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medi@terra on multilayering of land

medi@terra on multilayering of land
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

The tightly packed days of medi@terra/Gaming Realities conference include many interesting presentations about reality and place becoming multiple, mixed, multilayered, hybrid. I’d actually claim that our reality, and lands we inhabit are always this kind of chimeiras; sites half-imagined, half put together by pieces we recognize from elsewhere. Athens is obviously a city to evoke reflections of this kind, pasts, presents and futures colliding constantly on its crowded streets.

gaming realities conference, athens

I will be travelling — to Athens (Greece) this time; this is where the DiGRA Assembly 2006 and Gaming Realities conference is taking place. It looks promising; check out the programme at: http://www.mediaterra.org/2006/en/conference.html

elephants dream open content movie

Open content production is an important part of digital culture and participatory media culture. This night, I watched Elephants Dream, which is an international collaborative production (coordinated from the Netherlands, some Finns also in the core team). The movie is just 10 minutes and more of a technological proof of concept production-wise, rather than a landmark in any artistic sense (mostly this can be taken as a humoristic homage to the Matrix movies). But to have this kind of tools available in the open source is of course a really promising development.

finnish game companies

It is not exactly clear how you define a “game company” these days, we are living the era of convergence after all. But take a look at suomalaiset pelialan yritykset list and neogames toimijalista, if you are interested.

digra 2007 cfp

Please distribute: call for papers into the DiGRA 2007 Tokyo ‘Situated Play’ conference is out: http://www.digra.org/digra_conference/2007tokyo/digra2007cfp/

multiculturalism in games cultures

After two days in Berlin (IPerG EB meeting), next a couple of hours sleep in Tampere and then an early morning train to Helsinki; we have got visit from Seoul, Korea, and there is going to be talks about multiculturalism and comparative studies of games cultures. Please check out professor Sang-Min Whang’s public lecture, titled “Youth culture in online game worlds: Emergence of cyber lifestyles in Korean society”. Link: Games and Storytelling schedule page.

last.fm for games

Home, working on an article discussing the concept of digital culture, and listening on Last.fm. Typing “trip-hop” as the tag into the tune-in box, it can find me my daily doze of Portishead, Lamb, Goldfrapp and Radiohead. There are attempts to add more profiling and recommendation functionalities on the online services of Xbox Live, PS3, and I suppose that probably also Nintendo’s WiiConnect24 (or whatever it will be) will include something similar. But currently, it is up to searching blogosphere to find games you like. (Revisiting my old favourite Samorost, I also did find out all the other ‘Samorost-style’ games Blue Tea has been blogging about.)

henryjenkins.org

A brief blurb: please check out professor Henry Jenkins’s blog in http://www.henryjenkins.org/ — with two very interesting new books just out, this site is currently active with posts and discussions covering multitude of phenomena within the converging media culture. A treat!

pockets, deep & wide?

deep pockets
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Work phone, personal phone, iPod, Tom Tom navigator — it is just obvious that in these days of mobile technology, one of the most important things you need are deep pockets? (A test shot with Canon S3 IS.)

power of narrative

Continuing on the subject of DVD and broadening scope of media available in general, some days ago we watched two nature films after each one: La marche de l’empereur (March of the Penguins, 2005) and Le peuple migrateur (Winged Migration, 2001). Both are semi-documentary, French big-screen nature movies (a rather rare species, even with its own tradition, going back to the days of Jacques Cousteau). I liked both, but the Penguin one I truly enjoyed. There was several unforgettable scenes in the Winged Migration, conveying the sense of flying among birds better than anything before, but the March of Penguins was a coherent, powerful narrative. And in a linear, narrative media that truly appears to be an important part.

PS. Check out this year’s programme in Games and Storytelling (starting in Tuesday with Sandy Stone’s presentation); the theme this year is ‘multiculturalism.’