Friedrich Kirschner to speak on the 26th
“Moviesandbox: Approaching a Framework for Virtual Animated Filmmaking and More,” a lecture by Friedrich Kirschner
Please join us for a lecture on filmmaking by game designer and author Friedrich Kirschner, on October 26 at 4:30pm, in Skiles 002.
Lecture Abstract:
Mr. Kirschner will discuss the possibilities of an all-virtual way of creating animated movies and will demonstrate how a basic framework to achieve this ideal workflow could be established using Moviesandbox, a modification for the Unreal Tournament 3D engine as an example.
About Friedrich Kirschner:
Friedrich Kirschner is a filmmaker, visual artist and board member of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. He re-purposes computer games to create animated narratives and interactive performances. His work has been shown at various international animation festivals and exhibitions, including the ZKM Karlsruhe, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Ottawa international Animation festival, and the Seoul Media Art Biennale. He also publishes machinimag, an online magazine focussing on the development of the emerging art form of machinima moviemaking.
Mission Statement
Mission
The Experimental Game Lab (EGL), housed in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture’s Digital Media Program, is an interdisciplinary research community comprised of groups and individuals engaged in a broad array of experimentation that brings together humanities, computer science, design and the arts through a unique blend of theory and practice. Our aim is to investigate and extend the expressive capabilities of games, to foster critical analysis, and to better understand and influence the role of video games in culture. More
Research Areas
The EGL’s research areas include: generative and emergent game design; machinima; games and story; activist, documentary, serious and persuasive games; tangible play and novel interfaces; pervasive and Big Games; games and performance; games and augmented/mixed reality; mobile play; the convergence of games and interactive television; platform studies (including game system hacking and programming); diversity and gender in games; game ontologies; game criticism; and the sociology of play. The EGL also produces annual game-related symposia, lecture series, salons, residencies and exhibitions, as well as facilitating collaborations with other institutions and corporate partners.
Jesper Juul lecture this Friday
“A Game in the Hands of a Player, Or: This Game is Just Like That Other Game,” a lecture by Jesper Juul.
Please join us for a lecture by game designer and author Jesper Juul, on October 19 at 4:30pm, in Skiles 002.
Lecture Abstract:
In this talk, Jesper Juul studies the space between the game and the player. What happens when a player picks up a game, and how can game design influence the player’s actions and experiences? Mr. Juul sees this as an open field between two basic observations:
1) Different players may play and experience the same game differently,
And:
2) Different games yield different kinds of pleasures.
In Mr. Juul’s book, /Half-Real/, he attempts to create a framework for understanding games and game players, and in his lecture Mr. Juul will use this framework to discuss the interaction between games and players in two very different trends in video games: in open-ended games without goals, and in casual games. The very large, open designs in games such as /Sims 2/ and /Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/, generally facilitate a kind of expressive play that is not goal-oriented. At the other extreme, Mr. Juul will look at matching tile casual games, and how simple changes in game rules can radically change a game, while different users may react differently to such basic changes. By having the audience play new games they have not played before, Mr. Juul will illustrate how games make players play, how game genres change over time, and how players bring their preconceptions to new games.
About Jesper Juul:* *Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research, Copenhagen, where he also earned his Ph.D. His book, /Half-Real/, on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, Mr. Juul works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Website: www.jesperjuul.net
Ernest Adams to give lecture at LCC
Interactive Narrative Tools and Techniques,” a lecture by Ernest Adams
Please join us for a lecture on interactive narrative by game designer and author Ernest Adams, on October 12 at 4:30pm, in Skiles 002.
Abstract: To broaden the appeal of video games to reach new markets, interactive storytelling will be increasingly important. Unfortunately, the field is driven by acrimonious debate about the “right way” to tell interactive stories. In this lecture, Ernest Adams makes a case for treating interactive narrative not as a single discipline, but as a set of techniques at the designer’s disposal, a toolbox. The question is not, “Which is right?” but, “Which is best suited to my entertainment goals?” The lecture will consist of a survey of the various approaches used by the game industry in different circumstances, and the strengths and weaknesses of each one, including linear, branching, foldback, and emergent narratives. In addition, Mr. Adams will consider how the story as a journey differs from the story as a drama, and the emotional significance of such issues as multiple endings and the player-avatar relationship.
About Ernest Adams: Ernest Adams is a game design consultant, writer, and teacher, working with the International Hobo design group. He has been in the game industry for 17 years, and he was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions on the Dungeon Keeper series. For several years before that, he was the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line at Electronic Arts. Mr. Adams is the joint author of two books on game design and one on getting a job in the game industry. He also writes the popular Designer’s Notebook columns for the Gamasutra developers’ webzine. His website is at http://www.designersnotebook.com.
Tangible Play Workshop @ IUI 2007
Call for Participation
Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games
Workshop at the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference January 28-31, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (www.iuiconf.org)
Details at: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mazalek/workshops/iui2007-tangibleplay/
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DATES:
[ Nov 20, 2006 ] - Submission deadline for position papers (in camera-ready form) [ Dec 11, 2006 ] - Author notification date [ Jan 28, 2007 ] - Date of Tangible Play @ IUI 2007
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WORKSHOP AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION:
The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on subjects related to digital games with tangible interaction. We would like to involve participants with backgrounds in academia as well as industry, from diverse fields such as HCI, computer science, edutainment, interaction design and game design. Some of the topics we plan to address during the workshop are: different tangible interaction styles, designing for specific game types, and the advantages and disadvantages of different sensing and object tracking technologies.
This one-day workshop will consist of a morning and afternoon session. The morning session will include an introduction and position paper presentations by workshop participants. The afternoon session will be an informal and interactive discussion in break-out groups on the following subtopics: tangible interaction, game design, sensing technologies, evaluation, marketability and collaboration. We will also have a guest speaker from Philips Research, who will give a special presentation on the Entertaible from an industry perspective.
Interested participants are invited to submit a 4-page position paper using the ACM-template, which can be found on the website indicated below. Papers may address any topic related to tangible or digital tabletop gaming, from game case studies, to research on sensing technologies, theoretical overviews, or the design of tangible objects for game interaction. The organizers will try to create a diverse mix of participants from academia as well as industry and from different backgrounds and fields.
* Important dates: [ Nov 20, 2006 ] - Submission deadline for position papers
(in camera-ready form)
[ Dec 11, 2006 ] - Author notification date
[ Jan 28, 2007 ] - Date of the workshop at IUI 2007
* Please submit position papers to:
Elise van den Hoven, e.v.d.hoven@tue.nl
* Visit the workshop website at:
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mazalek/workshops/iui2007-tangibleplay/
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For more information, please contact the organizers:
Elise van den Hoven (e.v.d.hoven@tue.nl)
Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Ali Mazalek (mazalek@gatech.edu)
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA, USA
Irfan Essa
Assistant Professor CoC and Adjunct Professor ECE
irfan [at] cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~irfan
He works in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Computational Perception, and Computer Animation, with potential impact on Video Analysis and Production, Human Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence research. Specifically, he is interested in the analysis, interpretation, authoring, and synthesis (of video), with the goals of building aware environments, recognizing, modeling human activities, and behaviors, and developing dynamic and generative representations of time-varying streams (mostly video).
URLs: The Computational Perception Laboratory, DVFX @ GeorgiaTech
Uplift
UPLIFT - Enabling Latent Human Capability Through Gaming
Nathanael Ng
IDT Masters Thesis Project, 2005
Wide-Ruled
Wide-Ruled: A Generative, Interactive Story Authoring Environment
Lakshmi Jayapalan
IDT Masters Thesis Project, 2005