The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has started an inspired UIUC Library Video Game and Gaming Collection to support courses and gaming research. I like how they have created a one-stop page to connect together the library resources with classes, groups, research and news. Note also that they are asking for donations of games.
Thanks to Jeffrey for this.
Another horrible shooting at a school and once again there is a reported connection to a mix of blogs, goth culture and videogames. The Globe and Mail has a story about how the Blog of accused killer reveals dark character (Scott Deveau). The blog, which is still (as of posting) accessible, now has 233 comments on the last entry posted an hour before Kimveer went.
As for the videogame connection, Montreal gunman called himself ‘angel of death’ is the title of a CBC story that quotes the blog,
“Work sucks ‚Ķ School sucks ‚Ķ Life sucks ‚Ķ What else can I say?” he wrote. “Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime.”
The Globe and Mail article quotes more from the blog on the subject of videogames,
Among other things, he says his likes were: “First Person Shooters” and “Super Psycho Maniacs roaming the streets.” He also says he likes his knife, guns, and “Crushing My Enemies Skulls.”
Among his favourite video games are several first-person shooting games, including Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which has players mimic the infamous high school killings in Columbine, Colo., the morning of April 20, 1999, through the eyes of the teenage killers. The shootings at Dawson College on Wednesday are a chilling echo of those events.
Mr. Gill also lists Postal as another of his favourite games. The purpose of that game is to get through as much of the game as possible without going berserk and gunning people down, or, failing that, to avoid getting caught and being thrown in jail.
He also complained that Postal 2 was “too childish.”
‚Äúi want them to make a game so realistic, that it looks and feels like it’s actually happening,‚Äù he wrote in his blog.
Setting aside the question of who would create a game like “Super Columbine Massacre RPG”, I find it hard to believe that videogames didn’t let Kimveer model his violent fantasies.
Now I’m going to go back to the 233 comments on that last post. A snapshot of reactions from anger to concerns about how goth culture will be portrayed.
MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) is one of the leading digital humanities centres in the USA. They have a new Director, Neil Fraistat, and a new look to their web site.
From the Flick photos it looks like they have a agreat speakers series and a new paint job in their CoffeeHouse.
The Canadian Game Studies Association has a new site and a conference coming up in a week. There is a Projects Page which links to a number of interesting projects.
I’m assuming that this replaces the earlier CGSA Page which has useful links.
ClustrMaps offers a mapping service for hits on your blog or site. It shows a small map with bubbles where your visitors are coming from. This service is apparently free for sites with fewer than 2,500 visitors a day, but they are not allowing any new registrations. Why do I want one more when I can’t get a free map?
CiteULike has been evolving nicely as place for social networking around bibliographic references. It sounds dry, but look at a reference like Social Networks and Collective Action: A Theory of the Critical Mass. III. One can click on a link to generate a TouchGraph of the article in a network of related articles.
McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future is a blog by a Transformation Team of librarians at McMaster (the university I teach at) around the (long overdue) transformation of our library. It’s great to see organizations like our library opening up their thinking to their clients. Open administration – where groups negotiating change expose their thinking to their stakeholders – is a trend that should be encouraged.
It’s interesting that both the Transformation Team and the Chief Librarian Jeff Trzeciak’s blog are on wordpress.com rather than on McMaster servers.
Live coding is coding as performance. Matt alerted me to a Impromptu which is a programming language designed for sound coding performances. There is a gallery of sound performances and code at the site to give an idea of what the live coders might be typing to get what effects.
Live coding would seem to be connected to realtime coding competitions like live coda when the coding challenge is performative and the competition environment can be witnessed as a performance.
Pedagogically I wonder if live coding is more effective than write-compile-run coding. Certain languages like Ruby have live coding environments that let you type commands and see the results immediately. What is different here is the idea of language created for live coding in a performative context.
I’ve noticed a number of interesting activities that are using Second Life as their virtual site. The Infinite Mind in Second Life is a web page about interviews with people like John Maeda and Kurt Vonnegut that were broadcast (took place?) in Second Life. (You can see photos and read agout it also at The Infinite Mind blog.)
CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion is a law class about argument outside of court and on the net. The class is by Harvard prof Charles Nesson and his daughter Rebecca Nesson. There is a trailer video that explains the class and how you can join through Second Life. There is an interesting moment when you shift from the video of Nesson to video of his avatar in a recreation of the same space.
Note how video is the way virtual encounters are being documented.
Thanks to Johnny for the Infinite Minds link and Peter for the Harvard link.
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4M2
Canada
This hCard created with the hCard creator.
hCard Creator is a form for automatically creating an hCard microformat. Microformats are a neat idea I just stumbled on for “simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” (See About microformats.)