Part One: Yoyogi Park, Toyko. Asian popular culture is becoming American popular culture. Cosplay costumes-video clips. Video of Chloe Metcalf talking about Cosplay. Jenkin notes how she learns Japanese at a college level to better appreciate anime and Japanese culture. Media literacy as not consuming, but generating popular culture. Dynamic relationship between consumption and production. "Performance, for this generation, seems very important." Video clip: Rockabilly Yankees "deeply embedded in Japanese culture." Video clips: Boy Band moves. Says this is not about colonialism or cultural imperialism, it is about hybridity. [Ed: seems to presume there *is* such a thing as Japanese/American cultural identity.] After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger.
The people who will actually play this game of project development have already been selected. It's basically the Terra Nova community, plus some folks with expertise at organizing and funding large-scale research projects. But the ideas they come up with will be presented in an open forum, which may be of interest to many... After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.
If I take more notes during the conference, I'll append them. The conference is tri-tracked, but it appears that one track (including this panel) will be webcast, so you may be able to check the accuracy of these. Hector Postigo: "On June 9 the economies of modding took an interesting turn. Patrick Wildenborg released a mod called “Hot Coffee” on his Grand Theft Auto modding site. Now a player can have digital sex. As many of you know, a mod is fan-designed addition to a video game that modifies game play in some form or another. Some mods can be “total conversions” which change the game significantly while others can simply change the face or clothes on a character.
Several Terra Novans (Ted, TL, Cory, Dmitri, and I) have descended on Madison, Wisconsin for the Games, Learning, and Society conference organized by Constance and guided by the James Gee mafia of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As the title suggests, the focus is mostly on games in education. Below are notes from the first panel I went to, featuring Henry Jenkins and James Gee.
One thing that I think is important about the general suite of concepts under this heading is that they can be painfully vague or misleading in the wrong hands, or just marketing hype. But in the context of games, at the very least, emergence is a technique for creating the psychologically convincing simulation of life or intentionality. There is clearly a deep mental algorithim that human beings use to sort life and non-life that agent-based emergent systems do a pretty good job of tapping into. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.