Hey it's that time of year again! The 3rd year MFAs are having an open house at the thesis space on 555 Flower Street this Friday from 6 p.m. to as long as there are interested people around. There will be food provided, so come on down and check out our projects. A lot of us are still looking for team members in a variety of disciplines, so it's a good way to see what we're working on and hopefully we can pique your interest! See you there!
This Friday, Dec. 5th, 6 p.m. - Whenever
555 Flower St. Thesis Space
Snacks and Drinks will be provided
I eat your food, I eat it up!
Google docs provides a great way to create forms. The output gets saved into a google spreadsheet. Perfect for sign up lists or getting a list of interested people in a certain project. I'll be using this for my workshop signups in the future !!!
Official Site
Date: Saturday Dec 6th, 2008
Time: 12pm - 10pm
Location: Almer/Blank
Address: 525 Venezia Avenue
Highlights:
* The top studios set up shop on one street for one day so YOU can have some face time
* Quick presentations throughout the day so you can hear what these hiring companies are looking for
* Five amazing speakers
* Job stock - see below
* Budding Talent - see below
* A crazy street party you don't want to miss!
"RMB City" is a project in Second Life created by the 30 year old Beijing artist Cao Fei in March of 2008. Exploring the boundaries between virtual and physical worlds "RMB City" is a wry exploration of the correllation between the boom in Beijing's global real estate market and the parallel international growth of the Chinese contemporary art market. When exhibited in a gallery, the show is set up to look like a real-world real estate office for this virtual city. According to a review in the NYTimes this Second Life version of Beijing ''resembles the retro-futuristic metropolis of the Jetsons crossed with a modern-day Beijing. A smokestack belches flames, a statue of Chairman Mao salutes visitors, and a giant panda balloon floats overhead."
URL: http://rmbcity.com/
Documentation of "RMB City": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MhfATPZA0g
About Cao Fei: www.caofei.com
This one comes from Techradar:
a Dubai-based game company Game Power 7 is bringing Rappelz, the korean MMO game, to the middle eastern gaming market.
In a nationalistic twist, they're renaming the game 'Hope of the Nations'. And did I mention that it's 1.5 GB dowload? Local ISPs brace yourselves..
Besides the head-scratching attempt at trying to make money of a nascent, bootleg-ridden market, the company is making many changes to the games look and feel; the music and the characters' appearance in the game, among others.
It would be interesting to see how it performs financially in a non-credit-card economy of the middle east.
My blogging intention for this week is to close seminar with an open-ended fest of interactive topics that we may or may not have touched upon in class. 
In the case of this article, Lev Manovich has also been Andreas Kratky's collaborator on a project called "Soft Cinema", which explores the concept of database narrative and the merging of software and cinema in general.
Lev Manovich - Database as a Genre of New Media
The Database Logic
After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.
Why does new media favor database form over others? Can we explain its popularity by analyzing the specificity of the digital medium and of computer programming? What is the relationship between database and another form, which has traditionally dominated human culture - narrative?
read more >>http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html
Time: Wednesday, December 3, 6-9pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Featuring Fall 08 Semester Class Projects from :
CTIN 484/489 Intermediate Game Design Workshop
CTIN 401 Interface Design for Games
CTIN 464 Games Studies Seminar (Machinima!)
CTIN 488 Game Design Workshop
-------BREAK-------
CTIN 532 Interactive Experience and World Design
CTIN 482 Designing Online Multiplayer Game Environments
CTIN 491 Advanced Game Projects
CTIN 534 Experiments in Interactivity I
CTIN 541 Design for Interactive Media
Plus bonus research presentations by IMD/ICT Immersive group, the new prototype for Participation Nation, and more....
Food and Drink will be provided starting at 5:45.
***SCHEDULE below*****
In the last two weeks, while listening to a lecture by Jeffrey Kaplan and another by Ethan Levy, I realized the principles of analyzing how players use your game will remain relevant for years to come. Ryan Wiancko reads aloud an article on analyzing gameplay metrics from an online game. This spoken article and other designers' are free to download at Industry Broadcast.
Next Monday, December 1st will be a demonstration of the Gamebryo game engine and the Playstation 3 development kit, showing a method of creating current-generation games. You might remember the Gamebryo engine from such games as Oblivion and Civilization IV, and I imagine folks have heard of the latest incarnation of the Playstation. Both are potentially available for student use – This workshop will show how to create an animated scene (complete with shiny stuff like normal mapping), import and interact with it in a Gamebryo executable with minimal C++ code, and then compile the Gamebryo code and play it on the Playstation 3 console.
