One should not fail to mention that esteemed former PhD student, long-time Age of Kings show-off and much besides, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, handed in his massively multi-page PhD dissertation on games and education quite recently.

We who are about to write salute you.

Update: Simon's timely thesis will be the third game dissertation from our center. The two first were Lisbeth Klastrup's Toward a Poetics of Virtual Worlds and Jesper Juul's Half-Real (warning: Pretty big PDFs).
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 28.2.05 0 comments  

Are you a techie? I want to combine two video signals - one shows players in a couch, the other shows on-screen game action. And I want to do it with a minimum of post-recording hassle (I don't care so much about the complexity of the set-up).
Right now, what I'm going for is two cameras - and then synching the two signals in Premiere and showing both signals at once in the final movie (as shown in the illustration).
If anyone has better ideas I would just love to hear them.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 28.2.05 2 comments  

We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the conference Aesthetics of Play, to be held at the University of Bergen 14-15 October 2005. The conference is hosted by the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, and is arranged in collaboration with Norway's first game-art exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall.

We invite papers that address the diversity of cultural meanings as they are expressed in computer game technology and software. The notion of 'aesthetics' in this context is a broad one, encompassing the formal structures and audiovisual characteristics of games and game technologies as well as the wider epistemological, cultural and political dimensions of the gaming experience. Our aim is to contribute to the continued development of a cultural aesthetics of computer games, allowing us to better understand their role as mediators of cultural change. We especially want to encourage contributions that offer analytical 'close-playings' of particular games or genres. We invite a broad range of game-centred approaches, hoping to attract a rich mixture of highly focussed and particular investigations as well as broader more speculative work.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

- Game architectures. The analysis of formal, technological and narrative conventions of computer games
- The representations of society in contemporary game-worlds
- The epistemology of computer games
- The audiovisual aesthetics of computer games
- Theories and methods of game analysis
- Aesthetics and industrial imperatives

Abstracts of maximum 300 words should be submitted by 18 April, 2005 via the conference website http://www.aestheticsofplay.org.

Notice of acceptance will be sent out by 29 April, 2005.
Presenters will be asked to submit the full papers by 16 September, 2005.

All papers will be published in the online conference proceedings.
For more information visit the conference website at http:/www.aestheticsofplay.org or contact:

Eli Lea (eli.lea@uib.no) for practical or administrative inquiries
Rune Klevjer (rune.klevjer@infomedia.uib.no) for academic inquiries
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 25.2.05 0 comments  

From the online adventures of Garrg the Warlock (Shadowmoon server).

Yep, that's me, the adventurous Garrg. Rejoining my transludic lighthouse quest I have set out across the sprawling world of Azeroth - the picture shows me taking a brief rest from my attempt to swim around the entire continent. Join me, water lovers.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 25.2.05 1 comments  

Denmark has a new minister of immigration, refugees, and integration. She recently campained from a moving hotdog van.

...
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 18.2.05 0 comments  

Back in October I reported on the progress of our text-book project (very dated info here).
Now, I'm thrilled to report that we'll be signing a contract with a major publisher.
Final manuscript will be due some time this summer. Yep, book-making is a slow and careful art.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 14.2.05 1 comments  

The Digital Arts and Cultures 2005 conference CFP was just put online:

The 6th DAC conference invites critical examinations of the field of digital arts and culture, which challenge existing paradigms. We call for papers which examine both theoretical and hands-on approaches to digital experiences and experience design. Since the inaugural DAC in 1998 much has happened, and research has matured from early investigations into the problematic nature of new media towards questions of emergent dynamics, user centered design and various forms of interactivity. At the same time, the realization has grown that users of digital media not only are active participants, but also have to be taken into account at all stages of the design and production of digital experiences
How do practitioners (programmers, artists, designers etc.) cater for this kind of active and demanding user? What kinds of experiences can we create? How can these experiences inform us? How do we as academics analyse and evaluate digital experiences? DAC has always been interested in exploring the ways in which digital media do things that traditional media cannot. We believe that the focus on ‘experience’ in DAC 2005 will illuminate the possibilities of digital media beyond the functional perspectives of ‘usability’. What are the aesthetic and cultural implications of digital design as experience?

- Read the whole thing
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 14.2.05 0 comments  

Little did the inventors of the internet realize that the most valuable function their creation would allow would be the putting online of obscure manuals that always get lost in paper form (great when you need to decalcify your iron) and the ability to print old bills from phone companies (essential when doing accounts). But those two functions are quite priceless.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 12.2.05 0 comments  

I remember being scared by the Lovecraftian horrors of the original Alone in the Dark game.
Today, film reviewers are scared of the recent adaptation. But for different reasons:

• Washington Post: "Supremely idiotic."
• San Fransisco Cronicle: "So mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality. "
• The New York Times: "So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash. "
• Entertainment Weekly: "Far be it from me to dismiss a man's effort (Uwe Boll) in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value."
• The Hollywood Reporter: "One of those rare instances of a movie being so bad ... it's still really bad."
• New York Daily News: "No better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can."

