Jason Rohrer

BIO: Jason Rohrer is an independent game artist, programmer, and critic.
With game designs that explore complex and subtle aspects of the human condition, his work has bolstered the acceptance of games as a serious art form. Rohrer's games have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions in Park City, Toronto, Montreal, and Lleida, Spain. His 2007 release, Passage, received widespread critical and industry acclaim, with God of War creator David Jaffe calling Passage "one of the most emotional video games I've ever played." Parallel with his design efforts, Rohrer's review and interview site Arthouse Games has served as the lone hub of artgame criticism since 2006. Rohrer lives with his spouse and two children in the rural town of Potsdam, New York, where they pursue a simple, frugal lifestyle.

Some URLs for linking:

http://hcsoftware.sf.net/passage
http://hcsoftware.sf.net/gravitation
http://arthousegames.n3.net
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120034796455789469.html

ABSTRACT:In his lecture "The Game Design of Art," Jason Rohrer will present his observations from the front lines of the "games as art" debate. The fundamental question for Rohrer is not "Can games be art?", but instead, "How can we make art with our games?" Through comparison with film and critical analysis of several example artgames, the talk will explore one possible creative route: using game mechanics as metaphor.

James Tunick

BIO: James Tunick received his BA from Yale University and received his Masters in New Media from NYU Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). He is President/Co-Founder of StudioIMC (www.StudioIMC.com), a new media agency based in New York City. Studio IMC clients have included the Museum of Modern Art PS1, Heineken, Hennessy, Clear Channel, US Army, Diesel, NBC/Universal, National Amusements, the NJ Nets, the NRDC, and many others.

Tunick is also Executive Producer of the IMCexpo (www.IMCexpo.net), a show about innovations in art and technology held at the Chelsea Art Museum. Tunick also produced a 3-month Studio IMC show called “Beyond TV” at the Museum of TV & Radio in New York City (www.mtr.org/events/beyondtv)

Tunick’s work has been featured in the Time Warner Center, Times Square, Philadelphia, LA, Dallas, Boston, and Chicago, as well as in the LA Times, on NY1 News, The Discovery Channel, and Sony News Network. Tunick’s work has also been featured in Rollingstone Magazine, in the Museum of Modern Art, in the book, Virtual Sets and Pre-Visualization for Games, Movies and the Web, by Jean-Marc Gauthier, and in an upcoming book about media to be published in China.

He also has a patent pending with more software in the pipeline and he has plans to open a Studio IMC research lab and gallery in New York City with his business partners, Tony Rizzaro and Eric Alini.

BIO: As a student at Gallatin, Oren Ross paved a unique path through the many schools, forging a study in game design, when many academic institutions just began looking at it as a course worthy of higher education. After graduating, he went straight to Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, continuing his trailblazing ways through the closest possible academic route. While a student at ITP, he and a few fellow students received the Digital Incubator Grant from mtvU / Cisco Systems, to create snagu, a mobile phone scavenger hunt.

Through his career in gaming he has already worked with the Entertainment Software Rating Board, 2K Games, and MTV Networks. Currently he conducts playtest sessions at Gameloft, advising producers on small fixes that will have big effects, to ensure that the games are able to reach the highest level of fun possible. He also volunteers with NYU, as a Board Member of the Alumni Association, and the International Game Developers Association, producing their momentous Demo Nights, a New York game industry favorite.

Susan Gold

BIO: Susan is chair of the International Game Developers Association Education Special Interest Group and serves as an academic curriculum consultant in video games and computer graphics. Susan's work with the Ed SIG has created many new tools for instructors in game education. Her current focus is in organizing a knowledge base, developing student outcomes in games, resources for educators teaching in games as well as creating curricular models for the varying academic programs.

A key focus for Susan is in developing game industry relationships to help build academic relations and recommendations for educators. Susan is an artist, teacher, and activist with a specialization in digital art, new media and videogames. She speaks around the world on the IGDA curriculum framework, how to get hired in the industry and is often asked to review student portfolios. Susan's key role is to help educators develop collaborative learning strategies in the classroom to make for successful graduates. Susan's artwork and writing have been featured in numerous galleries and museums.

As an educator, Susan has helped shape a niche program in entertainment technology. Honored as the 2008 IGDA MVP, Susan continues to seek out new ways of to improve the education of students and help educators throughout the world. Susan sits on the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee and the IEEE WG16.3 Committee on Theoretical Foundation of Entertainment Computing in addition to numerous university and industry advisory boards.

