Monthly Archives: December 2011

CfP: 11th IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing ICEC 2012

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11th IFIP INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING

ICEC 2012 — http://www.icec2012.org

26-29 September 2012, Bremen, Germany

The IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing explores the application of computational technology to entertainment. The conference brings together practitioners and researchers interested in the art and design of entertainment computing applications. ICEC welcomes submissions on the design, engineering, application and theory of entertainment technology. We solicit paper, poster and demonstration submissions, as well as proposals for tutorials and workshops. In addition to regular scientific contributions we encourage contributions specifically for and by the industry that will be presented in a dedicated session. Papers will be published via Springer and archived in the SpringerLink digital library.

More after the jump

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CfP: Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing (WICED 2012)

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CALL FOR PAPERS: THE WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT CINEMATOGRAPHY AND EDITING (WICED 2012)

May 28th and 29th, 2012
Marriott City Center, Raleigh, NC
Part of The International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2012
Workshop URL:http://dgrc.ncsu.edu/activities/conf/wiced2012

The expressive use of virtual cameras, mise-en-scene, lighting and texturing within 3D synthetic environments shows great promise to extend the communicative power of film and video into the artificial environments of 3D games and virtual worlds.

Cinematics produced in virtual 3D environments play an important role expanding beyond entertainment to other applications, including training, education, health-care communication, simulation, visualization and others. Tools for automatic generation of cinematics and cinematic effects within these applications can provide an advantage in tailoring the spatial, temporal, communicative aspects of the experience.

This workshop will bring an interdisciplinary group of researchers and industrial experts from several fields spanning 3D graphics, artificial intelligence, visualization, interactive narrative, cognitive and perceptual psychology, computational linguistics, computational aesthetics, visual effects and others who are working on the many related aspects of automatic generation or cinematics.

We invite researchers and practitioners who draw upon cutting edge research and technologies regarding both the production and comprehension of virtual cinematics.

Among the topics of interest for this workshop are the following:
(after the jump)

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CfP: 2nd International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2012)

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2nd International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2012): Realizing User Engagement with Game Engineering Techniques

June 9, 2012
Zurich, Switzerland
http://2012.gasworkshop.org

co-located with ICSE 2012 (http://icse2012.org)

Submission deadline: February 17, 2012

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CfP: Chapter proposals for collection on the Representation and Depiction of History in Video Games

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We are seeking chapters for a new interdisciplinary collection addressing the representation and depiction of history in video games.

In a 2005 article discussing the simulation of history through video games, William Uricchio observes that the opportunities for mediation through play pose new and difficult questions about narrative authority and representation. “What happens”, he asks, “if we push the notion of mediation beyond language, to the domain of game, enactment, or simulation? Does this allow us to slip out of the well-critiqued trap of representation? And if so, where does it land us?” As of 2011, his questions remain unanswered.

Amid a world of SIMs, first-person warfare games, strategy, MMO and MMORPs in which players can influence the outcome of battles, campaigns, and even entire civilisations, such questions about the means by which history is delivered to new generations gain increasing importance. When history can be simulated, recreated, subverted and rewritten on a variety of levels, new questions arise about the relationship between video games and the history they purport to represent, questions which traditional historical approaches cannot properly address.

The proposed edited collection thus seeks to examine representations of history through video and computer games from a multidisciplinary perspective. Our aim is to avoid criticisms of inaccuracy and betrayal or descriptions of games which purportedly ‘get things wrong’, but to look instead at the ways in which contemporary players actually can and do engage with the past, and what effect this has on the period depicted.

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NYU Game Center to Offer MFA Degree in Game Design – Starting Fall 2012

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*NYU Game Center to Offer MFA Degree in Game Design*
*Beginning Fall 2012*

New York University has announced that the NYU Game Center, one of the
world’s leading academic game programs, will offer a new Masters of Fine Arts degree beginning in Fall 2012. MFA students will explore games as a creative art form as they design and develop games within a context of rigorous scholarly study in the two-year program at the NYU Game Center.

The curriculum includes game design, game programming, visual design for games, and game criticism. The program is distinctive in looking at games across a wide variety of media, from consoles and PCs to
smartphones and social networks. Over the course of two years, students will find their voices as creative practitioners working on individual and group projects, as they study the theoretical and cultural aspects
of games, all within the thriving community that is the NYU Game Center.
For more detailed information, visit:

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate

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CfP: IEEE IGIC 2012 – The Fourth International Games Innovation Conference

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IEEE IGIC 2012
The Fourth International Games Innovation Conference

Co-Hosted by the International Center for the History of Electronic Games on the Campus of The Strong and The School of Interactive Games and Media at RIT

September 7-9, 2012, Rochester, New York USA

http://ice-gic.ieee-cesoc.org

Conference Theme: Designing for Play

more after the jump…
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Conference: 3rd POCOS Symposium on Preservation of Games and Virtual Worlds

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3rd POCOS Symposium on Preservation of Games and Virtual Worlds:

• 26-27 January 2012
• The Novotel Hotel, Cardiff, UK
• Organised by the Future-Proof Computing Group, University of Portsmouth, UK.
• Symposium Fee: Free + £10 donation for refreshments (payable at the event)

Online registration: http://www.pocos.org/index.php/registration

Details after the jump
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Book: Ringbearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative edited by Tanya Krzywinska, Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Justin Parsler and published by Manchester University Press.

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Ringbearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative edited by Tanya Krzywinska, Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Justin Parsler and published by Manchester University Press.

It is available from Amazon UK at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ring-Bearers-Online-Intertextual-Narrative/dp/0719082927/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1323768029&sr=8-2

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Book: Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in WoW by Mark Chen

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http://www.amazon.com/Leet-Noobs-Warcraft-Literacies-Epistemologies/dp/1433116103/

Leet Noobs documents, for over 10 months, a group of players in the online game World of Warcraft engaged in a 40-person joint activity known as raiding. Initially, the group was informal, a family that wanted to hang out and have fun. Before joining, each player had been recognized as expert in the game; within the group they had to adapt their expertise for the new joint task and align themselves to new group goals. Through their shared activity, members successfully established communication and material practices that changed as they had to renegotiate roles and responsibilities with new situations and as the larger gaming community evolved. Players learned to reconfigure their play spaces, enrolling third-party game mods and other resources into their activity. Once-expert players became novices or noobs to relearn expert or leet gameplay. They became leet noobs who needed to reconfigure their expertise for new norms of material practice. Ultimately, these norms also changed what it meant to play World of Warcraft; some group members no longer wanted to just hang out and have fun, and eventually the group died in an online fiery meltdown.

A summary of findings can be found in this post at Terra Nova from a year ago:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2010/10/a-dissertation-distilled-into-a-single-blog-post-cry.html

According to the author, “the book has basically been rewritten for a more general audience, focusing a bit more on the story arc of the raid group, and now features a bunch of personal anecdotes about being a gamer in academia. :) ”
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