Joseph Corr

From Regina, at we-make-money-not-art:

Notes from Steffen Walz’s talk at Game, Set and Match II:

Dialectics of surveillance fun. Surveillance technologies are sine qua non components of our everyday life conditions. To what degree could serious pervasive games bring upon us an invisible system of technocontrol that would use the positive side of game. Turning our world into a “fun prison.”

The game could consist in trying to avoid surveillance camera using a map of the location of the CCTV cams or trying to be detected by as many as possible. One way to look at pervasive games as a form of counter surveillance or sousveillance or inverse surveillance (using surveillance to make something new.)
Exemple: New York Surveillance Camera Players.

Serious pervasive games follow rules set outside the game itself (war, policy, marketing, health, etc.). The game moves beyond the computer screen and people have to behave accordingly to the rules of the games. It’s more fun because you’re outside, in the normal world and you can impersonate another character: But upon you is surveillance architecture.

A whole nation can be turned into a game space.

Walz the showed a series of projects he has worked on.
- his students repurposed a cloister into a war zome with players running around the space to conquer territory using a tag shooter.

LINK - http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/008274.php

This is a rehash of an idea a student of mine from last quarter were tossing around. I’d like to learn more about the location sensing technologies this is implementing.  I also really like the idea of the virtual ‘6th floor’ that can be accessed via the PDA.  The building has 5 physical floors that you explore, and the 6th floor is a virtual area where players can interact with each other and solve the puzzle.

M.A.D.Control Players use PDAs on a wireless network to solve clues and find and deactivate a bomb hidden in a building. In addition to the real-world physical floors of the building, there’s a “virtual floor”; player activity crosses back and forth between the real setting and the virtual one.

LINK - http://www.madcountdown.de/preloader.html 

Regina, from we-make-money-not-art.com, is at the ‘Game, Set, Match 2′ conference in Delft, Netherlands right now, and she is pumped. Here’s an excerpt from her write up on the titled lecture:

First Person Paradoxes: The Logic of War in Computer Games by David Nieborg, from the University of Amsterdam.

Most digital games revolve around direct or indirect conflicts. War has therefore always been an easy pick for game designers. This presentation focussed on”realistic” SQUAD-BASED online multiplayer First Person Shooter pc games. They are squad-based (on the one hand the terrorists, on the other one the counter-terrorists). They involve some tactics (that’s what makes them realistic). Examples: America’s Army, Battlefield 2, Counter Strike and the recent Ghost Recon (image below) which features the highest tech that the U.S. army actually has at its disposal.

“Winning is keeping the target in constant sight”, wrote Virilio. The battlefield has always been a question of perception: seeing is killing. That’s why the U.S. military is so good at developing gears that enable soldiers to see better in whatever condition.

LINK - http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/008272.php

Rosanie - http://www.rosanie.blogspot.com

Nick - http://studentpages.scad.edu/~niotto20/thesisblog.html

Mili - http://milikuo.blogspot.com

Eun-Young - http://eunyoungyou.blogspot.com/

http://wiki.arch.ethz.ch/twiki/bin/view/Front/CaadArticleResearch2006X02X10X15X11X02

Sponsored by Nokia, this game entitled REXplorer is a real-world, real-time, mulitplayer, online mediated gaming system.  Basically, you rent a ‘Wand’ (think of a Nintendo Revolution controller, gyros and all, mixed with a cell speakerphone) and wander around the city, while the wand alerts you to ‘hidden spirits’ and other AI that live in geographic regions. To interact with these ’spirits’ you need to make specific gestures with your wand (which they call a ‘cellcast’) and you will then unlock those treasures/spirits.  If you interact with others with wands, you can do battle with your wand, casting spells with gestures, or treating the wand like the base of a lightsaber.  Pretty amazing, innovative, all that.

This includes past work that I have done, as well as information on what my Thesis’ core is.  Keep in mind that it is in a state of flux right now, and I will be updating this blog with developments and refinements to it.

LINK - http://www.josephcorr.com/45/thesis

I just got my delivery of the two must-have Ruby/RoR books by Dave Thomas.  Thomas is one of the founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, a publishing company created after the book ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’ was published and the phenomenon that it created grew.  The latest two books on Ruby are ‘Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide’ and ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’, coatuhored with David Hansson, the creator of the Rails framework; Leon Breedt, who wrote the web services component of Rails; Thomas Fuchs, who contributed much of the AJAX support for Rails; and Andreas Schwarz, the guy who wrote the security manual.

I’m pretty stoked to go through these books, as it will no doubt help my practices while working with PHP, ColdFusion, ActionScript and JavaScript, as well as introduce me to Ruby, something that will make my life easier as I shed the aforementioned languages.

I will update this with relevant resources and information regarding my thesis. Keep alert fools!

This is scary. And cool. It’s like creating an ant farm, where if you do it right, you destroy humanity.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/008254.php

A first level features a community of small robots divided into two groups, the black one and the green one. Each group has a primary level of socialization and a series of sounds conforming a unique vocabulary. Each robot’s initial state consists of a very simple movement within a delimitated spatial environment.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/008223.php

Metazoa Ludens is a computer gaming environment which allows pets to play mixed reality games with humans via custom built technologies and applications.

Humans can mostly passively map and analyze the data that is coming as the result of the technological implications on societies. Metazoa Ludens searches for new moments that solve this problem by placing animals as one of the new elements in this cycle. How can a living creature make changes to robust technologically driven systems? What are the possible outcomes of this combination? To answer these questions, the Metazoa Ludens team creates simulations, analytic models, and prototypes that will bear new results and implications. The first game enables hamsters to have a superior position compared to the humans’ position in the game. The overall aims for these types of games are to provide new beneficial relations, communications, interactions, progressions, and the evolution of the Metazoa species.