WHO: The speakers are DAVE GILBERT, creator of Wadjet Eye Games and CHARLES JOSEPH PRATT, creator of Situated Games, winner of Digital Incubator Grant from MTVu and Cisco Systems.
WHERE: Skirball Center for New Media, 9th floor, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 721 Broadway. CONTACT: Jean-Marc Gauthier, jean-marc.gauthier@nyu.edu

DAVE GILBERT has been interested in adventure games ever since 1986, when his mother made the mistake of buying him a copy of Wishbringer. In 2001 he took his first dip into game creation in when he discovered the Reality on the Norm Project and wrote his first short game. Since then, he has authored over six successful freeware games, including 2004's award-winning Two of a Kind. In 2006, he turned his hobby into a fulltime career and founded Wadjet Eye Games.

CHARLES JOSEPH PRATT is a freelance game designer working in New York City. His most recent work was as Level Designer for Adult Swim’s Viva Caligula. He is also the co-founder and Game Designer of Situated Games, whose social networking game Casablanca won the most recent Digital Incubator Grant from MTVu and Cisco Systems.]]> http://itp.nyu.edu/gaming/archives/2008/02/independent_gam.html http://itp.nyu.edu/gaming/archives/2008/02/independent_gam.html Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:56:14 -0500 Program of the 02/01/2008 session of the NYU Gaming Seminar. Starts at 1:00 pm.

Ken Levine, creator of Bioschok, is a founding member of, and creative
director at 2K Boston, formerly known as Irrational Games and now part of Take Two. BioShock one of the top game of 2007, is representative of the new generation of games with a focus on narratives. AP hailed the game "a first-person
shooter turned morality play, a thinking person's action game, a piece of electronic fiction with a soul. Review.

N'Gai Croal, general editor at Newsweek and technology writer, launched a videogame blog for Newsweek called "Level Up" that quickly became an industry must-read.

Bio: Chris Ault is an assistant professor in the Interactive Multimedia program at the College of New Jersey, covering a range of subjects from video games to interaction design to digital media production and literacy. Previously, Chris was a researcher and adjunct professor in NYU's pioneering Interactive Telecommunications Program. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas, and a master's from ITP at NYU.

CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS
-community focusing on four or five parallel pursuits. On the "Wii side":
-exploring expanded usage and homemade replacement of the Wii hardware
-unlocking the ability to execute arbitrary code on the Wii ("homebrew") and developing such code
-developing web-based applications tailored to the Wii. In particular, Flash-based applications which utilize the full range of the device's unique abilities
-growing and finding application for the Wii's online community
-on the PC side:
-repurposing the Wii input devices for PC input and
-corresponding development of diverse/pioneering applications

State of Wii software hacking:
-Homebrew possible in GameCube mode only, via modchip or Action Replay
-Wiimote functionality accessible via community-developed flash APIs

WII HARDWARE HACKING:

STOREBOUGHT HARDWARE MODS:
Action Replay - currently THE most essential hardware mod, allows code execution (in Gamecube mode)
Region-Free Play Enabler - another common 3rd party tool
Forthcoming Dedicated Homebrew Launcher

COMMUNITY MODS:
Wii Hacking 101
Central site with how-to videos
show: -just intro of ep.1
-use-as-mouse part of ep.3

PDF instructions for building a sensor bar

Instructions for wireless retro controllers

PDF
Hardware Hackers Building HDMI Wii Connector Cables
-New this week: hackers have determined how to flash the Wii's firmware from a DVD-R.... opens the possibility of homebrew once the BIOS is decrypted

"Open Source" Wii Homebrew Modchip
ROM streamed from PC to Wii via custom server software

WII HOMEBREW SOFTWARE
WII-NATIVE HOMEBREW
-Gamecube mode only at this point, therefore still largely theoretical
Wii Homebrew Wiki

WII HOMEBREW VIA FLASH:
Flash games 1
Flash games 2 + API
-Flash API allowing full exploitation of the Wiimote
-Demo games
-many believe this is the real key to homebrew on the Wii, and that actual unsigned code execution is no longer a necessary pursuit
Homestar Runner Games Wii versions
Flash-based PC Mii Editor

