030303: Collective Play - notes from a recent academic conference about electronic gaming and collaboration, hosted by University of California, Berkeley, and Intel. (experimenting with Radio notetaking/outlines) [Pardon me - this still needs to be hyperlinked.]

030303 Collective Play

• Details
• 030303 - the third in a series of academic game conferences associated with University of California, Berkeley.
• Howard was invited to speak, he suggested that Jane and I attend with him.
• At the PowerBar building - the tallest building in this town. On the top floor is the Intel Office - an open source wireless research center affiliated with UCB.
• Before you came, they asked, "What was your favourite game when you were ten?" - that was printed on your badge.
• Jane McGonigal - UCBerkeley student - organizer
• Pervasive (perversive - heh)
• The Nokia Game, The Go Game
• Immersive gaming (Majestic, AI Web Game)
• Layered or mixed reality
• Integration, not simulation
• Pervasive and embedded game play
• Interactivity
• In real life, examples: ringing payphone? Acting out skits for security cameras?
• "Play Paradigm" - persistence of game metaphor in non-play spaces, transforming them?
• Collective Play
• Shared goals, distributed strategies,
• How do we recognize games? Or mis-recognize them? Are there benefits for blurring that line? How do you blur them?
• Very smart, competant introduction.
• Greg Niemeyer - UC Berkeley
• Blurring games and reality, a sign of decadence? Games are played by civilizations at their moment of decline.
• We play games for moral relief? To distance ourselves from society?
• free - separate - uncertain - unproductive - regulated - fictional (derived from book: Man, Games and Play by Roger Caillois)
• parameters established French philosopher who wrote Man Games Life
• Instead - maybe games are a tool for engagement - engagement with a simulation of a person
• Short, provocative burst of ideas.
• Dana Plautz - Intel
• Funded many game laboratories - curious about future research directions for technology
• 60% of game development will happen in Europe?
• Collective Detective
• http://www.collectivedetective.org/
• Beating sweepstakes puzzle - their users wanted to beat the system, not get the prize
• What kinds of problems could be solved by collective system-beating impulses?
• Local political issues perhaps - tracking a paper trail and holding people accountable.
• Howard Rheingold - SmartMobs
• Collective Games nested within Collective Play nested within Collective Action
• Essay: What makes things fun to learn? by Tom Malone
• Gaming and flirting - in virtual worlds, behavior driven by the chance to blur virtual and real
• Effective abbreviated philosophical context
• Ken Goldberg - UC Berkeley
• Statistic: Only 7% of Americans have passports and only 10% of them have been used in the last 2 years
• (what about numbers of virtual tourists?)
• Joke: Two kinds of people - those who speak binary and those who don't
• Tele-reality versus virtual reality - tele meaning the virtual stands for something real, at a distance
• Public Keys: Acts of Faith, Trust and Access (art exhibit: 18 February 2003)
• He mentions Lynn Hirschman - very early work in this area
• Energetic, fun, smart presentation.
• Anthony Levandowski and Matthieu Metz - LaRaison
• SharePack - a game with no boundaries (time or space)
• Played with mobile phones or PDAs? Perhaps dedicated pocket devices, like Tamagochi
• Passive and active information and resource trading
• "expansion packs" - physical power ups for people who can't play constantly
• The Go Game
• Founder's dream story - at the core of their company.
• Drop your pants and dance - command issued from a phone actually followed
• Photos from past Go Games include a striking image of a young woman who had successfully convinced a cop to pose wearing his own handcuffs (to fulfill the assignment: "convince a stranger to trust you")
• Eric Paulos - UC Berkeley
• Non-verbal means of communication - physical interactions with wireless technologies
• Portable technology for young people - provides emotional benefit of constant connection
• Technology exchanges awareness, more than invitation
• Emoji from Wired
• "Motes" from Intel ?
• Machines used to give non-textual/verbal communication and relationship signals
• Street as Interface - "Digital patina" - we already tag things with text and graffiti, smells, broken elements, trash.
• Provocative, street-smart
• Jussi Holopainen - Nokia Research Center, Finland
• Marc Davis - SIMS Project @ UC Berkeley
• http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/
• Personalizing television, personal and popular culture mingling
• Mary Van Dusen's video Gray Geese, Star Trek Fan Music Video (mostly women?) - televideo Kirk/Spock slash viction
• Social TV watching - TV and chat/IM
• Converting television into an interactive medium where your meta-data appears inside, like MadLibs live?
• Marc shows a 7-Up commercial where he's inserted himself into it
• BreakOut Session
• Blurring the line between real and virtual - what is good or bad about that?
• Bad
• GTA3 changes percieved risks, rules and stakes of "reality," real driving
• Reconditioning sex offenders with images, testing urges from images
• Go Game example of pants dropping like Stanley Milgram's experiments with obidience to authority
• Versus embedded mistrust
• Maybe these games can be used to teach mistrust
• Immersive gaming leads to paranoia in real life
• What is our responsibility as media readers/makers?