And they say games don't make for good cinematic material...
See more reviews at Metacritic.

posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 9.2.05 0 comments  

I'm not angry.
Actually, I expected it.

I once spent a multitude of hours trying to cancel my AC2 subscription. It was very, very hard.
And so today, I wanted to cancel my SWG account.

It can't be done.
It's not possible.
There is no way to do it.

At the SWG website there are instructions:

- Launch Star Wars Galaxies and log into the game using your Station name and password
- At the auto patcher screen, click on the Edit Account option
- Select the Cancel Subscription option
- A new screen will appear that asks you to confirm your cancellation. Select Yes or No, and then click on Submit

It's not true.
It's false.
It's counter-factual.

So I've emailed them. More reports as the war continues.

posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 4.2.05 0 comments  

The (very) right-wing Danish People's Party today draw upon the work of the nationalist Danish Association which seems to have pooled its resources with a group of Norwegian racists. The Danish People's Party wield huge influence over the present DK government which seems set to win the parliamentary election this Tuesday.
Even the weather today is quite awful.

posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 4.2.05 0 comments  

Carrying on my interest in trust and signaling, I just finished reading Amotz and Avishag Zahavi's "The Handicap Principle".
Briefly, the handicap principle is the idea that to send a trustworthy signal one sometimes has to accept a handicap. Taking on this handicap proves to the receiver of the signal that the transmitted statement is true.
For instance, in order to convince a skeptical observer that you're a world-class swimmer you may have to get wet. You could choose to just say it ("Seriously, I am a world-class swimmer"). But that signal would not be reliable.
Similarly, the Zahavis argue that the male peacock lugs around his beautiful tail (handicapping himself since he is more easily spotted, less agile etc.) in order to reliably signal to the female that he is made of strong genetic material. He could have "told" her in other ways, but the tail is an unfakable signal.

There's a decent intro to the theory of honest signaling here.

Now, Geoffrey Miller, reviewing the book for Evolution and Human Behaviour said it well:

"Depending on your viewpoint, they [the Zahavis] act like (1) dangerous hyper-adaptationists even more extreme than Steven Jay Gould?s worst caricatures of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, weaving just-so stories out of thin air, (2) harmlessly entertaining, pseudo-scientific fabulists in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, (3) classical Victorian natural historians (somehow displaced to contemporary Tel-Aviv University) using the same hypothetico-deductive methods as Darwin himself, or (4) ardent, creative biologists who, whatever one?s qualms about their methods and examples, deliver a revitalizing shock to animal communication theory, sexual selection theory, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and evolutionary psychology. "

Miller adds, as I would have done from the comfort of my layman's armchair: "I favor this last judgment".

Anyway, many aspects of the book are fascinating (as are the author's regular jibes at colleagues who spend too much time arguing against the "obvious" using fancy mathematical models and too little time in the real world).
But two sections struck me as particularly interesting. My limited understanding of evolutionary biology had it that there are essentially two complementary explanations of cooperation among animals (discounting group selection theories that are frowned upon).
The first is kin selection (and the related idea of inclusive fitness). Here, the idea is that individuals should behave altruistically to the extent that other individuals share their genes (or to the extent that other individuals are likely to share your genes). And what-do-you-know? Parents often care about their offspring.

The second is reciprocal altruism. Here, the individual is expected to be altruistic to the extent that he or she expects this altruism to be reciprocated in the future. So, a vampire bat should share its meal with another bat if it believes that this other bat will reciprocate the favor. And Hallejujah! This seems to be the case.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Zahavis consider both theories to be flawed. Kin selection, the Zahavis argue, is really just group selection among relatives. It may be true that an individual "would like" to increase its inclusive fitness, but wouldn't it just be much better if your brother did the work instead of you? So, kin selection is vulnerable to social parasitism (the bane of group selection theories).
Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, seeks to explain something which does not really warrant such fancy models, the Zahavis feel. Many individuals gain prestige by performing altruistic acts, which increasestheir standing in the hierarchy, which increases their reproductive success. Altruism, then, is a signal of superiority - look!, I can share my food, that's how strong a bird I am (marry me!).

Very interesting even if I don't entirely know what to think.


posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 3.2.05 0 comments  

The good people of Digra would like me to write and talk about The problem of other players - in-game collaboration as collective action in June.

posted by Jonas Heide Smith  # 3.2.05 0 comments