MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media

 Posted by (Visited 9035 times)  Misc
Nov 162007
 

I am here at MIT’s Media Lab, at the Bartos Theater, attending Futures of Entertainment 2. I am not going to bother liveblogging the sessions, because the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Weblog is doing it already. Worth reading up on.

Warning, the rest of this is muddled, self-contradictory musings as the discussion progresses.

I am listening to the panel on mobile right now, and am struck by how little the phone capabilities come up. The panel has folks from Yahoo, Turner, MTV, and the Media Lab on it. And it’s interesting to see the gap between some of the panelists. MTV is talking about how to push content, and the need to create it first for mobile, and migrate it elsewhere, essentially granting mobile respect as a platform in its own right. Yahoo is basically talking about the reverse; what is of great interest to them is the fact that mobile is creating effectively a distributed geocoded videocamera network.

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Academic job available in Germany

 Posted by (Visited 4589 times)  Game talk
Nov 152007
 

I got this email from a reader… I generally avoid the many sort-of-advertising-y things that people want me to post, but this one seemed meritorious. Anything we can do to help foster more academic programs that include games and virtual worlds is a good thing.

I’ve been following your blog for quite some time now and really enjoy reading it, especially the game grammar stuff. But that is not why I’m sending you this email.

I’m a member of Acagamics, the IGDA game development club of the University of Magdeburg in Germany, and we are currently looking for applicants who are interested in filling the vacant junior professorship for Virtual Enviroments (esp. Computer Games) at our university.

Unfortunately there isn’t much time left, the closing date for applications is 23. November.

More information can be found on this website (German):
http://www.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/data/FIN_/Text-Ausschreibung-JunProf.pdf
The (unofficial) translated version can be found here:
http://acagamics.de/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/virtualenviroengl.pdf
If you are interested in our club (and know somebody who understands
German) you can find some more info here:
http://acagamics.de/

We would appreciate if you could help us by posting this to your blog.

Salsipuedes: leave if you can

 Posted by (Visited 14640 times)  Game talk
Nov 142007
 

In Baja California, on the way to Ensenada, there is an exit marked “Salsipuedes.” You can’t really see where it leads — the exit turns steeply off the highway, and the area is tall mud cliffs overlooking the Pacific. Somewhere down below, you can catch a glimpse of dusty pickup trucks and maybe a few dwellings.

Salsipuedes means “leave if you can” in Spanish.  It struck me because of the possible readings: you can’t leave because it’s so beautiful; you want to leave because it’s so horrible; you can’t leave because it’s too hard to get out.

Seems like most virtual worlds are kind of the same way.

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