Play’s Republic

This past weekend, Prof. Ted Castronova hosted the Second Ludium, this one on “videogames and public policy.” It was an extraordinarily interesting experience for various reasons, not the least of which was the outcome: A Synthetic Worlds Initiative-sponsored Declaration of Virtual Worlds Policy, comprising 10 planks relating to the future of virtual space. […]

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While Juul has moved on to discuss the cross roads of real and not real rules versus play; I found interesting that both him and Gonzalo Frasca made such an attempt to bring together radical narrativists and ludologists.  Frasca - who is said to have coined the word ludology - argues that ludology was not meant […]

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Digital Games versus Video Games…
Is there a difference in terms? A wrong or right one? What do people think?
For my final, I think I’m essentially arguing for an academic focus on “digital play” instead of “digital games”, but I want to make sure I’m using the terms properly. It seems like people are calling them […]

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The British Board of Film Classification (”We are not, as some people seem to think, a Government funded or controlled body”) has just released a smattering of findings  about “Playing Video Games.”
Beyond a cursory visit to their website, I’m not familiar with the BBFC, but (if the material described in the press release is any […]

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(Updated)
Tomorrow’s conversation will be about games, public policy, political discourse, and so on. One of the interesting, motivating tensions I see here returns us to Huizinga and Caillois, and has all sorts of interesting echoes: If, per Caillois, we may read a culture by reading its games, then what are we to make […]

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A CNET news.com article on a Sundance Film Festival panel devoted to the issue of independently-produced video games. Note the utopian rhetoric in paragraphs like this one:
The enthusiastic panelists, comprised of both indie game community members and those watching them, concluded that the movement is not only radically changing the gaming industry; it’s changing […]

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