I’ve been watching the The Guild – a web series about gamers. It was launched in 2007 on YouTube and shows what can be done with a web series. Written by Felicia Day it chronicles the real and online lives of a guild of MMORG players. It apparently was one of the inspirations of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog another great web series. They both use a series of short episodes suitable for web streaming to do comedy.
MLA Profession 2011: On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship
My paper “On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship” has just been published online in MLA: Profession 2011 (pp. 152-168). The PDF is freely available. The abstract reads,
As more and more scholarship is digital, we need to develop a culture of conversation around the evaluation of digital academic work. We have to be able to evaluate new types of research, like analytic tools and hypermedia fiction, that are difficult to review. The essay surveys common types of digital scholarly work, discusses what evaluators should ask, discusses how digital researchers can document their scholarship, and then discusses the types of conversations hires and evaluators (like chairs) should have and when they should have them. Where there is a conversation around evaluation in a department, both hires and evaluators are more likely to come to consensus as to what is appropriate digital research and how it should be documented.
This is part of a collection put together by Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell and Stephen Olsen about Evaluating Digital Scholarship. McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, among others, also have papers in this issue of Profession.
Akihabara: Otaku Holy Land
If you are interested in Japanese otaku culture you have probably heard about Akhihabara or Akiba for short. Akiba is a neighbourhood of Tokyo famous for electronics shops, game shops, maid cafés and arcades. I was lucky to get a tour of Akiba by Michiya Kawajiri and Kiyonori Nagasaki on November 30th, 2011. Akiba is similar to Osaka’s Nipponbashi neighbourhood, but larger and with maid cafés. You can see my photos of Akihabara on Flickr.
Game changers: the women who make video games
The Guardian has a welcome story on Game changers: the women who make video games. The story contrasts the statistics for the UK that show 49% of game players are women with the stats on game developers (12% are women.) It then profiles a number of women game developers and discusses some of the barriers.
Interview with Akira Baba
On December 1st I met with Akira Baba who was the founding President of DiGRA Japan [Japanese]. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies and a member of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. The meeting was set up by Kiyonori Nagasaki who is in the same interdisciplinary faculty and we had a student who translated for professor Baba. Our conversation revolved around the challenges of university/industry engagement.
Japanese Game Centres (Arcades)
- Me rubbing a good luck Pachinko ball
Arcades are still popular in Japan and they offer a gaming experience different from the small arcades in airports in Canada. Associate Professor Keiji Amano and his wife took me for a tour of arcades in Nagoya on November 25th and commented on a draft of this post. We visited a variety of arcades including a Pachinko parlour, a floor of claw and crane games in an arcade complex along with a floor of “hard-core” arcade games, and a family oriented arcade in a shopping mall. We also visited a large shop to check out fan dojinshi manga and a card trading/play shop. I’ve posted my photos in a set on Flickr with some comments.
Continue reading Japanese Game Centres (Arcades)
Live at Return of the Magic
Shane and Shannon were on breakfast television promoting the locative game they developed called Return of the Magic Live at Return of the Magic #3 and Live at Return of the Magic #4. This uses SCVNGR and is supported by GRAND. They worked with the Old Strathcona Business Association to create this game with prizes.
The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face
Steve Silberman has writing a great story about The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face. Susan Kare was the artist who was hired to design fonts and icons for the Mac. She designed the now “iconic” icons in a graph paper sketchbook. The story was occaisioned by the publication of a book titled, Susan Kare Icons which shows some of the icons she has created over the years. (She also has prints of some of the more famous icons like the Mac with a happy face.
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
Also from Slashdot a feature about The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix. Warren Toomey, a historian of Unix, wrote this feature for the IEEE Spectrum in honour of Unix turning 40.
The creation of Unix (which originally stood for “Un-multiplexed Information and Computing Service”) is tied to text editing as Thomson and Ritchie pitched a proposal to Bell Labs management not as an operating system project but as a project to “create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today.” One of the first programs was roff, a text formatting tool. The first tests where for entering and formatting patent applications.
At the end of the feature Toomey talks about the historical work he and others are involved in curating old Unix versions through the Unix Heritage Society.
Our goal is not only to save the history of Unix but also to collect and curate these old systems and, where possible, bring them back to life. With help from many talented members of this society, I was able to restore much of the old Unix software to working order, including Ritchie’s first C compiler from 1972 and the first Unix system to be written in C, dating from 1973.
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.