A paper I wrote with Keiji Amano just came out in the online journal Kinephanos, Pachinko: A game studies perspective. The paper looks at pachinko as a game rather than as a form of gambling (as the title suggests.) It is part of a nice collection on Geemu and media mix: Theoretical approaches to Japanese video games.
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Is it Pokemon or Big Data ? is a simple game where you are presented with a name and you have to guess if it is a big data company or a Pokemon creature. My thanks to Jane for this.
As we spend lots of money on Black Friday there are a few stories looking a the start of internet e-commerce. There is New York Times article from 1994 Attention Shoppers: Internet is Open that suggests NetMarket was the first. A short video You’ll Never Guess What The First Thing Ever Sold On The Internet Was mentions some pot sales organized on the Arpanet.
NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday. A first step.
The Storage Engine is a timeline of computer storage from the Computer History Museum. It is easy to navigate and goes back to Pliny and various analogue storage systems. The items are well documented with multiple images, contemporary documents, and current information. Lots of good historical information here.
The Computer History Museum seems to be doing a number of these technology history sites including one called The Silicon Engine with a timeline of semiconductors in computers.
The CBC has a story on how the Canadian video game industry catching up to TV & film production. The story is based on the annual report of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC). You can download the PDF from here. Some of the interesting facts from the report include:
I’ve just left the ReFig 2015 workshop. I kept my workshop notes at Re-Figuring Innovation in Games (ReFig) 2015. Important research with an awesome team that I hope to follow. Last night we were treated to a conversation with Anita Sarkeesian that was fascinating. She has had more of an effect and probably done more good research in preparing the videos than most of the rest of us. There are lessons to be learned about how to address a broader audience, how to have an impact, and how to stay focused on social justice.
The folks at the University of Western Sydney have now put up the keynote talks from DH 2015. See Digital Humanties Conference 2015 – YouTube.
I particularly recommend the two Keynotes by Jeffrey Schnapp and Genevieve Bell. You can see my conference notes here.
I was part of the panel on Building Communities and Networks in the Humanities.
Lately I’ve been trying Wolfram Mathematica more an more for analytics. I was introduced to Mathematica by Bill Turkel and Ian Graham who have done some impressive stuff with it. Bill Turkel has now created a open access, open content, and open source textbook Digital Research Methods with Mathematica. The text is a Mathematica notebook itself so, if you have Mathematica you can actually use the text to do analytics on the spot.
Wolfram has also posted an interesting blog entry on Literary Analysis and the Wolfram Language: Jumping Down a Reading Rabbit Hole. They show how you can generate word clouds and sentiment analysis graphs easily.
While I am still learning Mathematica, some of the features that make it attractive include:
The Call for Papers for Replaying Japan 2016 is up. See CFP here.
The theme of Replaying Japan 2016 is “From Pac-Man to the present: Japanese Games between the local and global”
The conference will be held for the first time in Europe at Leipzig University from August 15 to 17, 2016. This is right before GAMESCOM in Cologne, Germany.
Join us!