[canada research chair in digital game studies and design]

Exciting academic employment opportunity:

Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, invites applications for a Senior (Tier I) Canada Research Chair (CRC) in the field of Game Studies, Game Design and/or Games and Learning as a joint appointment in the Faculty of Arts and Science and Faculty of Fine Arts. The goal of the CRC program (http://chairs.gc.ca/) is to ensure that Canadian universities "achieve the highest levels of research excellence to become world-class research centres in the global, knowledge-based economy.”

Concordia’s academic culture celebrates leading-edge research, creativity, and the transfer of knowledge for today’s innovation driven society. The Chair in Digital Game Studies and Design will build on Concordia’s leadership in the fields of creative expression, communication and culture, and information and communication technologies as described in our Strategic Research Plan (2008-12) http://oor.concordia.ca/formsandreferencedocuments/strategicresearchplan/.

Concordia is located in one of North America’s most diverse, creative and livable cities. Many leading games companies have chosen to locate in Montreal where strategic government initiatives also support the research sector and industry. Applicants for this position may come from any disciplinary background but must have a superior record of publication and/or research/creation in the fields of game studies and game design. The successful candidate is expected to have an outstanding and innovative research program, as well as demonstrated abilities to foster the development of broad based interdisciplinary initiatives, attract excellent graduate students and secure external funding. The successful candidate will be expected to take a leadership role in the development of the newly founded Centre for Technology, Art and Games (TAG).

The TAG initiative is leading interdisciplinary, cross-Faculty research in games studies and design at Concordia. TAG operates under the umbrella of the Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies, which is the largest and most productive new media lab in Canada. For additional information on TAG and Hexagram, see http://www.tag.hexagram.ca and http://www.hexagram.org.

The successful candidate for the CRC position in the field of Game Studies, Game Design and/or Games and Learning will be appointed (with tenure) at the rank of Associate Professor or Professor. The candidate will work with the Faculty of Arts and Science and Faculty of Fine Arts to prepare the formal CRC nomination according to the CRC program guidelines. The university will nominate the successful candidate to the CRC Secretariat at the earliest opportunity according to the guidelines of the CRC program.

Applications should consist of a cover letter, a current curriculum vitae, copies of recent publications, a statement of teaching philosophy/interests, a statement of research achievements, and evidence of teaching effectiveness.

Candidates must also arrange to have three letters of reference sent directly to:

Chair, Game Studies and Design CRC Search Committee Concordia University
c/o Faculty of Fine Arts 1455,
De Maisonneuve Boulevard West, EV 2.781
Montreal, Quebec,
H3G 1M8
Canada

This position, linked to the CRC appointment, will begin July 1, 2010.

Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. All applications should reach the Chair of the Hiring Committee no later than November 2, 2009.

All inquiries about the position should be directed to crcgames@alcor.concordia.ca


Concordia University is committed to employment equity.

[employment: lectureship in new media]

This is an amazing position at the University of Leeds...makes me (almost) wish I was in the U.K.:

Closing Date: 17th July 2009

Lectureship in New Media
(Job reference: 317127)
Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications
Institute of Communications Studies

The institute of Communication Studies seeks to appoint a Lecturer in New Media from
2 September 2009 or as soon afterward as is mutually convenient.

You will deliver teaching and research primarily in areas related to New Media at
both undergraduate and postgraduate level, but may also be asked to teach more
generally in other areas of media and communications. Essential teaching
requirements are ‘Design for New Media’ and ‘New Media, Planning and Gaming’. You
will also be required to take responsibility for student project work. You will be
expected to play a leading role in the continued development of the programme in New
Media and undertake supervision of undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD projects and
dissertations.

You will possess a PhD, or have such an award pending and be able to demonstrate a
developing research profile with a clear indication of future plans and potential
commensurate with aspirations to an 'international' standard of excellence.

See http://ics.leeds.ac.uk for more information on the Institute of Communications
Studies or http://hr.leeds.ac.uk/jobs/ViewJob.aspx?CId=3&JId=416 for more details
about the post.

