Ludology.org

Back in business!

Thanks to Benjamin for taking care of the evil backend of this blog. Thanks, thanks, thanks!

Portugal

I'll be in Portugal next week (May 3-5) in order to attend to the VII Semana Internacional do Audiovisual e Multimedia organized by the Lusofona University of Lisbon. I'll be going along with Espen Aarseth, it should be a lot of fun and a chance to meet Portuguese game researchers. See you there.

CFP: The ethics of e-games

Call for papers for a special edition journal on Ethics and Games. Deadline for abstracts is June 30, 2005. More information here.

Where no gamers have gone before

Skydivers playing Mario; two guys carrying their DS to the Everest... An enjoyable article about extreme gaming at Wired.com

CFP: Game-On 2005

7th International Conference on Computer Games: Animation, Mobile and Educational Systems. 14-16th November 2005, Angouleme, France. Paper submission deadline: August 31st. More information on their website.

CFP: Game On 2005

McGill University (Montreal) is hosting Game-On North America 2005, to be held on August 22-24, 2005. Early bird submission is June 15 and the regular deadline is July 1st, 2005.

BattleBoard3D

Battle Chess. Augmented. With virtual Legos. Who could ask for more? BattleBoard3D is an augmented reality game prototype from Interactive Spaces, an IT research lab in Aarhus, Denmark.

New Blog: Nongames.com

More blogs, more places to look for interesting stuff. Now's the turn of Chico Queiroz, who has been publishing NonGames.com for a while now. Chico has a background on webgame production and is currently working on his MA thesis. His blog focus on "nongames", or toy-like, play-oriented games without clear goals.

Food Force

Finally! An educational game that rocks! Informative, well produced and very enjoyable to play with. Go United Nations! Food Force was just launched and it is definitively worth the 200 meg download (full versions available for free for Windows and Mac).
rThe game consists of several different missions, with animated and video cutscenes in between. Unlike what happens in many videogames, the cutscenes are not there to show off graphics but rather to give valuable information. And what it is best, the designers were able to overcome the most common trap of educational games: they keep a good balance between game and info, so you never get the impression that you are watching either a bad movie nor playing a bad game (read more...)
r

Game-based Comic books

Forget Machinima, the new cool kid in town is Gamics. That's comic books made from game screengrabs, in case you didn't know (I didn't!). But it seems the trend is quite old and, if you think about it, it's a natural thing to do, specially when machinima is so popular. So, during the weekend, go to gamics.com and enjoy some of these fan-created comics. Or get outside and enjoy the sun (oh, wait a second, you may get skin cancer. On a second thought, just stay home with your computer).