Ludology.org

Out for a few days

Ileaving Atlanta in a few hours. It's stormy down here and I hope that Mexico beaches will be as sunny as I imagine them. Finally, trip just for fun, without meetings (last time I went on vacation with my wife was on September 11th. Yes, that September 11th, so it wasn't what I would call a quiet trip). I met Michael Mateas (who's now teaching Interactive Narrative at Georgia Tech) and discussed a lot of issues on ludology. He keeps asking the rigth and difficult questions. Everytime we talk we discover that we agree more on the basis of this discipline, even if we took different approaches.
Anyway, the blog will be out for about a week. The good news is that Benjamin Sadaba, web developer extraordinaire at CNN has been helping me to give a major update to this site and the new blog should be up sometime in February.

New book on games

Games, Gamers, and Gaming Culture: An Introduction to Games and Culture. Edited and introduced by Matthew Wolf-Meyer (University of Minnesota, Anthropology) and Davin Heckman (Bowling Green State University, American Cultural Studies). I have no idea when it will be available (if somebody find out, please comment).

CFP: COSIGN 2003

The 3rd International Conference on COMPUTATIONAL SEMIOTICS FOR GAMES AND NEW MEDIA.University of Teesside (UK). 10th - 12th September, 2003. Submission date for Academic Papers: 28th March 2003.

Sao Paulo

Spent the day in Sao Paulo, on my way to the States. Great city, Brazil is just amazing. It's the third largest city in the world, right after Mexico and Tokyo (btw, it has a huge Japanese comunity. Just bought tons of Calpis, but no games though :( I will get to Atlanta just in time for the Super Bowl (I hope).

Going postal over gay-shooting

Postal 2 allows you to walk into a gay bar and shoot people. A Dutch activist would like to see the game banned. My favorite quote from the designing team: 'We are not political'. Well, it's hard to be not political. But it is also true that if the game featured shootings in Internet cafes rather than gay bars, I don't think geeks would stand up and try to ban the game... Another case of game ideology, ready to be dissected.

The sounds of gaming

Want to know how the average gamer sounds while playing counterstrike? (thanks William Huber!)

My name is Bond, Games Bond

Cool new blog about Flash and Shockwave games. Great examples and links.

"Games as interactive systems" symposia

The symposia will be held in Norwegian and Swedish and it is organized by the good folks from the PLAY group at the IT-University in Gothenburg/Sweden. From 31/3 to 1/4/2003 (symposia information only in Swedish).

Another videogame journal

Charles River Media announces a new scientific journal on videogames. They claim to be the first (?!) journal on the field and their first issue will be available by mid 2003 (by that moment, Game Studies will be celebrating two years of life...). Anyway, in spite of this, it is always good to see more academic interest on games.

New blog on the block

Greg Costikyan has started a new blog "games, game design, and game culture". This is definitively one blog that I will try to read as often as possible.