Here are the slides for my keynote at ICIDS 2018
The world’s first Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference was held in Utrecht in 2003. Joost Raessens has just unearthed the videos and posted them online. Here is my keynote from that meeting, “What Are Games Made Of? ”
Posted in Ch 1 Design in an Evolving Medium, Ch 13 Game Model
Tagged Narrative, videogames
The slides from my AR in Action Talk AR in Action 2017 MURRAY
and here is the video
Is VR the appropriate way to engage sympathy for child refugees or are child refugees the appropriate content to expand the market for VR?
Empathy or Novelty?
Posted in Ch 1 Design in an Evolving Medium, Ch 6 Spaces and Places
Tagged Digital Journalism
Here is a film that was made for my participation in the the 2015 Future of Storytelling Summit.
Source: Future of Storytelling | 2015 Films
Among the games that flash by are Dys4ia, Blood and Laurels, Unmanned, Every Day the Same Dream, Framed, Walden, Her Story, Papers Please, and Game of Thrones: Iron from Ice
The interactive TV projects are from my Georgia Tech eTV Lab
Georgia Tech PhD candidate Andy Quitmeyer came up with another way of representing the affordance gird described in Chapter 3 of Inventing the Medium, using the framework of a radar chart. Here is his example, and the downloadable vector file is here.
Example of Affordance Grid as a radar chart, with thanks to Andy Quitmeyer.
The folks at TED have kindly dug up for me my 1998 talk which I still stand behind and which predicts the future well, but is also still timely. It is longer than the current crop, and more spontaneous. It falls into 4 segments and it references other talks, some of which are on the TED website but most of which are not.
Here is a summary:
1.PREAMBLE: WE NEED EVERY MEDIUM TO EXPRESS OUR HUMANITY (first 5 minutes) I take issue with Julie Taymor who spoke disparagingly of screen-based experiences, and offered the rituals of Bali dancers ( invoked again in her 20** TED Talk) as the superior paradigm for art that addresses the human condition. I also take issue with John Warnock, founder of Adobe and a rare book collector who described his meticulously prepared facsimile book series as purposely avoiding interactivity, such as searching by text, which makes it much less useful. I would still consider both positions examples of a fetishism for legacy forms of representation. (first 5 minutes).
2. ELIZA IS OUR CREATION MYTH (5:00 – 17:00) I compare the amazement at the birth of film (the legend of the Ciotat Train showing) to the amazement at the birth of procedural storytelling (the legend of Eliza at MIT), as I do in Chapter 3 ofHamlet on the Holodeck, and as I have done with my students pretty much every semester for the past 20 years.
3. PROTOTYPE OF A MULTISEQUENTIAL STORY WORLD STILL AHEAD OF ITS TIME 17:00- 2500) show an MIT project I created with Freedom Baird, sponsored by IBM and based on Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, The Norman Conquest. The TV dramas are also now on YouTube. They were meant to be seen on three successive nights in any order, and each one is complete in itself but an exit in one play is an entrance in another play. This makes a nice comparison with Mitch Horowitz’s recent work on the Netflix version of Arrested Development, as I discussed in another post. (timecode: )
4. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? (last 30 seconds) I sum up as I do in Hamlet on the Holodeck, by comparing the development of conventions of interaction with the invention of the soliloquy in Shakespeare’s time.
Other references: John Warnock is the founder of Adobe and a rare book collector. At 1998 TED he presented a facsimile book series that purposely avoids interactivity, such as searching by text, which makes it much less useful. This is a good example of what I would now call legacy media fetishism.
Brenda Laurel, feminist game designer and pioneer of interactive storytelling, whose talk on her wonderful but short-lived series Purple Moon, is on the TED site.
Marvin Minsky, one of the seminal theorists of the field of Artificial Intelligence, who has a notorious blind spot for humanistic discourse. In the corridor between sessions Ben Shneiderman and argued with him. Minsky took the position that fictional stories were a waste of time because they were not true. Ben and I were appropriately outraged.
