ALT-CTRL deadline
I should probably mention, in relation to my upcoming political game, that today is the deadline for ALT+CTRL submissions. This is an event to be held at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California Irvine.
It looks like an all-star jury. Given my batting record for the year I’m not setting my hopes too high, especially since my game is pretty much an alpha version.
Political Icon 2004
I am working on an alpha version of my Flash game, Political Icon 2004, which should appear here shortly.
My game works a little differently than other “political campaign” games I know of. And those I know of are:
- Frontrunner by Lantern Games.
- The Political Machine by ???
- Power Politics 3 by by Randy Chase and Kellogg Creek Software.
If I’ve missed any let me know so I can make a complete list.
An Economy of Rules (part 6)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Games and form. What is the form of a computer game? Should the form be restricted by certain requirements, so that one form of computer games requires a “PC” system with a certain level of video and audio support, and a certain operating system? That would make things easy in many ways, so that “computer game” would be shorthand for a PC-based game with certain requirements. Normally the PC part is referred to as a platform, so you have the PC platform, the Mac platform, the Gameboy platform, and many others.
Some computer games exist on multiple platforms. Are they the same games? Sometimes. Are they the same form? No, I think they are different forms. The title, or brand, of a game may be the same, but the PC version of Diablo is different from the Playstation version of Diablo.
Notes from Self-Organizing Systems
Self-Organizing Systems: rEvolutionary Art, Science, and Literature was held on April 30, 2004 at UCLA.
First, some contrast with last week’s UCLA conference, also organized in part by Katherine Hayles. This was a much larger crowd, helped no doubt by the association with the Electonic Literature Organization. The audience at Narr@tive consisted almost entirely of panelists.
An audience of 100-120 endured four sessions in the UCLA Design | Media Arts department’s EDA space. I don’t know why, but they configured the space so that the entrance was stage left of the projection screen, which discourages people from wandering in and out of a presentation in progress.
Despite being held in the Design | Media Arts space, there was a notable lack of DMA faculty in both the audience and on the panels. Well, nothing to be too concerned about.
Lara Croft Rug
I have recently completed work on this rug:
It is approx 21″ x 21″. Click on the picture for a larger version.
Hexagonal Life
This has been on my to-do list for a while: create a cellular automata similiar to Conway’s Game of Life but on a hexagonal grid.
Hexagonal Life – Written in Flash, runs very slowly.
Illegal Art
Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age.
Fear and Loathing at the UCLA Hammer Museum
i.
April 22-23 I attended Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling, a UC Digital Cultures Graduate Conference at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Everyone was so nice. Too nice. Too damn nice.
The University of California system has a solid graduate program and provides excellent resources for cross-campus events. By excellent resources I mean that they are exceedingly generous in picking up the tab when the conference heads en masse to the local pub.
The organizers were likewise generous with their time, in that they spread out 19 presentations, two keynotes, and one roundtable over two days. (Two days on chairs I wouldn’t put in even the most despised Sim household. This chair provides: comfort 0.) Two days which could have accommodated another dozen presentations, the addition of which would perhaps have offered some high points to an otherwise middling assembly.
There are two ways to design a conference: leave everyone yearning for more, so that they furiously exchange business cards before catching a taxi to the airport, or give everyone a solid 20-30 minutes so they can practice their public speaking skills. If you choose the latter design, a good way to spice things up is to run concurrent sessions, so that attendees are forced to choose between “Diegetics and the Other: Uncovering Narrative in Hypermedia” and “Narrative and the Other: Dude, where’s my diegetic?” But that didn’t happen here. As I said, everything was nice.
An Economy of Rules (part 5)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
some considerations
The rules of surface are motivated by considerations on the lower levels. Craft puts pressure on surface through the mastery of tools; a master of craft will be seen as someone who uses the “correct” tools, and so their surface will be defined by the tools of craft. Structure determines the relative importance of certain relationships, so it determines which of the elements would best be served in the surface presentation. Idiom affects surface through its influences on structure and craft, and also, as I discussed with the anime RPG, idiom often pulls in certain rules of surface by referring to idioms which are specific to certain elements.
An Economy of Rules (part 4)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Rules of idiom
The rules of idiom are rules about the genre of a game. A game falls into a genre when it satisfies the idiomatic characteristics of that genre.
A Real Time Strategy (RTS) game might be described idiomatically in this way:
| 1) Activity takes place in “real time”. |
| 2) The playfield is preexisting according to some set of parameters. |
| 3) The production of units (the pieces which the player or a computer can manipulate) requires the consumption of playfield resources. |
| 4) There is a set of direct dependancies which determine which units may be produced based on the current state. |
| 5) There is conflict between opposing sides. |
| 6) Combat between units of different types is non-symmetric. |