My Books

the game system as mother

SÈbastien Babeux’s talk was about space in video games, and has lots of fascinating examples of glitches in game space. You can read the abstract here. I don’t really want to talk about what his paper was explicitly about, I want to […]

WoW machinima

Tristan Pope’s Not Just Another Love Story is a love story made in World of Warcraft (so it’s machinima, Animated filmmaking in a realtime game environment) by a theatre student in New York. It’s about a troll and a human who fall […]

the world of warcraft panel

Saturday morning at Aesthetics of Play and the World of Warcraft panel is on. There are three presnetations about WoW and the abstracts are all here. I’m fighting a very strong desire to just play World of Warcraft. Oh dear.

the architecture of Ironforge and Orgrimmar

(At Aesthetics of Play) Mattias Ljungstrˆm – a lecturer in advanced media and game design in an interface design department in Potsdam. So design theory at the heart of his paper. Also it’s about World of Warcraft! Yay! The presentation is based […]

jonas linderoth on avatars

This presentation is interesting: he’s discussing Walkerdine’s discussion of how children say “I” about their avatar and the “complex indentification”. abstract.

Character data sets and parameterized morality

Rob Fitzpatrick from Georgia Tech’s Game Lab is presenting on characters and morality. Three dimensions of dramatic dimension – games (in contrast) heavily oriented towards action. Psychological and social data is mostly absent. However morality is becoming more important/popular. In single player […]

aesthetics of play: jon dovey’s keynote

Why am I in Vietnam?: A Computer Game Case Study Several voices in this presentation: A diary of his playing Conflict Vietnam, his critical analytical voice and the voices of the game developers. How does a game like this come into the […]

aesthetics of play: espen aarseth’s keynote

Ooh. The game conference just started, and Espen started his lecture by asking how many people have played World of Warcraft. Yay! Now he’s showing a screenshot from a raid with lots of high level characters, and yes, it’s so complicated. “How […]