The workshop will be on Monday, December 1st from 1-4pm in the ZML and will probably end up at the Game Innovation Lab next door. Students and others interested please email tfurmanski@gmail.com
Annenberg Research Park Colloquium Series: Multimedia Literacy Track
Join students and faculty for a presentation by Peter Lunenfeld on December
2nd @ 11am.
Title: "Bespoke Futures: Addressing the Vision Deficit"
As we hurl into the 21st century, we suffer from a vision deficit. One
reason we have so little faith in the future is that what¹s to come has
never been so inadequately imagined. Knock modernism, if you choose, but at
least the art, design, and architecture generated in that heady period put
forth a panoply of futures seductive enough to inspire others to bring them
into being.
Corporate culture certainly hasn¹t ignored the future. Over the last 25
years, far-sighted multi-nationals have institutionalized long-term scenario
planning to ponder upcoming conditions and their effects on long-term
investment and profits. What about the rest of us? The advent of visual
computing and massively-scaled networks has made it possible for groups of
individuals to come together and envision futures they might actually want
to inhabit.
We will talk about the creative mis-use of scenario planning as a means to
guide us towards crafting visualizations -- often interactive, immersive,
or augmented which can inspire us to go back out into our own communities
or dig deeper into our own creative practices to make these visions real.
Time: The talk will be on Tuesday, December 2nd from 11-12, followed by an
interactive discussion between 12:30 and 1:30 over lunch for those who wish
to stay on for a small group discussion. It will be held at Kerckhoff Hall,
734 W. Adams Boulevard, LA 90089.
Bio:
Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in the Design Media Art department. His books
include The Digital Dialectic (MIT, 1999), Snap to Grid (MIT, 2000) USER
(MIT, 2005), and The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the
Computer Became Our Culture Machine (forthcoming). As creator and editorial
director of the Mediawork project, he produced a pamphlet series for the MIT
Press that redefined the relationship between serious academic discourse and
graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web. One area
he is exploring is the relationship between design theory and the digital
humanities.
In this week's Famitsu(the top game magazine in Japan), a new game to be on sale on Wii on Dec. 4th has gained a full-mark score.(40-points. about the scoring system: http://interactive.usc.edu/members/hchen/2008/10/kosoge_how_terrible_can_a_game.html) It's name is 428 ~ Fuusasareta Shibuya(428〜封鎖された渋谷で〜, in English: In the sealed Shibuya), which is a suspense text adventure game and has several characters whose stories will interact with each other at the stage of Shibuya. It is the first text adventure game ever that has gained such "perfect" critical acclaim. Though there is no English version yet, we can still wait to see some info about it in the coming week.
Here are the official website and the JP version wikipedia page of this game:
http://chun.sega.jp/428/
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/428%E3%80%9C%E5%B0%81%E9%8E%96%E3%81%95%E3%82%8C%E3%81%9F%E6%B8%8B%E8%B0%B7%E3%81%A7%E3%80%9C
Here is a really nice blog post by Suzanne Seggerman of Games for Change asking whether or not Obama and his people understand the potential of videogames in the same way they have shown themselves to understand the nature of social networks. In the end, it is both an affirmation of Obama's track record with digital media, as well as a call to action regarding the power of games.
November 24th 6pm,
7:30pm 2008 —
Guest Lecture by St. John Colon, Lead Artist at Heavy Iron Studios at CTIN 401 class— at
CSSG 142
Please join CTIN 401 class tonight - St. John Colon, Lead Artist at Heavy Iron Studios will showcase his innovative work and share his insights on the fast-paced industry. Please contact Tomo Isoyama, isoyama@usc.edu for inquiries.
In case you missed it, Tomb Raider: Underworld was recently released to mediocre reviews and even less excitement, but the kicker was this twitter message posted by Guy Cocker, UK editor for Gamespy:
call from Eidos--if you're planning on reviewing Tomb Raider Underworld at less than an 8.0, we need you to hold your review till Monday.
It was later confirmed (and then denied, of course) by two different industry spokespeople that Eidos was indeed trying to stifle low reviews of the new Tomb Raider game in order to keep metacritic ratings high.
This is not the first time this has happened - not too long ago Eidos embroiled itself in controversy over Kane & Lynch for posting fake reviews/scores of the game on its website. This was in response to a slew of bad reviews the game received because it was - get this - not that good of a game.
The overwhelming opinion of the internet is that the best way to stack metacritic scores is to make a good game. Sounds right to me.
T-RACES: Testbed for the Redlining of Archives of California Exclusionary Spaces
The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), in collaboration with the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at UNC Chapel Hill, will preserve, analyze, and make publicly accessible online documents relating to the practice of redlining neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s in eight California cities (redlining refers to the practice of flagging minority neighborhoods as undesirable for home loans.)