University Grade 7 (£32,458 – £35,469 p.a.)
Salary: Lecturer Grade 7 (£32,458 - £35,469)
Apply using: Application form, CV and Equal Opportunities Monitoring form
Download an application form: (pdf version) | (Word version)

Informal enquiries: to Dr Stephen Sobol, New Media Programme Head, email
s.c.sobol@leeds.ac.uk, tel +44 (0)113 343 6247 or Professor Gary Rawnsley, Director
of the ICS, email g.d.rawnsley@leeds.ac.uk , tel +44 (0)113 343 6906.

Send completed applications to:
email vpaempl@leeds.ac.uk, or by post to:

VPAEMPL,
PVAC,
Faculty Office,
Man-Made Fibres Building,
University of Leeds,
LS2 9JT

Closing date: 17 July 2009

[Learn, Teach and Play in 3D Virtual Worlds]

Second Life and City University London

A one-day seminar on the topic of "Learn, Teach and
Play in 3D Virtual Worlds"
We welcome teachers, students, educational technologists, researchers, and anyone interested in 3D virtual worlds and games. We welcome you to showcase your virtual world projects (e.g. education, virtual museum, etc), to present your research findings, or simply to voice your opinions about it.

Time and place
• the seminar (whole day, 18 March 2009) will be face to face meeting at City University London (time and room will be announced later).

Types of participation
• If you are interested in attending this event, please send in a short bio (50-100 words) to us.
• If you are interested in showcasing your project, please send in a short bio (50-100 words) and a short description of the project (around 300 words)
• If you are interested in presenting your research findings, please send in a short bio (50-100 words) and an abstract of the study (around 300 words)

We are not just looking for presentations but participatory formats to share and debate. Thus, we welcome ideas of other types of participations. Please submit a proposal (around 300 words) to let us know what you would like to discuss, how you think we could best
exchange ideas in this event and the anticipated outputs.

In addition, a virtual meeting (in Second Life) will take place a day before the face to face event and everyone is welcome. Further information of the virtual event will be announced shortly.

Please register the event at http://learnteachandplay.eventbrite.com/ If you have further enquiries please do not hesitate to contact Ulrike Pfeil (U.Pfeil-1@city.ac.uk)

Jim Ang, City University London
Panayiotis Zapihris, City University London
David White, Oxford University
Steven Warburton, King's College
Palitha Edirisingha, University of Leicester

This event is sponsored by JISC EMERGE http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/

[enactive cinema with pia tikka @ the ioct]

From the IOCT blog:

"PIA TIKKA

Enactive Cinema
The Future of Creative Technologies
IOCT Lab
24th October 2008, 4.30pm

***

A New Concept in Cinema

The Enactive Cinema project introduces a novel kind of interactive cinema genre, which is described as enactive cinema:

How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, depend on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters. Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator’s emotional participation. The project suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one's own experience in what happens to the 'others'. This is, ENACTIVE CINEMA.

• Wanted to reinterpret Eisenstein's dynamic organic film theory of montage
• how to capture the dynamic nature of his theories in today's new media
• so used parachronic reading which is outside of time, recurise: linearity of historical time as put into brackets, or substituted by recursive dynamics of experience, a nowness involving events in a spiral manner.
  
• biomechanics: early Eisenstein and montage of attractions (1923)
• ecstasy : holistic experience auditory and visual
• She jumps over the other people important to Eisenstein - hegel, darwinism, karl marx, vygotsky, alexander bogdanov (political rival of Lenin, retired himself from political scen and in 1928 he died but founded "techtology"

"unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underly all systems. His work "Tektology: Universal Organization Science", finished by the early 1920s, anticipated many of the ideas that were popularized later by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the General Systems Theory. There are suggestions that both Wiener and von Bertalanffy might have read the German translation of Tektology which was published in 1928. In Russia, Lenin (and later Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to the dialectic materialism and put tectology to sleep. The rediscovery of Bogdanov's tectology occurred only in 1970s."

