Play’s Republic

C|Net has covered this before (and I know Micha has mentioned Cantu in class), but it remains lots of fun. Chicago chef Homaru Cantu is known for his witty, technology-driven experiments with food. This is play in its most basic sense: Indeed, the lowest levels on Maslow’s hierarchy are often the sites […]

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I’ve several posts forthcoming, as well as responses to some of your posts. For the moment, I wanted to direct you to a (very accessible, non-theoretical) article from Forbes about Von Neumann’s ‘game theory,’ to which I had alluded on Tuesday.
If we’ve not yet discussed your research paper/project, please contact me ASAP or come […]

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As he lays out his argument for video games as semiotic domains of active learning and fluid subjectivities, James Paul Gee, in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, makes frequent reference to Pikmin, a 2001 release for the Gamecube from Nintendo, designed by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto.
The following Youtube clips […]

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This, from the washingtonpost.com:
Tenleytown’s Fantom Comics, best known as a place to stop in for graphic novels, is now hosting midnight video game parties on Saturday night with snacks and drinks. There will be different games and systems every week on the shop’s 42-inch plasma TV, and tonight’s vintage selection is Street Fighter, and the […]

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Just FYI:  Our site (and thousands of others) will be offline and entirely unavailable this Saturday February 24th from roughly 4AM to 9AM.  If you’re like me, and spend Saturday mornings doing work on your laptop at the Mocha Hut, you’ll want to plan ahead.

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One of the many things we didn’t discuss Tuesday is the play epitomized by pre-Lenten carnival, a week-long festival that figures heavily in the lives of folk in many countries, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and even some regions in West Africa.  Carnivals typically culminate, as on Tuesday, in a day devoted to the annihilation […]

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Apparently dazed from a 24–hour Moonlighting marathon, I forgot to include the endnotes and bibliography to the Kline et al. reading for this week.  I’ve posted it in the additional readings section; you can download it here, too:  Footnotes and Bibliography, Kline.

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We’re snowed out.  No class:  The University has closed as of 4PM.
If you’re looking for something to do during the course time, here’s a quick-and-dirty version of the assignment I was going to give you this PM: 
(1) Take a photo of a “magic circle” in the real world; ideally, the photo will hint at boundaries, […]

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Linden Labs has just published a “preliminary” version of some interesting statistics regarding the who, what, and how of their synthetic space, available as an .XLS [Microsoft Excel] spreadsheet.  Read the February 2007 SL Virtual Economy Metrics.
Some interesting, accessible statistics:

January was another record month for Second Life in many ways. The size of the world, as measured […]

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