Redlining is a practice that started in the 1930s when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to create "residential security maps" to indicate the level of security for real-estate investments in different cities. These maps used color coding to indicate which areas were more or less desirable based on the demographics of that area. Neighborhoods that were "A" grade and considered most desirable had a Caucasian population. Those areas that were red were considered the least desirable for development because they had "subversive racial elements" (non-whites).
The T-RACES project is an online archive using GoogleMap and GoogleEarth to organize its informational interface around the notion of the neighborhood. It makes visible the relationship between data and segregation by making visible the racial lines drawn on our geographic space and opens up possibilities for collaborative scholarly work in digital humanities.
This project will go live in a couple of weeks and be available through Vectors Online Journal.
http://salt.diceresearch.org/T-RACES/demo/#
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/
Hello all! For the second Design for Online Games workshop next Monday (11/24/08), we will be covering Game Design and Business decisions in Western versus Eastern online games, an interesting topic that is becoming more and more prevalent. We will also have a special guest, as Jeffrey Kaplan, the lead designer of World of Warcraft, the only wildly successful game in both Eastern and Western markets, will be coming in to give a post-mortem and open Q&A on the newest WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
The schedule for the workshop will include 3 main parts:
1. A brief hands-on play session of World of Warcraft and Maple Story
2. Seminar and open discussion on Design and Business affordances in East versus West online games
3. Jeffrey Kaplan: Post-Mortem on design decisions for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King with open Q&A following
The Workshop is:
Monday 1-5 Nov. 24th in the Robert Zemeckis Center, Zemeckis Media Lab (2F)
3131 S. Figueroa St.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
There may not be enough computers for a larger crowd, so if you have a laptop, please bring it so that you will be able to run World of Warcraft and/or Maple Story on it. Also, a university recruiter from Blizzard Entertainment will be present if you have any questions about jobs or internships.
A Very Special Thanks to Jeffrey Kaplan for coming in to lecture for this workshop and Blizzard Entertainment for their support.
If you interested in coming, please RSVP to albertya at usc dot edu
Google has decided to shut down its little not-game interactive chat room experiment called "Lively." Currently, plans are to shutter the service on December 31st, putting the almost 1.2 thousand users out of a place to chat on the internet. But seriously, folks.
It's not every day that Google actually shuts down a service it has invested time and money into, but really, who didn't see this coming? The stylistic art was kind of interesting, but there's not really anything to do in their little rooms but chat. Which I guess is fine, but that's not much of a hook.
Sad times for the users who liked to hang out in the Pyjama Partie room though:
According to a post on Google's blog, they want to "ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."
Check it out before December 31st if you want to see what this (failed) experiment actually was.
The ongoing HASTAC Scholars forum has just launched a new online discussion topic titled Participatory Play: Digital Games from Spacewar! to Virtual Peace, which thus far includes numerous references to work being done at the USC Game Innovation Lab. This topic is led by two graduate students at Duke University, and offers an opportunity for in-depth discussion of games as meaningful play. The longer you wait, the more there is to read, so add your voice to the forum now!
Whoa - an iphone app to make stereo images!
Also appears to be some new iphone apps that turn the iphone into a MAXMSP or Arduino controller:
This page contains lots of great iPhone apps, including an app that turns your iPhone into a Max/MSP controller, an app that simulates a scrolling LED banner on the screen of your iPhone, as well as many other projects that illustrate Mr. Akamatsu's interesting approach to software hacking on consumer electronic devices. This approach is also reflected in the many interesting Max/MSP objects he has created, perhaps the most famous being his object that interfaces the Wii Remote with Max/MSP.(From Make).
Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade & Sameera Khan (India)
Collaborating with: University Scholars Programme Cyberart Studio
This was an interesting interactive piece featured at ISEA 2008 in Singapore. It explores questions of female subjectivity and public space in Mumbai.
Like Singapore, Mumbai is reputed to be one of the safest cities in the world for women, and yet through extensive research the artists have observed that this does not translate to an equal claim to public space. The act of loitering, 'hanging around' on the streets, for example, is still very much seen as an occupation exclusively for men. Women who appear to ‘purposelessly’ inhabit public space are looked upon with deep suspicion. Loitering is certainly not the act of a respectable woman. This artwork aims to question some of the underlying assumptions about public space and gender in both Singapore and Mumbai. The installation ironically gestures to the impossibility of loitering for women. It will be complemented by time-lapse video footage that explores the gendered inhabitation of public spaces in the two cities. Through the idea of loitering, the artwork asks questions about pleasure, risk, and citizenship.
Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan (India) have collaborated on a research project about women in public space, under the aegis of PUKAR, an inter-disciplinary urban research group based in Mumbai, India.
www.genderandspace.org
