRESENT PETER MOLYNEUX with COVETED HALL of FAME AWARD at 7Th ANNUAL INTERACTIVE ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
For Immediate Release ACADEMY OF INTERACTIVE ARTS AND SCIENCES (AIAS) TO PRESENT PETER MOLYNEUX WITH COVETED HALL OF FAME AWARD AT 7th ANNUAL INTERACTIVE ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS LOS ANGELES, CA – (March 2, 2004) – The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS), the professional organization of the interactive entertainment industry, today announced that it will present Peter Molyneux, Managing Director, Lionhead Studios with its illustrious Hall of Fame award. The Hall of Fame award will be presented to Mr. Molyneux during the Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, which will be held at Rain in the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas on March 4. Peter Molyneux is one of the best-known names in the international world of computer games. He co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987 and created a new genre of computer games, “the god game” with the release of Populous. Since then Peter has been responsible for a string of massive selling games including Powermonger, Theme Park, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper. Cumulative sales of his games are now approaching the ten million mark worldwide. In 1997 Peter left Bullfrog Productions to form a new games development company Lionhead Studios. The company’s first game Black & White was released to wide spread critical acclaim in April 2001 and sales currently top the two million mark. Peter is recognized as one of the computer games industry’s most articulate and eloquent speakers on the subject of the development of computer games. He has spoken at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the British Film Institute, ICA (London), the Tate Gallery and the Dortmund Museum of History and Culture. -
High-Performance Play: the Making of Machinima
High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima Henry Lowood Stanford University <DRAFT. Do not cite or distribute. To appear in: Videogames and Art: Intersections and Interactions, Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.), Intellect Books (UK), 2005. Please contact author, [email protected], for permission.> Abstract: Machinima is the making of animated movies in real time through the use of computer game technology. The projects that launched machinima embedded gameplay in practices of performance, spectatorship, subversion, modification, and community. This article is concerned primarily with the earliest machinima projects. In this phase, DOOM and especially Quake movie makers created practices of game performance and high-performance technology that yielded a new medium for linear storytelling and artistic expression. My aim is not to answer the question, “are games art?”, but to suggest that game-based performance practices will influence work in artistic and narrative media. Biography: Henry Lowood is Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University and co-Principal Investigator for the How They Got Game Project in the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. A historian of science and technology, he teaches Stanford’s annual course on the history of computer game design. With the collaboration of the Internet Archive and the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, he is currently working on a project to develop The Machinima Archive, a permanent repository to document the history of Machinima moviemaking. A body of research on the social and cultural impacts of interactive entertainment is gradually replacing the dismissal of computer games and videogames as mindless amusement for young boys. There are many good reasons for taking computer games1 seriously. -
Backgrounder: AIIDE 07 Invited Speakers
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 445 Burgess Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 (650) 328-3123 www.aaai.org For press inquiries only, contact: Sara Hedberg (206) 232-1657 (office) [email protected] Backgrounder: AIIDE 07 Invited Speakers 1 of 6 AiLive's LiveMove and LiveCombat Wolff Daniel Dobson and John Funge (AiLive Inc.) This talk describes the successfully productization of the state-of-the-art statistical machine learning technology to create LiveMove and LiveCombat. LiveMove is a groundbreaking artificial intelligence product that enables the Wii Remote to learn. Instead of complicated programming, developers need only take a few minutes to train Wii controllers through examples. Nintendo now sublicenses and promotes LiveMove to Wii developers around the world. Our other product, LiveCombat, gives developers and players the power to build AI characters that learn how to behave by observing the actions of human players. AI characters learn in seconds to be trusted companions or deadly foes. The talk will include many anecdotes and observations from lessons learned (often the hard way) along the way. Wolff Daniel Dobson received his PhD in computer science from Northwestern University, specializing in artificial intelligence and intelligent user interfaces. At Visual Concepts Entertainment, he constructed emotional behavior on NBA2K for Dreamcast, and then became colead for artificial intelligence on NBA2K1 (garnering a Metacritic.com score of 93). For the past 5 years he has worked for AiLive Inc., a startup devoted to next-generation artificial intelligence in games. Working as a designer, producer, engineer, and artist Wolff has been instrumental in developing two commercial products, LiveMove and LiveCombat, that bring groundbreaking real-time machine learning technology to the computer entertainment industry. -
