Ludology.org

Taller de Narrativa Digital

The International University of Andalucía (Seville, Spain), is organizing a workshop on Digital Narrative, directed by Fran Ilich from January 7-10, 2003. The workshop also includes discussion on videogames. José Luis Guerín, Dora García, Santi Fort y Carolyn Guertin are among the invited speakers. Today's the last day for registration (sorry for the short notice, I just got an email with the news). The fee is 90 euros and the contact info is 954-462299 or unia@uia.es.

Tomorrow's deadline

Tomorrow's the deadline for 2-4 page abstracts for the Second International Conference on Entertainment Computing, that will be held on May 8-10, 2003 at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Serious Play: Challenges of Educational Game Design

Here's an article on Educational Gaming by Jennifer Jenson & Suzanne de Castell (warning: it's a draft, so you should contact the authors before quoting).

Interview on telecommuting

I am not sure how many of you guys can read Spanish, but at least you can take a look at the pic (yap, the guy holding the iBook is me).

¡Ay, Caramba!

Honduras bans Quake, violent games and toys.

New paper on Façade

Mateas and Stern have just released Architecture, Authorial Idioms and Early Observations of the Interactive Drama Façade. This is probably the most interesting project around on the field and the good news is that the software itself will be available online as a free download on 2003!

Aarseth, others at GCD

Here's the complete schedule for the next Academic Summit at the GDC conference next March in San Jose, CA, USA.

Tales from the future

Here's a scoop on the Sony Playstation 5, by way of the folks from The Onion.

The entertainment-military complex

A new gaming blog from a military perspective. It is run by Anders Frank, whom I met in Japan early this year, while he was presenting two excellent papers on "the potentials of using games and gaming for other purposes than just entertainment" and political bias in games. As you can see, two topics directly related with my research interest, even if from a total different perspective.

Interactive frictions

Andrew Stern pointed out another article by Jonas Heide Smith. It's very well constructed, showcasing a deep knowledge of adventure games. Sadly, it fails to convince me on the possibility of interactive fictions (trust me, I would love to be convinced). But you should give it a try, it is a good reading.