Game Industry Legends: Richard Garriott de Cayeux

From Slashdot I found my way to a nice long interview with Game Industry Legends: Richard Garriott de Cayeux. Also known by his in-game name Lord British designed games like the Ultima series from Origin Systems that he founded with his brother and father.

In the interview he talks about designing games and the research he feels you have to do.

My process is very labor-intensive, it’s a very research-oriented approach to game design. I consider myself a student of the Tolkien style of fictional development, and yet virtually no one even in my own company, having heard me expound on this for years and years and years, will put in the long nights and weekends of study in order to come up with something that is of similar power.

He also speculates that consoles are doomed because of the power of the smartphones and tablets that we carry around.

If we’ve got a smartphone that can do Xbox level graphics, which we’ve almost got, and I can hook that up to a TV and use a controller, what’s the difference between that and a console? It’s just whatever games are available.

Research Infrastructures in the Humanities

The European Science Foundation has released a report on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities. The report has a nice Introduction on the origins of Research Infrastructures like the library and museum. It presents a taxonomy and a number of case studies. By and large the report argues “that digital RIs offer Humanities scholars new and productive ways
to explore old questions and develop new ones.” (Foreword, p. 2) The report is by the European Science Foundation and is designed to encourage appropriate development of digital infrastructure for the humanities which bridge to traditional resources.

Digital infrastructures are developing rapidly but unevenly, and there is an urgent need for coordination, standardisation and sharing of experience to prevent unnecessary duplication and the atomisation of good initiatives. (Foreword, p. 2)

I’ve only skimmed the report, but it doesn’t seem to raise the question of exactly what is suitable as infrastructure and what should stay open research. The report concludes with a nice set of priorities including the need for evaluation systems.

Uzumasa Sengoku Festival

Entrance to the Park

On November 26th I visited the Toei Kyoto Studio Park for the Uzumasa Sengoku Festival. I’ve posted my photographs here. The Toei Park is cinema theme park with sets that are still used along with all sorts of activities for visitors like a Ninja show. It is a bit of tourist trap, but that is part of its charm for those who want to be photographed in “authentic” settings as you will see. The Uzumasa Sengoku Festival is a two-day festival dedicated to Japanese Warring Period transmedia (manga, anime and games) which made is a perfect venue to study the interplay between media and/for fans. For the festival there was a pavillion dedicated to gaming where local game companies had booths, there were special events and some of the houses in the “historic” Kyoto setting were used by companies to promote new products about popular warring period anime and related media. Above all the cosplay (costume play) fans came out in droves to pose for pictures in the recreated streets of old Kyoto.
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Conference Report on DH-JAC2011

I am at the 2nd International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures, DH-JAC 2011.  I am writing a live conference report here on philosophi.ca. Yesterday I presented a response to Mitsuyuki Inaba’s survey of the work of the Web Technologies group (PDF) of the Global COE Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures.

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INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond

Today I was at the INKE Birds Of a Feather conference here in Kyoto. I wrote a conference report at, INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond. It was a great day with lots of discussion thanks to the BOF format where papers were distributed beforehand so we could only talk for 5 minutes.

Motion Capture and Noh

On November 10th I was invited by Dr. Kozaburo Hachimura to watch as his graduate students capture the motion of a master Noh performer. The motion capture was run in a special lab that was specifically built for this. They have a floor that was built to Noh theatre standards and we had to take our slippers off to protect the wood. There is a rig on the ceiling with the motion capture cameras and a sound booth in the back. When not in use for motion capture the room is used for seminars and meetings.

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Antconc – Concordance tool on PC/Mac

Screen shot of Antconc

Thanks to John, I learned about a gem of a concordance tool for the Mac, PC and Linux called Antconc. It runs on your computer and you can download the tool from the author’s site, Laurence Anthony’s Software. If it is stable it could be a great tool to introduce students to text analysis. Looking at the screenshots it has some nice features for finding n-grams and can handle a set of texts.