Play’s Republic

So, a while ago I found this article, Persuasive Games: Why We Need More Boring Games by Ian Bogost, who we are well familar with here. In it, he discusses some of the implications of considering games not just as art, but as a media form in their own right. Are games the [...]

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So, as I went through my (occasionally multiple-times) daily perusing of icanhascheezburger a little bit ago, I found a nicely done article analyzing some of the sociology of these cat-macro images. It traced all sorts of aspects, including why they are called ‘macros’ (they originated on message boards as an image which served as [...]

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So, it seems to me that the scientists in this article may have read Sutton-Smith (or perhaps – and admittedly more likely – read the same evolutionary theorists he had) because their rational seems similar to his. The article is discussing the intelligent and playful nature of the common raven. The researchers are [...]

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So while at the Media in Transition conference last weekend, the Heraclitean/Platonic dichotomy Garrison set out at the beginning of class kept jumping out at me. Someone in the very first plenary session, Tom Pettitt, described something which fits perfectly, and which Garrison has somewhat alluded to in a recent post.
One of the panelists [...]

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…looking over the shoulder of the person in front of me, as she is logged into second life, in the NMC ampitheatre and watching the panel in second life. (in addition to being here herself) There’s about 10 people hanging out there, watching the panel.
I just thought that was cool.

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Henry Jenkins made a post about the conference on his blog yesterday. It has details on the topics of the plenaries, and the addresses. Check it out here if you are interested:
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/media_in_transition_5_creativi.html

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So, I’m at the MIT conference at MIT ( http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/ ) and they just announced that the 6 plenary sessions will be simulcast within Second Life at the New Media Consortum site (find it through search or http://www.nmc.org/ I believe, they did not give SLURL’s unfortunately, I’ll post ‘em as I get ‘em)
Webcasts/podcasts for [...]

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So, some links which have caught my eye lately:
First a game, which I think is very interesting to look at in terms of all the readings we have had on Games, Narrative, and Rules. There are several games in the Eyemaze Grow series, this is a link to the basic one I find most [...]

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I recently read an article on some game studies professors who are trying to get a set of video games considered for preservation by the Library of Congress as important cultural artifacts.
Here’s a NYtimes article on this topic.
Here’s their list of their choices:
“Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario [...]

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