digital culture – Page 29 – frans goes blog

lecture about gaming skills/games literacy

I will be today presenting a lecture where I outline some of the fundamental skills and learning processes that are involved in playing digital games. It is a public, studia generalia lecture, so welcome to listen; it is part of the Media Education project that our department participates in, see https://www11.uta.fi/blog/mediakasvatus/?p=16

assembly won the grand prix

Another moment of glory to the Finnish digital culture: Assembly, the key event of demo scene won this year’s MindTrek Grand Prix, the largest Nordic new media price. In this shot from yesterday’s Gala, Pekka Aakko (Pehu of Accession) and Jussi Laakkonen (Abyss of Future Crew) accept the price from Risto Linturi, a veteran of Finnish computer scene and one of its leading telecom and futurology consultants. Great to see the computer fandom getting recognition! The impact of Assembly events has been major indeed.

ubimedia & media adventure seminars

Next week it is again the time of MindTrek mediaweek, the new media festival. I will be presenting in two different seminars, Mediaseikkailu (Media Adventure) is focused on educators, and I will be talking about kids and games; the second one is titled Ubimedia, and there my talk will be on pervasive games. Links: http://www.opeko.fi/mediaseikkailu/ & http://www3.hermia.fi/in_english/ubimedia_seminar/

upj week, jenkins on distributed cognition

Phwww. This week has been dedicated to the UPJ process, this mysterious, this transcendentally beautiful, illuminating and ambiguously ambidextrous rite of salary classification on the basis of work requirements and personal achievements that we need to go through, meek, alert and ready to prove our worth, every year, from now on, as employees of the Finnish university system. This is why we are, what we are, how we are, as the scholars, as the servants of wisdom, sophia, as academics.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the free world.

Henry Jenkins has participated in the new MacArthur Foundation initiatives and blogs about the white paper where they discuss the concept of distributed cognition, among other important things:

Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of
individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that
intelligence is distributed across “brain, body, and world”, looping
through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. [link]

wikis and anarchism?

All over the world, political systems and worldviews are in crisis, and many people seem to express their political choices in their consumer choices, in clothing or musical taste. Anarchism is presented as one of the few genuine alternatives to global capitalism, and it also fits well with much of the new collective and anti-hierarchical spirit of the ‘information age’ and ‘network society’, apparent in blogs and wikis as new grassroots media. As it happens, Anarkismi.net, the Finnish umbrella website of various anarchist groups also sports a wiki on anarchism. Visiting it today, it displays a front page loaded with wiki spam (“buy darvocet, generic darvocet, order darvocet…”) and comment areas covered with over one thousand porn advertisements. Even while deeply sympathising with philosophical anarchism as the fundamental ‘good life philosophy’, there is something symptomatic in the obvious lack of care or disregard that this wiki displays. As I understand, media and society are rather similar phenomena as you go deep enough. Having a good, open wiki requires similar preconditions like a good, anarchistic society: an active, functional community who actually cares about each other and their surroundings. Not really having that care, you end up with a failed experiment, filth-covered wikis, and streets with broken windows.

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.

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.

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.)

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.)