• Good
• Release - preventing criminal behaviour
• Mapping social practices
• Play with rules, systems promotes creativity
• Technologies, interfaces that promote this blurring
• Marc's television appearance
• Cacaphony society - social, non technological
• Games demand social architectures - from existing systems? or new systems? MMOGs need buddy list
• What about when cultures change? Hard to hold constant means of communication around the world, over time
• Limiting communications is part of the game rules, game experience
• Making appointments for virtual presence, meetings?
• Taking a telephone and putting it in the game
• Technologies of temperature or light demonstrating your friends and their thoughts on you
• Tools to make your own language
• BreakOut Sessions Wrap-up
• Group 3 - Celia Pearce
• potential for political action through performance in games
• role-playing and practice
• playing against the machine? playing against the game designer.
• Group 1 -
• Schiller: "We're most at home when we play games" - most ourselves?
• Consequences - what if your credit report is affected by the outcome of the game?
• Boundary-establishing - where is the off-switch in an immersive game?
• Group 4 - Carol
• Easy to blur the line, harder to draw it.
• Lunch
• Howard suggests a movie itinerary for studying blurring of virtual and real: The Game, House of Games, Spanish Prisoner
• With 13th Floor as the midnight flik?
• Do games signal the end of a complex society?
• Playing to detach from something dying
• Is it tragic to have such resources and attention develoted to virtual problems.
• Monica Lam - Documentary Filmmaker - UC Berkeley Journalism Graduate School
• Television newscast-style short film about America's Army
• But no counter-point
• Henry Lowood & Casey Alt from Stanford University
• Presentation from "How They Got Game" history of videogames and interactive simulations
• funded by Stanford Humanities Lab
• Very elaborate, flash-y Powerpoint
• Upcoming Yerba Buena center installation on the Battle of 73 Easting from the Gulf War
• Studying "counter-gaming" - gaming outside of popular, commercial games
• Frans Mayra - Hypermedia Labratory
• Introducing DICRA
• Talks about Majestic, Nokia Game, Bot Fighters
• Can You See Me Now? - player is hunted in virtual rotterdam
• Sean Stewart - A.I. Web Game
• Put up nine months of content, most people solved it within 4 days
• "Quick! We have to write a 'solve world hunger puzzle!'"
• Bacon and Newton established the group problem solving format
• They put up a clue containing 17th century written Japanese, because someone knows someone knows someone knows someone who can read it.
• Massive amounts of data create opportunities for amateur scientists and explorers
• Role-playing gamers are training themselves to participate in emergent narratives
• Games as art - not as reality or non-reality
• Dynamic speaker
• Geoffrey Bowker and Matthew Kabatoff - UC San Diego
• jupiter.ucsd.edu/~mkabatoff/SITE/skyles.html
• PDA interface - Wireless XML SOAP database - Network Ontology - How can you play networks?
• PDA-based MUDS in an installation combined with narratives drawn from plays and literary theory
• Intriguing-looking maps: book narratives mapped into network topologies, but they go unexplained.
• Susan Leigh Star and Zara Mirmalek - UC San Diego, Department of Communication
• Leigh's pain history
• Personal testimonial and poetry in the language of academia
• What are the requirements of everyday life, and how can we teach them in games?
• Evaluation based on process-fullfillment not on emotional satisfaction of participating parties
• How to teach emotional practice
• "invisible others like us talking to others"
• How to interact, create, play around trauma, suffer, alienation without it being a downer
• Fascinating practice of the deep discourse of posed academia I hadn't heard perhaps since Swarthmore.
• Staffan Bjork - Studio Manager, Play Studio, Gotenberg University
• I play America's Army, mostly with some Swedes, many Polish people, Germans
• Yehuda Kalay - Architecture Department at Berkeley
• Discussion of the nature of place, as virtuality affects it.
• Slides, pictures of Tron, pictures of CG virtual worlds, student designs of new information spaces
• Sri Sridharan and Syed Shariq - TrustNet
• We want to understand trust
• How people formulate and meet expectations
• Tools: Do what I say; Interpreters: Do what I mean; Agents: Act for Me; Collaboration - exchange
• The afternoon runs long - even nice audiences have trouble staying awake and interested. Butts fall asleep.
• John Sherry - Intel Corporation
• Funny, honest, refreshing
• Good looking powerpoint - black and white, simple, sans-serif
• "Deep Play" by Clifford Geertz, about Balinese CockFighting
• Translation between "cock" and "sabung" is direct, in all connotations.
• Sabung - keitai?
• "foreground the technologies"
• No final breakout groups - standing around and talking. And then, a retreat to Jupiter, a fine alehouse in Berkeley. I sat at a table loaded with people developing graduate school programs to study electronic gaming.