Mii Repositories
(repository for Miis created via PC editors)
MiiPlaza
MiiMall
Java-based online NES Emulator /w/ 650 games, Wii-enabled
Individual Flash-ports of NES games, optimized for Wii
Flash-based browser enhancement: tabbed browsing, etc.
Streaming Radio Parsed for Wii Opera
Home Control through Wii/PC-based server/Flash interface

PC Support Software
-WiiCR: a media player solution that acts as a streaming media server and is capable of transcoding nearly any video or audio file into an embedded flash file viewable in the Wii's Opera browser. It allows browsing of the remote filesystem to view: videos (avi/xvid/divx/mpeg/wmv/etc), text files, jpg's and play mp3s

REPURPOSING WII HARDWARE FOR THE PC:
-Wiimote "discovery mode" has been found, allowing connection via any standard bluetooth stack
-Applications such as glovePIE mediate between Wiimote and PC, allowing it to be used as a mouse or game controller

Wiimote>>PC Projects underway:
-Mouse emulation daemon.
-generic joystick.
-Gesture recognition, in similarity to mouse gestures and what Nintendo is using. Many games use such "gestures" for control. A classifier can be trained to recognize such gestures (based on raw acceleration data). A classifier can be based on hidden Markov models. Alternatively, a clustering technique based on wavelet transforms could also render suitable. Implementing the math is fairly straightforward. There's many examples in academic literature (search for accelerometer, gesture, recognition, classifier, ...).
-This goes beyond simple accelerometer parsing and vastly enhances the utility of the device
-Sufficient demand that a commercial motion recognizer for PC/wiimote is in development:
AiLive White Paper
-Game engine mod. Say, hack Quake 3 (which is GPL) to use the Wiimote natively.
-Virtual keyboard tailored to the Wiimote. Experiment developing faster typing schemes for the wiimote.
-beryl / compiz interface
-Media player control
-Audio player for the Wiimote speaker (low quality, but potentially useful for effects)
-Calibration application
-Mii creator with support for saving to the Wiimote to transfer back to the Wii :)

Good Wiimote/Windows installation walkthru

Devil Sticks Simulation
-shows full mastery of the controller functions

Half Life 2 Wii mod
-convenient, zero-fuss - wii drivers are integrated into the modded game

House of the Dead 3 + wiimote via GlovePIE script
-demonstrates more sophisticated movement analysis scripting that is beginning to be done in community

Wiitar
-non-gaming application

VIRTools
-this one is near and dear to Jean-Marc's heart...

Wiisaber (Mac)
"this was inevitable"

EXOTICA:
WiiJaying - DJing with Wiimotes:
WiiRoomba
-Wii Beowulf cluster - usually inevitably follows the securing of a networked console's ability to run unsigned code and the porting of Linux
-Wiimote is actually an IR camera - could a cluster of Wiimotes function as ultra-cheap substitute mocap cameras?
-scaled-up sensor bars with clusters of LEDs replacing each single LED effectively extend the range of the Wiimote. The Vicon camera IR lamps emit 128x the intensity of a standard LED with a diameter at approximately the same scaling. Four of them could be used to create a bar whereby a wiimote could drive a display from 2500-4000 feet away with an optimal diagonal-measure screen-size of between 250 and 500 feet - IMAX wii anyone?

-Jeff Hahn is utilizing the Wiimote in conjunction with his MultiTouch environment to facilitate big-screen touch interaction for participants not physically near to the board.
-Jeff is also researching the feasibilty of a hemisphere of multiplexed strobing sensor bars to extend the wiimote's field of action omnidirectionally

More at http://homepages.nyu.edu/~pfb206/wii/wii_links.html

Bio: Peter Birdsall is an accomplished animator, software developer and researcher. He is affiliated with NYU's Media Research Lab, where he provides expertise related to graphics, motion capture and analysis. He has produced animation work for Mabou Mines, David Parsons and Ben Munisteri Dance, and has worked for New York media firms Curious Pictures (as an animator on "The Barbie Diaries" motion picture) and Razorfish (as a technologist developing multimedia projects for broadband and mobile).

- Microsoft proposes The Computer Gaming Resource Toolkit check
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=4724
Microsoft Research posted a RFP (closed) for Gaming and Computer Science. http://research.microsoft.com/erp/gaming/default.aspx

- ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF DESIGN
Sun Microsystems and Provost’s Learning Initiative Grants program funded Through capitalizing on research in the areas of gaming and virtual community social psychology, RIT is engaged in a project to develop a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) entitled “The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study” (M.U.P.P.E.T.S.).