• Pia's theoretical background - emotion dynamics, cognitive ecologism (Ulric Neisser), recent neroscientific views of the human mind (Gallese), emmbodied simulation (Gallese), emotions as cognition (Antonio Damasio), homeostasis theory of cinema viewing (Torben Grodal)
• gallese draws on merleau-ponty: the body is...that strange object...
• Gallese and george lakoff collabor5ations on embodies role of experience, semantic studies and neuroscience (see this excellent article that i read the other day)
• toolbox for authoring and describing intersubjective cinematic understanding derived from Theory of Metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)
• a way to get a hold of the cinematic experience via the tracking of sensorimotor aspects and spatial dynamics
• gap between phenomenology and how we describe the experience or gap between the phenomenological and the neurological - how to build a bridge between these
• embodied metaphors
• "My goal is to shed light and define novel perspectives especially on the categorization and attribution of emotions within the cinematic narrative. The artistic and scientific outcome is an “intelligent” cinematic system that anticipates and makes inferences about emotional narrative paths suggested by the spectator-participants' bodily actions. "
• enactive cinema - how the narrative unfolds depends on how the spectator experiences emotional dynamics between the characters
  

• dynamic emotion ecology refers to the dynamic interactinon between spectator and psychophysiological states
• emphasises unconscious interaction between narrative and emotional participation, the invitation to enact is very gentle. 5 chairs invite the spectator to sit down, there are also other biofeedback sensors measuring emotional level etc...

Listening to Pia Tikka's talk i'm wondering what happens with spectators who don't have high or normal functioning mirror neurons (perhaps as has been suggested in the case of autism? And what about gender issues. Some cognitive/neuroscience studies suggest there are gender differences with mirror neurons, deepening the stereotype that women are more empathetic because women's mirror neurons showed signs of stronger stimulation (for one example, see this article - "Gender differences in the human mirror system: a magnetoencephalography study")


Data that was monitored - heart rate, breathing rate, activity monitoring, non-body contact - all of this information can go into a toolbox for authors on how to create a narrative.

Have a look at the following video for an interpretation of Eisenstein's visual "vocabulary"

[conference: IT and teaching]

SITE 2009 - Charleston, South Carolina - March 2 - 6, 2009

Proposals Due: October 17 2008

Call for Presentations

Presentation Types

Proposal Submission Guide & Form

Advance Program/Registration

Deadlines

Topics

Proceedings Guidelines

Presenter Lounge

Corporate Participation

Overview

Registration Rates

Hotel & Travel Information

Charleston, South Carolina

Program Committee

Review Policy


GENERAL TOPICS:
* Assessment and E-folios
* Corporate
* Development of Future Faculty
* Digital Video
* Distance/Flexible Education
* Electronic Playground
* Equity and Social Justice
* Evaluation and Research
* Games and Simulations
* Graduate Education and Faculty Development
* Information Literacy
* Information Technology Diffusion/Integration
* International Education
* Latino/Spanish Speaking Community
* Leadership
* New Possibilities with Information Technologies
* Web/Learning Communities
* Workforce Education


See more at the conference site: http://site.aace.org/conf/

[DMU leading 3D gaming and gaze software]

In the technology section of the most recent online New Scientist I see that De Montfort University's Stephen Vickers, is leading the research on gaze technology - a type of assistive technology.

"Users typically guide a cursor with their eyes, staring at objects for a time to emulate a mouse click. But that is too laborious to let users to match the speed and accuracy of real-time 3D games, says lead researcher on the project, Stephen Vickers, of De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

His team is developing the software as part of the EU-funded project Communication by Gaze Interaction (COGAIN).
Gaze gaming

"Even though a user in, say, Second Life might look as if they are able-bodied, if they can't operate and communicate as fast as everyone else, they could be perceived as having a disability," he told New Scientist, adding that there is a privacy issue for players who may prefer not to reveal their disability in the virtual world.

In virtual worlds, gamers need to perform a whole suite of commands including moving their character or avatar, altering their viewpoint on the scene, manipulating objects and communicating with other players.

Eye-gaze systems bounce infrared light from LEDs at the bottom of a computer monitor and track a person's eye movements using stereo infrared cameras. This setup can calculate where on a screen the user is looking with an accuracy of about 5 mm.

Vickers' software includes the traditional point and click interface, but includes extra functions to speed up certain commands."

Read Vickers' paper here.

Watch a video:

I wonder how this kind of literacy - using one's eyes in a *very* different way - plays into the concept of transliteracy...something to think about.

