We know that many of you just can't get enough of virtual worlds, Terra Nova, and the associated little community of wireheads and bookworms. Thanks to the New York Law School, you can now see some of us and some of our friends, and Clay Shirky as well, on video, taped during last year's State of Play I conference. Shameless Nepotism Advisory: some of the interviewers are also interviewees. And if you're still not satisfied, keep an eye on this space: Terra Nova will be the official blog of State of Play II, coming up at the end of October.
Slashdot Games reports that PBS, arguably the most reputable news service in the land of the free and the home of the brave, declares and describes a Videogame Revolution this week. Check the link for broadcast times. But it is not necessarily an authorial artifact, a mechanism which was originally intentionally put into games as a communicative act by game producers or authors. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.
...Are you good at multitasking? Would you like to have a specially trained character ready for Shiva's release?...For a limited time, CCP is offering current EVE players the opportunity to create an additional account with 6 months of game play for only 35.85. That’s an amazing 6 months for the price of 3. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.
We wonder why this has not happened sooner; there are some very popular science-fiction licenses out there. But now Perpetual Entertainment has obtained access to the entire corpus of Star Trek culture, and we can expect the final massively-multiplayer product in 2007. Read more here. Indeed, when people ask me what Terra Nova is, I say that it is an Academic Letters blog - an attempt to return to the very first days of academic journaling, when expertise was largely based on sensible writing rather than degrees and positions, and when the target audience was everybody, not just a collection of oddball obsessives.
Burke is an expert in African history and cultural studies at Swarthmore (one of America's most highly respected schools for undergraduates). He's also offered trenchant commentary on the culture and game design aspects of MMORPGs. We noted a couple of his recent papers here and his assessment of Star Wars Galaxies here. Tim's blog, "Easily Distracted," takes a jackdaw perspective, corvus monedula being known as a rogue among avians. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.
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. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example?
It might be true that the entire idea of Captain America is reactionary in some fashion, but a detailed reading of the history of his comic book reveals some interestingly ambivalent and complex reconfigurations of “patriotism” through and within the character himself. In fact, because Captain America is so bland a personality (pretty much from the character’s origins to today) he has always tended to be a natural prism for contemporary contestations about the nature of American nationalism. So in the 1970s, the character turned his back on his identity to roam around Easy Rider style, looking for America. At various points in his history, he’s run into and confronted conspiratorial interests at the highest reaches of the American government—recently including a post 9/11 Secretary of Defense seeking to manipulate paranoid fears about “homeland security” (who turned out to be the Red Skull).
There’s every reason for scholars who want to do game criticism not to adopt tedious academic practices of artifically exaggerated respectability which interfere with the timely delivery of relevant analysis and findings, such as lengthy peer review—one reason I’m really excited to be blogging at Terra Nova, because I think the group blog is an excellent form for delivering just-in-time critical analysis of games and the issues that surround them.
I'm really happy to join here--I've recently stepped up my academic interest in games research after letting it lie fallow for a while, and I can't think of a better place to explore that interest than Terra Nova. I think Edward is perfectly right that Terra Nova is an excellent model for the way scholarly publication ought to develop in the near-term future, not just for games but perhaps for many disciplines and subjects. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world.
Following the June launch of Habbo Hotel Canada, Sulake Labs continued its North American expansion with a September 1 launch of the U.S. version of Habbo Hotel (in beta). According to Sulake's latest press release, worldwide Habbo Hotel membership is 17 million. And this is *before* the U.S. launch? Holy habbos, batman! On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.