Abstract:
The Graduate School of Games and Interactive Media:
A new pedagogy of training for games

In 1998, I started to work on the project of a public school of games. By that time some professionals were no convinced of the necessity of such school. Numerous universities provided some modules devoted to games in a given subject: programming, graphics and animation, writing and narration; but, to my knowledge, there was, in the world, no specific formation covering the whole design and development process of games, except a school in Japan sponsored by the publisher Komani. All the games produced so far, the great and the bad ones, were designed by peoples coming from various fields, from electrical engineering to cinema and audiovisuals or clever designer without any academic background. Many game designers thought that there was no reason for a change and that an academic training may lead to more conventional games. In counterpart some publishers and managers of game studio agreed on the fact that the game design production world was changing and that a structured and fundamental adapted formation could lead to a new generation of games and new application of game design principles. With the help of French professional game associations (SELL, APOM), the French Government and the Poitou-Charentes region the training opened in 2001 and the Graduate School of Games and Interactive Media (ENJMIN) was officially announced by the prime minister in 2003. In 2007, the ENJMIN will open the same degree in Singapore, in 2008 in St Petersburg (Russia).

The graduate school of games pedagogy is based on the two assumptions: a profession in the game industry is a specialization of a given basic knowledge, the production process of games relies is closely related to the film production process, a cooperative work in multidisciplinary teams. So the school offer mainly an European Master Degree opened to students with at least a bachelor degree and in one of the following fields: Audiovisual, Visual Arts, Sound and Music Design, Computer Science, Psycho-perception and Cognition. Students are selected for their background, their creativity and their passion for video games. The structure of the education is highly inspired from cinema high school (FEMIS, INSAS, NYFA, Lodz Film School …). The two main goals of the pedagogy are:

• To train people to a multidisciplinary work in te

This semester, he's teaching a class at ITP called Massively Multiuser Media which explores the creation of content for online worlds using Second Life as a production platform. Prior to graduating from ITP in 2005, Mike was VP of Technology for an internet financial services start up.

Mario Gerosa is the author with Aurélien Pfeffer of "Mondi virtuali" (Castelvecchi, 2006) and of an upcoming book about 2L. Mario created www.synthravels.com a tour operator for virtual worlds.
Other sources include Matt Gross, New York Times, Marie Lechner, Christophe Alix, Liberation. Let's follow some of Mario's picks from his book "Mondi Virtuali".

Blogs and news:
Wolkam Winker SLObserver
Hamlet Au
Adam Reuters

Must see:
Treasure Island in Entropia Universe
Founder's Fall in Paragon City - City of Heros
Caledon Cay - gothic city
Svarga - natural park

Artistic communities:
(Nakama46,46) city inspired by japanese anime
The Port island creted by Tor Lindstrand, architect
Ars Virtua Gallery - 13 most beautiful avatars by Eva and Franco Mattes
Mood Indigo (Olive217,227) dance floor
The virtual Hallucinations Experiment (Sedig 45, 25)
Church of Elvis (Nampo 231,228)
Memorial to Carl Sagan

Digital remains:
Gardens of memories in Tatlina

Fashion and style:
www.secondstyle.com
Adidas creates shoes for avatars
Yoko Xiao designer

V commerce:
American apparel (Lerappa 152, 64)
Toyota for free special 2L SUVs
IBM
Dell
Uitvaart

In some cases large online games can evolve into virtual worlds built by developers and gamers. For example, in Entropia Universe, a memorial dedicated to Tina Leiu, alias Island Girl is visited by thousands of virtual tourists, The memorial was built by her lover Neverdie, an avatar and owner of Treasure Island.

City of Villains, Mercy Island

There, Red Light Disctrict

World of Warcraft, Molten Core,

Star war Galaxies, Gold Beaches at Corellia, Lok's Labyrinth

Everquest, Nettleville, The Beach of Cobalt Scar

Online serious games,
Cost of Life made by Gamelab http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/rights/explore_3142.html
Food Force http://www.food-force.com/ and http://www.darfurisdying.com/

Online serious game with humour, McDonald's Game www.mcvideogame.com teaches how to mess with the environment in order to run a fast food company

Cooking Mama and Trauma Center Under the Knife are Nintendo DS games exploring the new and uncharted territory of selling serious games.