creative technology
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talk show tell print

present / print

lost in science -- game(s) for change

A. Eliëns, 2009


media / design(s) / AI


The title of this presentation refers to Jane McGonigal's www.avantgame.com site, where she advocates the relevance of games for real life, as well as to the book Deep Time of the Media, Zielinski (2006), in which the author discloses how individual researchers, such as Galvani, Volta and Ritter, and later Walter Benjamin, explored how technology and media may enhance the inherently limited perceptual capabilities of humans, by experiments that sometimes jeopardized their own health, and often the relation with the institutes in which they worked. Of course, Timothy Leary, of the famous tune in, turn on, drop out slogan may serve as another example. Looking back at my earlier work, Eliëns (1979), Eliëns (1988), I cannot help but share the feeling of being somewhat lost in science, and take the invitation of writing this essay/presentation as an opportunity to reflect on how the various strands in my education, art, philosophy, cognitive psychology and computer science are related, and what my long walk through the institutions, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the 1968 french student-revolt, has contributed to the fields of AI and Multimedia.

introduction -- game as social system

game as social system


syntaxsemanticspragmatics
actor(s) players/places rolesgoals
rule(s) events/explorationevaluationfacilitators
resource(s)game spacesituationcontext

alternate reality games (ARG) / TINAG


At the end of the trailer for the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence, the phrase This Is Not A Game flashed in red. More than a mere coincidence, the trailer was the Rabbit Hole (entry point) into the massive online promotion that gave birth to the current ARG community. The promotion, now regularly referred to as the Beast, took hundreds of thousands of players on a wild ride throughout which the not-so-quiet screams of This Is Not A Game could be heard.

development(s) -- AI versus multimedia

development(s)


research -- topical media & game development

intelligent multimedia


education -- what I talk about when I talk about smart media

creative technology / new media


conclusion(s) -- paradigm shift(s)?

... relationships are things that happen only in a virtual world, and we are able to move backwards and forwards between the physical world of interactions (real events) and the virtual world in which these events are constituted into relationships in order to be able to understand what the significance of specific actions is or might be, or how two relatioships impinge upon eachother. The Human Story, Dunbar (2004)

innovation(s)


the main conclusion that follows from our description of attitudes to innovation, except at the very ends of the chain, there is an inherent resistance to the kinds of radical change at the systems level that seems to be necessary to solve the major design and planning problems of our time ...

change(s)


..., I (still) believe that in both academic research and education there is a need for change, change, quoting Obama, we can believe in.

references
[Human] Dunbar R. (2004),
The Human Story -- A new history of mankind's evolution, Faber and Faber
[Creativity] Eliens A. (1979),
Creativity: reflection and involvement, Ninth Int Conf of Aesthetics, Dubrovnic, August 1979
[Computational] Eliens A. (1988),
Computational Art, First Int Symposium on Electronic Art, Leonardo Supplementary Issue, Pergamon Press 1988, pp. 21-26
[DLP] Eliens A. (1992),
DLP -- A language for Distributed Logic Programming, Wiley
[OO] Eliens A. (2000),
Principles of Object-Oriented Software Development, Addison-Wesley Longman, 2nd edn.
[Platform] Eliens A., Huang Z., and Visser C. (2002),
A platform for Embodied Conversational Agents based on Distributed Logic Programming, AAMAS Workshop -- Embodied conversational agents - let's specify and evaluate them!, Bologna, Italy
[VULife] Eliens A. and S.V. Bhikharie (2006),
Game @ VU -- developing a masterclass for high-school students using the Half-life 2 SDK, In Proc. GAME-ON NA 2006, Monterey, USA
[Odyssee] Eliens A. (2006),
Odyssee -- explorations in mixed reality theatre, In Proc. GAME-ON NA 2006, Monterey, USA
[Serious] Eliens A. and Chang T. (2007),
Let's be serious -- ICT is not a (simple) game, In Proc. FUBUTEC 2007, Delft, Netherlands
[SecondLife] Eliens A. Feldberg F., Konijn E., Compter E. (2007a) ,
VU @ Second Life -- creating a (virtual) community of learners, In Proc. EUROMEDIA 2007, Delft, Netherlands
[Climate] Eliens A., van de Watering M., Huurdeman H.,
Bhikharie S.V., Lemmers H., Vellinga P. (2007b), Clima Futura @ VU -- communicating (unconvenient) science, In Proc. GAME-ON 2007, Bologna, Italy
[Mashups] Eliens A. Feldberg F., Konijn E., Compter E. (2007c) ,
Mashups in Second Life @ VU, In Proc. GAME-ON 2007, Bologna, Italy
[Panorama] Eliens A. and Vyas D. (2007),
Panorama -- explorations in the aesthetics of social awareness , In Proc. GAME-ON 2007, Bologna, Italy
[XIMPEL] Eliens A., Huurdeman H., van de Watering M.,
Bhikharie S.V. (2008), XIMPEL Interactive Video -- between narrative(s) and game play, In Proc. GAME-ON 2008, Valencia, Spain
[Replay] Eliens A. and Ruttkay Z. (2009),
Record, Replay & Reflect -- a framework for understanding (serious) game play, In Proc. Euromedia 2009, Brugge, Belgium
[Design] Jones J.C. (1092),
Design Methods, Wiley (2nd edn)
[Magic] Klabbers J.H.G. (2006),,
The Magic Circle: principles of Gaming and Simulation, Sense Publishers
[Running] Marukami H. (2008),
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Alfred A. Kampf, New York
[Time] Zielinski S. (2006),
Deep Time of the Media -- Towards an archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, The MIT Press
[] readme new(s) workshop(s) project(s) CA1 CA2 CA3 CA4 CA5 course(s) creative exploration(s) / serious games resource(s) _ / .

(C) Æliens 09/09/09
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