The NCSU Department of Communication Newsletter has an article about the MGRL. Check it out here.

by Angela Spence 

"In the 1980s as video games became popular to the masses, teenagers would gather together to play arcade games like Galaga or Pac Man at the local video arcade. During the 1990s, it became more common for friends to gather at each others' houses to play video games on a Nin-tendo, Sega or Playstation. In the early 2000s, online gaming became popular, with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like Everquest and World of Warcraft for dungeon-questers, and Madden football matches versus players from all over the world for the sports nuts." More...

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It’s been a big year for location-based applications and services. The release of Apple’s 3G iPhone and Apps Store has given millions of consumers their first access to LBS products. And the movement is being further pushed along by T-Mobile’s G1 and other touchscreen smart phones that use the LBS-enabling Android operating system.

Next year, look for established players to continue developing their revenue models, while more competitors start up, drawn to the new opportunities. Here’s our list of five location-based service providers or application developers to keep an eye on in 2009 (in alphabetical order)

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It's been in stores for only one week, but Mirror's Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts, Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games without Frontiers."

Mirror's Edge, available for Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (a PC version of Mirror’s Edgewill ship in North America in January 2009), is set in a police state in the near future. The game has its players assume the persona of Faith, a courier whose mission is to deliver sensitive information, which requires a lot of leaping between rooftops to elude agents of the totalitarian government. Whereas many other first-person shooter games stabilize a player's vision as their characters perform, in Mirror's Edge, players can see their arms and legs pumping as they run, and their perspective is jostled when they jump, slide, fight or climb over obstacles. The action is reminiscent of Parkour, which involves a lot of running, hopping fences, climbing parking garages—anything to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. (Several examples are can be seen at the Parkour.tv Web site.)

 Read more

 

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Luci Gutiérrez
By RANDALL STROSS

Justine Cassell, director of Northwestern University?s Center for Technology & Social Behavior, has written about the efforts in the 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately, increase the representation of women in computer science. In commenting as a co-contributor in a new book, ?Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming,? Ms. Cassell writes of the failure of these efforts, ?The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were ?boys? toys? and that true girls didn?t play with computers.? She said last week that some people in the field still believed that the answer to reversing declining enrollment was building the right game.

More at the NYT.

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By BRUCE LAMBERT

Maxine Hicks for The New York Times

I BRAG to people that I was probably the first kid to play a video game,” said Robert Dvorak Jr. That happened half a century ago here at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Mr. Dvorak’s father had assembled what was arguably the first video game, called Tennis for Two.

The game, primitive by modern standards, featured two control boxes whose buttons prompted a bright green ball of streaking light to bounce back and forth over a symbolic net. The action took place on a round oscilloscope screen that measured all of five inches across. “It was very simple to operate,” said Mr. Dvorak, now 57 and an electrical engineer in Saugerties.

More at the NYT.

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December 1-2, 2008

Georgia Tech Technology Square Research Building

85 5th Street, Atlanta, GA

Step in to the vanguard of digital gaming at Georgia Tech?s 4th annual Living Game Worlds symposium to be held December 1-2, 2008.   Raph Koster and Chris Klaus headline this year?s conference which will showcase ?InterPlay,? networked online play and the rapidly-growing domains of multiplayer games and virtual worlds.  The symposium will also feature a pioneers panel including luminaries Richard Bartle, Brian Green, Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer and Pavel Curtis.  Early registration ends October 31. Register now at http://gameworlds.gatech.edu

Media Inquiries: gameworlds-media@lists.gatech.edu
All other Inquiries: gameworlds@lists.gatech.edu

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The videos of the presentations from the last three speakers in the Future of Games speaker series are now available online at the DGRC website. You can see the index of videos here or view the series main page (for details on the last four semesters' worth of talks) here:

All future talks will be recorded and will be available via on-line video.

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New media encompass both new opportunities and new dilemmas for scholars. This ICA pre-conference invites participants to reflect on ways to analyze, preserve , and understand new media in a manner that is both sensitive to the past and to future needs of historical research. The history of new media is a burgeoning new subfield, but one aspect that often goes overlooked is how new media involve new ways of doing history. The purpose of this pre-conference is to focus attention on the shifting needs of historical scholarship about new media. It will include a demonstration of new technologies for collaboration and visualization under development at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago.

We welcome papers on a wide array of historically-grounded themes. The following illustrations of topics suggest ? but are not intended to limit ? topics suitable for paper submissions:

* The idea of ?storage? as it relates to new media and historiography.

* The contextualization of historical problems in a new media milieu.

* The changing meanings and implications of inscription as the internet more fully embraces a range of audio-visual forms of communication.

* Ideological implications of speculations regarding the future.

* The changing place of ?the virtual? in new media studies.

* Digital history.

The reputed move away from print media to new media.

* Changing meanings of the ?global? in relation to new media.

* Ubiquity, indexing, correlation and access.

* New media and transformations in the scholarly enterprise.

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted no later than November 1, 2008. Send abstracts to: David Park, Chair of the ICA Communication History Interest Group, at park@lakeforest.edu.

Authors will be informed whether abstracts have been accepted by 21 November 2008. Papers will be due by May 1, 2009. The program for this pre-conference will take place all day on May 21, 2009, the date established for ICA pre-conferences. The available time allows for three consecutive blocks of short presentations and roundtable-style discussions.