[ur brain on compUtrs]

In the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend there was a feature by John Cornwell: "It's a No Brainer." The article gave an overview of Professor Susan Greenfield's latest research findings detailing the effects of extended computer use on young people's brains.

According to Cornwell, Greenfield is predicting a "nobody scenario" in which teens of tomorrow won't have a secure/stable sense of personal identity (which means lack of morality and inability to think about effect of actions).

"By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen...the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alterations. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Organge, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences."

Greenfield draws parallels between the degeneration of an Alzheimer's brain and "the implications of these newer threats." For Greenfield (via Cornwell) too much IT (from 6-9 hours a day...ah! sounds like me!) means brains develop differently: "The brain has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."

Thanks to the "substitution of virtual experience for real encounters, the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry, a decline in linguistic and visual imagination, and atrophy of creativity, ccontracted, brutalised text-messagine, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complext thinking" ..."the more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other." the result: "a failure to build highly personalise individual conceptual freamworks..."

I'm not sure about the seemingly sweeping negativity. Sure computers have changed/added to the ways we communicate but young people especially are still in school all day - there *must* be at least some real-life contact during those hours. A decline in linguistic imagination? I think text messaging is all about imagination rather than a "brutalised" form of language, this is a craft - a different kind of language for a specific purpose (only 140 characters to say what you mean). Sounds like the creation of a kind of code. But more research needs to be conducted before anyone can say exactly what changes are occuring and how parents/educators/society should (or should not) accommodate them. (See Charles Leadbeater: "But the reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves.")

Interestingly, the print version of the Times' article has various brain photos but the accompanying online version does not. The images included in the print article are from the Science Photo Library which also has these amazing views of the brain speaking, hearing words and reading words:





As an aside to the article content (science, brain research, teens) the writing style of Cornwell suggests his own kind of ludditism...an inappropriate gendered kind. Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Fullerian Professor of Physiology, Senior Research Fellow Lincoln College, Honorary Fellow, St. Hilda's College) is described as "the motormouth publicist of science" whose "lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry." She is also a "glamourpuss" (though at least an "academic" one). We are told about her "bust up with her Oxford-don husband" and then treated to Cornwell's interpretation of her accoutrements: "she, in laboratory mode, is dressed down in a beautifully cut Russian-red jacket; a sleeveless, artificial-fur-lined silvery waistcoat; charcoal Armani trousers; a fetching beret (hint of Rasta-chic); and patent platform lace-up ankle boots." Further in the article, Cornwell describes Greenfield's "tight-fitting grey-blue trouser suit" she wears to a Birmingham lecture. Just one question: had the scientist been male, would Cornwell similarly draw focus to his "pouting" lips, eyes and clothes?

[international literacy]

"The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international comparative study of the reading literacy of young students. PIRLS studies the reading achievement and reading behaviors and attitudes of fourth-grade students in the United States and students in the equivalent of fourth grade in other participating countries.

PIRLS was first administered in 2001and included 35 countries, and was administered again in 2006 to students in 40 countries. PIRLS 2006 results will be released on November 28, 2007. The next PIRLS is scheduled for 2011. PIRLS is coordinated by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)."

Have a look at the comparison overview:



Apparently the drop in literacy (but this is just word-literacy) has been blamed on gaming.

The Sun (ever so reliable source) says "computers keep kids away from books." Perhaps...but maybe they're still reading online...

Image from Neil Long.

But, have a look at one of the reading samples the 4th-graders were given:

Image from the The Reading Literacy of U.S. Fourth-Grade Students in an International Context Report.

Would this kind of story encourage attention from today's 4th grade students? Plus, literacy here is defined solely as

"the ability to understand and use those written language forms required by society and/or valued by the individual. Young readers can construct meaning from a variety of texts. They read to learn, to participate in communities of readers in school and everyday life, and for enjoyment. (Mullis et al. 2006)"

And with this definition they believe they can measure (see p.2)

• processes of comprehension;
• purposes of reading; and
• reading behaviors and attitudes.

They do say they're focusing on "print" literacy but I wonder whether this method really does give accurate results for *today's* readers. I suppose I'm wondering about the accuracy especially because in the comparison of literacy levels between countries, the report considers "Canada" but only reports on two provinces, Ontario and Quebec.

