betajames

The fancies of our brains have shifted so little from the real to the virtual that tens of thousands of children in China are earning a living by causing avatars to graduate to higher levels in various digital games before reselling them for a good prize to boys in America who like to play those games but have not the time nor patience to earn enough “points” for their aliases. When Segolène Royal, the French presidential candidate, bought a piece of real estate on Second Life to start a campaign headquarters there she paid for it in hard cash.

If it is rather useless to try to decide whether we are ready to upload our former selves into these virtual worlds or not, it is more rewarding to notice another much more interesting difference between the two industries and technologies of imagination. Apart from the number of copies sold and the number and length of reviews published, a book in the past left few traces. Once in the hands of their owners, what happened to the characters remained a private affair. If readers swapped impressions and stories about them, no one else knew about it.

It's hard to ever call it a day and enjoy your "free time," since you can always be working on another paper, another proposal, sitting on another program committee, whatever. For years I would leave the office in the evening and sit down at my laptop to keep working as soon as I got home. I've heard a lot of advice on setting limits, but the biggest predictor of success as a junior faculty member is how much of your life you are willing to sacrifice.

In essence, just as word processing comes standard with a computer to compose essays, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, or Avid (or whatever the software platform du jour) will become the standard for creating media stylos. Indeed, our students increasingly arrive in the classroom having already experimented with moving images to create or critique meaning (imagine saying that 10 years ago). Of course, talent and creativity are still necessary but, unfortunately, not essential skills. Knowing how to technically use Microsoft Word doesn't necessarily make for a good writer and the same goes for filmmaking. Especially for creating media, more people are learning the technical ability to create works but fewer are learning the aesthetic sensibilities to create interesting works. This gap between technique and aesthetics presents a crucial opportunity for critical media. Indeed, this is why Lars Von Trier warned in the Dogme '95 manifesto that the avant-garde must take on an educating function particularly during times of technological democratization. Just because anyone can make a movie doesn't mean they should. Our job as educators now turns on the teaching of critical innovation over technical skills.

we cannot make higher education more accessible, affordable, and effective if we do not reveal to the public how we spend money and why we think it is a good thing for people to support our endeavors.

Advergames are an entertaining blend of interactive animation, video content and advertising, exposing children for extended periods of time to online messages that primarily promote corporate branding and products.

I could probably have done something similar - depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society - with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.

I am here to tell you something. It is not as late as you think. In 1993, writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge said, “Within 30 years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” Thereby kicking off the concept of the technological singularity, which in your time is adhered to with religious ferocity by a hard core of believers.

You’ll note, being more than halfway through Professor Vinge’s countdown, that there is no sign of even the useful underpinnings of a superhuman AI development programme. It is not as late as you think. The promise that responsibility is going to be taken out of your hands by the grabby manipulators of a strong AI is, and will go, unfulfilled.

Some things I did not expect that turned out to be true: 1) An awful lot of people read blogs. Spontaneously conceived essays (if they deserve that elevated name) that are not particularly well-thought-through can instantly go viral on you without warning. After a few of these experiences I came to realize that there were significant numbers of readers who believed that Think Tank was all I did for a living, and was perhaps all I had ever done, and who seemed pretty well content with this assumption. That was a sobering discovery. 2) Goofy experiments that would not work in any other format, such as deciding to read the entire 2009 stimulus legislation and blog about it will be forgiven by many readers on the grounds that we’re all in this experiment together; it’s like going to a rock festival and hearing terrible music but feeling really good about being there. 3) Aggregation and calling attention to other people’s good work without much effort on your own part is enough justification for blogging in the first place.

CCP's space-faring MMORPG EVE Online is known for what some may term mildly as "accessibility issues." But while many game developers are clamoring to attract a wide base of users through better accessibility, CCP is focused more on nurturing an existing hardcore fanbase.

By doing this, Reykjavik, Iceland-based CCP has been able to maintain an EVE subscriber base of around 300,000. MMORPG released in 2003 and has had several expansions to give players a reason to keep subscribing month after month.

The company has taken steps to make the game a bit more appealing to new players, but at its heart, EVE Online is an unabashed hardcore MMORPG in a world where the buzz word is "accessibility."

Having established the premise of game design as an analog for course and curriculum design, we must consider what it means to design a game and discuss just how it is done. There is no shortage of literature on the design of games, ranging from practical guides on professional game development to theoretical analyses of the components of games. What can be gleaned from a review of this literature is that defining what a “game” is and how to go about designing one remain topics of great debate. That is healthy of course, particularly as the exposure of video games increases and the discourse surrounding games continues to expand. The goal of this paper is not to resolve either of these debates. That being said, in order to draw direct comparisons there must be a stable framework from which to work, and a crucial part of that framework is a specific definition of a game.