Month: March 2007

One of the events i’ll miss while I’m away is this great one. If you can’t make it, the website is full of los of juicy links too.

Find out how blogging by women and for women builds networks, improves customer reach, monetizes creativity and infuses your business with Web 2.0 goodness!

This event is for small businesses, individuals, researchers, nonprofits, artistic and educational organisations interested in:

– blogging as a business opportunity
– women bloggers
– women in business
– women customers
– social media and networking
– creative communications
– innovation and cooperation
– customer relationships
– opportunities of Web 2.0 and the Long Tail
– usability

And, just to be clear, men are definitely invited. All the speakers are women, and we’ll be talking about women users, readers and bloggers. But everyone is welcome to attend the conference and participate in the sessions.

Check out: http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/nlabwomen/

My mate Tom is the co-editor of this very interesting issue for Refractory. The themes they’re interested in will be right up the alley of many of the readers of this blog. 🙂

Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media is a refereed, peer-reviewed, e-journal that explores the diverging and intersecting aspects of current and past entertainment media. The journal is published  by the Cinema Studies Program, School of Culture and Communication,  University of Melbourne.

ISSUE THEME: Meta-Materiality: Games, New Media, The Digital

Launching as it did in 2002, The Refractory arrived on the scene just in time for its titular metaphor to get complicated, with the arrival of ‘metamaterials’ – artificial composites with negative refractive indices. When a wave phenomenon such as light travels between media, it changes speed and bends relative to the normal: refraction. But with just the right metamaterial, the positive refraction can be negated.

The wave finds its stride – the straw in the glass looks straight – total refraction. This special issue of The Refractory aims to assess its central metaphor in relationship to games and new media with a focus on the materiality of their aesthetics, assemblages, ecologies, and networks.

Some directions you may wish to consider are:

– Real-world economics, class and power in games
 – Remediation, Adaptation, Cross-media Style and the Media’s Metamateriality
– Protocol, Code, Algorithms – the materiality of Digital Media
 – Re-representation of one medium by another: e.g. Videogame Emulations, Youtube
– Arcades, public space, social mapping and locative media
– Material genres: e.g. Game engines, middleware, blogs,
 – Mobile movements and the ‘ludicity’ of technology
– Controller crises, free movement, and gestural remediation: e.g. Wii Sports
– Who actually makes games? / A history of Tose studios
– Piracy, free gaming, information control, DRM
– New Media art and artistic intervention

Abstract Deadline: April 10th
 (Articles: 3,000 – 7,000 words, refereed)
 (Small Articles: 1,000 – 3,000 words)
 (Reviews: 300 – 500 words)
 Notification of Successes: April 30th
 Submission Deadline: July 1st
 Publication: Mid-Late August

All Enquires and Submissions:
refractorygames@gmail.com

Check it out: http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/

Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal and Mia Consalvo are back with their great sampling of the latest game research. Game Studies Download 2.0 is available for download now. It is a great idea that is quite popular at the Game Developers Conference it is presented at and generally everywhere online! Indeed, I think it is such a good idea that I’m keen to work on an Alternate Reality Game Studies Download. I’ll reconfigure the research I put together for the IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper, add some more findings and whamo! Hmmm…I think a Second Life Studies Download would be a good idea too. Any SL colleagues out there keen? I think you should. 🙂