After another glorious Bear in Berlin (for Danish Dogme Film "Italiensk for begyndere") yesterday, can it be a surprise that the Dogme movement has now made it to the Game world? Gamasutra in beginning of February featured the article Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers by some Ernest Adams. Even includes 10 Dogme rules for game making....this is one of them:
4. There shall be no knights, elves, dwarves or dragons. Nor shall there be any wizards, wenches, bards, bartenders, golems, giants, clerics, necromancers, thieves, gods, angels, demons, sorceresses, undead bodies or body parts (mummified or decaying), Nazis, Russians, spies, mercenaries, space marines, stormtroopers, star pilots, humanoid robots, evil geniuses, mad scientists, or carnivorous aliens. And no freakin' vampires.

Justification: Self-evident. If you find that doing without all of the foregoing makes it impossible to build your game, you are not creative enough to call yourself a game designer. As proof, note that it does not exclude any of the following: queens, leprechauns, Masai warriors, ghosts, succubi, Huns, mandarins, wisewomen, grizzly bears, hamsters, sea monsters, vegetarian aliens, terrorists, firefighters, generals, gangsters, detectives, magicians, spirit mediums, shamans, whores, and lacrosse players. One of the games that made it to the finals of the first Independent Games Festival was about birds called blue-footed boobies, so forget you ever heard of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien and get to work.

Hmmh, I wonder if I should step down from my position as wizard in StoryMOO and instead go by the name of Armilla, the Masai Queen?

posted by Lisbeth at 16:22

This place still looks like a construction site, but will have to leave the finer building details to later. Just reading Beth Kolko
"Building a World with words: The Narrative Reality of Virtual Environments" - turns out that aside all the usual babble of the political/culturally/pedagogically liberating possibilities of MOO space, she actually analyses the MOO environment from a rhetoric and narrative point of view. She makes a distinction between mapped and amorpheus virtual space (i.e. here the realistically rendered rooms and rooms intented to provide "a formless space" for interaction) which I like - and should be of use for ACLA paper. Btw, thanks to Frank and his illustriousFragment.nl (previously Webbah) site for providing me with the correct URL to Kolko's article - the link on her own homepage is 404. And it's like the zillioneth researcher homepage I've been visiting today that hasn't been updated since who-knows-when. Somehow it strikes me as a bit odd, that people who devote their entire academic life to researching online life can't be bothered to update their own vitae...
posted by Lisbeth at 18:00

Well, here we go - my days of weblogging has begun. After a day of constantly coming across great resource sites, I decided that now is the time. I'm drowning in bookmarks and my mental notes to them. So from now on I promise - myself not the least - to record my webwanderings and whatever research here.
Thanks to Jill for introducing me to this.
posted by Lisbeth at 17:53