I’m at the internet cafe down the road from the hotel. It has unbelievably trashy computers and miserable connection speed – but then it is really cheap. The conference is over, and a wonderful conference it was. There were a lot of really interesting papers – I was especially pleased to find a lot of new approaches from people I didn’t know. I enjoyed Tiffany Holmes‘s discussion of art games, which relates to stuff I’ve been doing on political web games, and Jane McGonigal’s paper on immersive games and Andrew Hutchison’s work is really relevant to my thesis – plus he’s a Perth boy (Adrian reported briefly on Tiffany, Jane and Andrew’s session in the conference blog, and Deena posted her raw notes, plus you can read their abstracts and I think next week the papers’ll be available), and Jim Bezzochi’s analysis of the rhetoric of cursors in Ceremony of Innocence. Mary Flanagan did a wonderful survey of paper dolls houses of the nineteenth century and how they relate to The Sims, Noah talked about playing texts as we play instruments (and Stuart Moulthrop had a new piece, Pax, in the exhibition that does this) The MelbourneDAC blog was pretty active, and Torill also blogged the conference at her personal site, Lisbeth has a quick post, so does Nick over at Grandtextauto.org and Danny reviewed it for Fibreculture.

The conference was really well organised, too. Adrian did a great job as conference chair. The program was excellent, the technology was great, the food was yummy, the day out to the bush and a winery was a stroke of genius and there was lots of time to chat with people and network. Melbourne is of course as beautiful as ever.

I’ll be reading the papers when I get home and nosing around the web to find out more about peoples’ projects, so more on MelbourneDAC when I’ve digested it a bit more.