I think Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher's most recent book is in the right direction, tapping into new literacies.

[social networking]

How great is it to meet someone interesting on the train? Well, it has happened before but today I met Andy Law of CyberSports a gaming company and we spent the whole trip talking about social networking (I've told him about CreativeCoffee Club and NLab) and he's interested in getting his company onto Facebook and shared with me some fascinating info. about their about-to-be released MMOG (though the site was down when I last checked it...perhaps too much traffic).

"What if you could play football online with thousands of other people in 3 to 11-aside squads, controlling a single player from the footballer’s perspective?

Eventually, hard work and persistence may lead to you turning professional and earn you money with which you could buy the best that life can offer. Lead the life of a football superstar in a utopian world."

[machinima = storytelling]

After welcomes and introductions to the event, Paul Marino, Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, shared with us his presentation, "commemorating the first ten years of the use of game engines in real-time for the creation of Machinima." For me, this was an excellent presentation as it really gave me a sense of how machinima began and the stages through which it has been evolving. What I found most exciting about Marino's presentation was his recurring statement that machinima is about telling stories (woo hoo go narrative!):



Watching Marino's chronology of machinima not only reflected the development of technology and skill but also the greater expertise or craft of storytelling. (here is a list of his machinima selections) Marino, as well as other speakers on the day, reminded us that *anyone* can create machinima stories but then I wondered if that were true why are so few women (seemingly and please let me know if this is way off) are involved? Judging from the audience not many women are interested in machinima. Judging from the entries DMU received, not many women are making machinima. Judging from the films viewed at the festival, not many women are playing parts in machinima in terms of characters (there were a couple but not exactly positing *contemporary* views of women...) or production. Is this really the case or are women presenting their machinima work in other arenas and following different avenues? (perhaps Sims99.com might be such a place) The seeming lack of women was highlighted for me during an afternoon panel which included Ricard Gras, Xavier Lardy, Friedrich Kirschner and Klaus Neumann. Interesting as it was to hear the speakers' thoughts on distributing and promoting machinima as well as the variety of links Friedrich and Klaus zoomed through, I was left a bit surprised - given the perceived accessibility of machinima - that no women were represented in that session. I wonder if this gender imbalance grows out of the fact that machinima originated with gaming? How many women play Quake and Halo etc...? However, maybe this is changing already with Sims and SL game engines?





Food for thought I think.



~~~~~

"When a guy can show a machinima vid and proudly announce 1996 as the date of origin for that art form, he’s eliding decades of female vidding history. And that’s very, very wrong. (Harvard 2005)"

~~~~~

[machinima festival at dmu]

woo hoo! tomorrow I'm heading over to the machinima festival at dmu.

Check out the small print...guess who was one of the judges:

[user-created content a *must* for gaming]

At the transliteracy colloquium on Tuesday we talked about the role of co-operation and collaboration in transliteracy and Sue brought up Surowiecki's "wisdom of crowds." Today I read Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve Software, argue that home consoles must embrace user-created content if “they want online to matter.”

"Half-Life 1 was okay as a multiplayer game and Team Fortress Classic was really good, but Counter-Strike kicked both their asses no question. And that came from a kid going to college in Canada and another kid going to high school in New Jersey, who had our code and thought it would be cool to play our game.”

"The PC has that great advantage; has had that great advantage, and it comes from multiplayer and modding starting in the early '90s and [online] multiplayer only showing up on consoles in 2000 or 2001.”

“You've got a good 10-to-15-year lead there and you still have broken pathways on both consoles, so the PC has the advantage of time and a clear pathway," he added. "You've got a freeway set up on the PC and you've got this dirt road with roadblocks all over it on console in terms of getting user-made content out there."

As it stands, home consoles are only just starting to become acquainted with user-based content, as seen in the Playstation 3’s LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule, which is distributed player to player.

However, Valves upcoming project, like many efforts that stemmed from PC titles, will likely be a commercial effort, requiring certification.

"I would love to see that happen, but I think the platform holders are always going to need certification, which means it's usually going to have to be a commercial thing," admitted Lombardi.


Story from Gameworld Network