The pre-conference is a joint initiative by the Communication History Interest Group of the ICA, New Media & Society and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory and Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The pre-conference will be held at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and there will be transportation available for participants and attendees between the conference hotel and the UIC campus.

Organized by * Dave Park, Chair, Communication History Interest Group, http://www.icahdq.org/sections/secdetinfo.asp?SecCode=DIV23 * Nicholas Jankowski and Steve Jones, co-editors New Media & Society, http://newmediaandsociety.com Click here for more information: http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/2009/future.asp

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Budapest, Hungary 10 - 14 October 2008

Where: Gödör Klub, Budapest V. ker., Erzsébet tér

Times: 6pm - 10pm on Oct 10, 13, 14 and 4.30pm - 10pm on Oct 11 & 12

Take a cycle ride in the streets around Budapest. A games console mounted on your handlebars will guide you as you roll through the city. Slip down an alley and find yourself in a quiet corner. Make a recording, then move on glimpsing traces of other players, eavesdropping under a bridge or from the top of a multi storey car park.

Rider Spoke continues Blast Theory?s fascination with how games and new communication technologies are creating new social spaces.

Please note that Rider Spoke must be booked in advance, for full details contact Budapest Autumn Festival customer service H?1052 Budapest, Szervita tér 5. Tel. +36(0)61 486 3311 or email ticket@festivalcity.hu

"Rider Spoke consists of a highly original and exciting form of augmented travel...a delicate, almost intangible work. Like other Blast Theory performances, it combines elements of trust and risk, irony and politics, confession and exposure, orientation and disorientation, everyday life and digital worlds." - Realtime, Australia

"The show's greatest gift is that it manages to embrace the remorseless urban rush of the City while insisting on the individual's ability to pierce it with quiet reflection." - Metro, London

Rider Spoke in Budapest is co-organised by Artopolis Association and Budapest Autumn Festival. This presentation has been made possible by the generous support of the British Council.

Rider Spoke is available for touring in 2009 and 2010 for additional information: julianne@blasttheory.co.uk +44(0)1273 413 455 Rider Spoke will be presented in Brighton Oct/Nov 2008. More details to follow. Rider Spoke is sponsored by Trek Rider Spoke is a collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and Sony Net Services in Berlin under the auspices of the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming (IPerG). Blast Theory is supported by Arts Council England.

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By MOTOKO RICH

When PJ Haarsma wrote his first book, a science fiction novel for preteenagers, he didn't think just about how to describe Orbis, the planetary system where the story takes place. He also thought about how it should look and feel in a video game.

The online game that Mr. Haarsma designed not only extends the fictional world of the novel, it also allows readers to play in it. At the same time, Mr. Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel.

"You can't just make a book anymore," said Mr. Haarsma, a former advertising consultant. "Pairing a video game with a novel for young readers," he added, "brings the book into their world, as opposed to going the other way around?"

Read more here:

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October 8, 2008 -- With many people probably thinking that computer games are a sedentary enough pastime as it is - with the possible exception of the Wii - the prospect of games that don?t even require the lifting of a finger to operate a controller might not be great news for parents hoping to get their couch-bound prodigies moving. That hasn?t stopped ?wearable? consumer bio-sensors manufacturer, NeuroSky, Inc., demonstrating a brainwave-controlled video game At the Tokyo Game Show 2008 in Makuhari, Japan, on October 9 and 10. The technical demonstration based on a new game concept being jointly developed with Square Enix Co., Ltd. featured the NeuroSky commercial headset, dubbed the MindSet, operating in conjunction with Windows PC machines.

Like the Emotiv Systems interface we encountered earlier this year, the recently introduced MindSet resembles a pair of headphones. It incorporates a single electrode contacting the user?s forehead while reading the player?s brainwave information, or EEG data. The headset registers the current state of relaxation or concentration of players, allowing them to perform a variety of actions within the game. Although demonstration was carried out using Windows based PCs, the MindSet is also capable of interfacing to a variety of gaming platforms, including console and mobile platforms.

For further info visit NeuroSky

Full article

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by Clint Boulton

Andy Rubin, father of Google's Android operating system, waxed ecstatic about the future of mobile computing in a blog post Sept. 19.

The post, timed to whet users' appetites ahead of the introduction of the first Android-based smart phone by Google and T-Mobile in New York Sept. 23, is getting little play in the blogosphere.

Google watchers are probably tuckered out from the series of prognosticating blog posts Google has pumped out since Marissa Mayer blogged exhaustively on the future of search. However, I think it's important to pay attention to Rubin with the Android Dream so close at hand. 

See full article here:Mobile future

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Deadline for submission: November 3, 2008 (Monday, 11:00 pm (2300 hours), EST)

ICA Annual Conference in Chicago Theme: Keywords in Communication May 21-25, 2009

CONSIDER SUBMITTING A POSTER FOR THE SCHOLAR TO SCHOLAR INTERACTIVE PAPER SESSION!

Call for papers: http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/2009/2009CFP.pdf

Paper submission site: http://www.icahdq.org/cfp/

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Digital Art and Culture (DAC)2009 will occur in mid-December, 2009, on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, in sunny Orange County, just south of Los Angeles.
Right now, the most pressing issue is the Call for Themes and Theme Leaders

Conference email address:dac09dir@uci.edu.

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