Trafalgar Square Publishing Spring 2016 Don’T Miss Contents
Trafalgar Square Publishing Spring 2016 Don’t Miss Contents Animals/Pets .....................................................................120, 122–124, 134–135 28 Planting Design Architecture .................................................................................... 4–7, 173–174 for Dry Gardens Art .......................................................8–9, 10, 12, 18, 25–26 132, 153, 278, 288 Autobiography/Biography ..............37–38, 41, 105–106, 108–113, 124, 162–169, 179–181, 183, 186, 191, 198, 214, 216, 218, 253, 258–259, 261, 263–264, 267, 289, 304 Body, Mind, Spirit ....................................................................................... 33–34 Business ................................................................................................... 254–256 Classics ....................................................................................43–45, 47–48, 292 Cooking ......................................................1, 11, 14–15, 222–227, 229–230–248 Crafts & Hobbies .............................................................................21–24, 26–27 85 The Looking Design ......................................................................................................... 19–20 Glass House Erotica .................................................................................................... 102–103 Essays .............................................................................................................. 292 Fiction ...............................................42, -
More Than a Game
More than a game prelims.p65 1 13/02/03, 13:59 For Diane and Eve – the people who really matter prelims.p65 2 13/02/03, 13:59 More than a game The computer game as fictional form Barry Atkins Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave prelims.p65 3 13/02/03, 13:59 Copyright © Barry Atkins 2003 The right of Barry Atkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6364 7 hardback 0 7190 6365 5 paperback First published 2003 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs www.freelancepublishingservices.co.uk Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow prelims.p65 4 13/02/03, 13:59 Contents Acknowledgements page vi 1 The computer game as fictional form 1 The postmodern temptation 8 Reading game-fictions 21 2 Fantastically real: reading Tomb Raider 27 Lara Croft: -
Reality Is Broken. Game Designers Can Fix It.”
GAME INDUSTRY VETERANS REVEAL 67 TFORIPS INDIE GAME DEVELOPMENT, LAUNCH, & MARKETING CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................4 DESIGN ..............................................................................................................................................6 #1 ..................................................................................................................................................7 #2 ..................................................................................................................................................8 #3 ..................................................................................................................................................9 #4 ................................................................................................................................................ 10 #5 ................................................................................................................................................ 11 #6 ................................................................................................................................................ 12 #7 ................................................................................................................................................ 13 #8 ............................................................................................................................................... -
British Film Institute Report & Financial Statements 2006
British Film Institute Report & Financial Statements 2006 BECAUSE FILMS INSPIRE... WONDER There’s more to discover about film and television British Film Institute through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning Report & Financial resources are here to inspire you. Statements 2006 Contents The mission about the BFI 3 Great expectations Governors’ report 5 Out of the past Archive strategy 7 Walkabout Cultural programme 9 Modern times Director’s report 17 The commitments key aims for 2005/06 19 Performance Financial report 23 Guys and dolls how the BFI is governed 29 Last orders Auditors’ report 37 The full monty appendices 57 The mission ABOUT THE BFI The BFI (British Film Institute) was established in 1933 to promote greater understanding, appreciation and access to fi lm and television culture in Britain. In 1983 The Institute was incorporated by Royal Charter, a copy of which is available on request. Our mission is ‘to champion moving image culture in all its richness and diversity, across the UK, for the benefi t of as wide an audience as possible, to create and encourage debate.’ SUMMARY OF ROYAL CHARTER OBJECTIVES: > To establish, care for and develop collections refl ecting the moving image history and heritage of the United Kingdom; > To encourage the development of the art of fi lm, television and the moving image throughout the United Kingdom; > To promote the use of fi lm and television culture as a record of contemporary life and manners; > To promote access to and appreciation of the widest possible range of British and world cinema; and > To promote education about fi lm, television and the moving image generally, and their impact on society.