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Mar 282009
 

Jordan Lynn, my graduate student and IGDA GDC Scholarship recipient, and I were chatting after todays sessions. I had just come from Jane McGonigal’s GDC Education Summit keynote, where a question that Celia Pearce asked had stuck with me. That question was, why haven’t developers made revolutionary designs that challenge, change, and shift human experience towards happiness? This is a 30 year old industry that is only now beginning to find its revolutionary and humanist side. What took so long if we are so cool?

Jordan suggested, and it seemed to strike a chord, that the 30 year lag has something to do with that a generation of gamers are only now reaching points in their lives that they are capable of making games and have a drive or desire to change the world. There is certainly something to that argument. But even children’s books seek to change the world, so I only buy that half way. The other piece of this might be that because, at least traditionally, games require a fair number of people to make, that this can shift significantly the messages trying to be delivered. I don’t doubt that, but that hasn’t stopped Hollywood. So, I think the question still does stand, where are the Mark Twains of videogames?

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Mar 282009
 

GDC 2009 started off with a bang for me at the IGDA Education Summit’s Game Design Improv with Brenda Brathwaite at the helm and Ian Schreiber and Charles Shami backing her up on the floor. For two hours I had the opportunity to swap places with what I usually force my students to do, design games. It was an absolute delight. “Table 6” as we became labeled at some point during the day designed two games together before the round of firing and hiring which shook up our studio tables managed to come up with several gems. Malcolm Ryan, Baozheng Wang, Morgan Calhoon, Apar Maniar, Peter Juhl, Eku Wand, and Roane Beard were part of what became the myAIG pitch.

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Mar 172009
 

I’m working on another post related to my efforts on finding useful frameworks and tools chains to use in my classes and independent game development here in Athens, GA. That is a longer post, but this seemed important enough to be its own post. I recently found the Popcap Developer Framework, which for independent 2D game development looks really exciting. It is my understanding that this framework was used in the development of games like World of Goo and of course many of Popcap’s games. What a boon to the community I thought! Then I clicked the download button, which sends me the following message:

Forbidden
You do not have access to this page.
You must be logged in to developer.popcap.com before downloading files

To which I dutifully clicked the “Register” link, which returns the following:

Sorry, registration has been disabled by the administrator.

I’ve sent several messages through the “contact us” link with no reply. I have found the alternative Tuxcap port of the library, but it is a little sad to see such a great community boon lost to the non-responsive industry ether that pervades in many cases. Of course I can’t ask the question on the Popcap developer forum because registration is closed. Thus I cry my tears into the Internet ether.

Mar 172009
 

I just received the following email:

Dear Webmail account User,

This message is from Webmail account update Service team messaging center to all subscribers/webmail users. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail center due to an unusual activities identified in our email system. We are deleting all unused Webmail Accounts. to create space for new ones.

You are required to verify your webmail account by confirming your Webmail identity. This will prevent your Webmail account from been closed during this exercise.In order to confirm your Web-Mail identity, you are to provide the following data;

First Name:
Last Name:
Username/ID:
Password:
Date of Birth:

*Important*
Please provide all these information completely and correctly otherwise due to security reasons we may have to close your account temporarily.We have been sending this notice to all our email account owners and this is the last notice/verification exercise.

webmail service Maintenance team.

Note to spammers and phishers. At least pirate Microsoft Office and run a damn grammar check before you send your email deluge. Oh, and most people put a space after periods and capitalize the first letter in a sentence. You must at least attempt to make your message look legitimate. I guess this strikes a particularly frustrated chord with me at the moment has to do with having to go to great lengths recently in ensuring that servers I am responsible for must now have all sorts of configurations to be considered legitimate. SPF records and other things to ensure that real, legitimate mail reaches people. All the while though, this crap continues to get through.

Jan 132009
 

I decided over the weekend that it was high-time to move my old essay from Flow TV, “The Wii-volution will not be Televised” into the academic arena. In particular it was several recent (not so recent now) articles about Sony “opening” up the PS2 that seemed to push me over the edge. While I have not decided upon a particular venue for this essay yet, though my initial estimation is with New Media and Society.

In part this was due to watching several people at conferences in my relatively recent past talk about precisely what I had written, as if it hadn’t ever been mentioned before. I have actually written about it twice now, once in Flow TV and once in my dissertation, but if my words fall in the forest and no one is listening, apparently it doesn’t really make a sound or matter. Continue reading »

Jan 132009
 

I have been thinking a great deal lately about what the rise of digital distribution means for the videogame industry. I have also been thinking about what it means, culturally, for videogamers. It is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, because I’ve heard many game developers talk about how much videogame rentals and videogame resale hurts developers by depriving them of much more frequently needed funds.

I have also been thinking about my childhood Continue reading »

Jan 042009
 

My Google Alert for “Casey O’Donnell” or Google Ego Monitor notified me this morning of the re-emergence of my essay for the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. I wrote an essay entitled, “Making an Open Source Case for Offshoring.” Because the essay was shorter, short on data beyond my own observations, and a bit risque, it was labeled a “Commentary” piece, which I was not opposed to. It was a spin off an elaboration on an earlier essay that was somewhat schizophrenic, which was published in First Monday. That piece was titled, “A Case for Indian Insourcing: Open Source Interest in IT Job Expansion.” That essay was published along with several other essays from a 4S Meeting in Paris, France. Because it was schizophrenic, I broke it into two separate essays. One of those was the IEEE Commentary and the second was published in the IGI Global edited book, “Handbook of Research on Open Source Software.” That chapter was titled, “The Labor Politics of Scratching an Itch.” In the end, breaking the essay apart and expanding upon each section made each piece work better and I’m happy with the way it turned out. It is just funny what a Sunday morning Ego Alert will cause you to go back and investigate.

Actual citations are posted after the jump, if desired.

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Dec 232008
 

The unfortunate thing about my first semester teaching was that I felt as if I was never going to come up for air. The fortunate thing about that process is that it means I’ve been sitting on a pile of thoughts on a variety of videogame development and game industry issues that I’ve been following for quite a while now. Thus, the next several posts are ones which have remained, have persevered, as tabs in Firefox for nearly two months.

The first series of tabs are perhaps critically linked to the second post I’ll be making, but fundamentally about different issues. In my dissertation, especially in the “MOD(ify)-ing Game Development Worlds” sections I talked about some of the critical issues facing the videogame industry. I also talk specifically about how those practices which are hurting the videogame industry are actually many of the practices which are being imported into other “industries,” but most directly in other New Media industries. Those two particular chapters are titled:

  • “Game Development Practice: A Postmortem”
  • “The Game Industry Galaxy: A Postmortem”

Though I tease the Phil Harrison of 2007s Game Developers Conference and his “Game 3.0” slide from the Sony keynote, recent news reports have me wondering if he was really commited to the concept and his job at Atari has created an opportunity for him to pursue Game 3.0. The other possibility is that his experiences at Atari thus far have convinced him that Game 3.0 as the industry is currently structured will never be the lively world of Web 2.0 they wish it to be.

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Dec 212008
 

Several folks from the Grady College at UGA pulled together a fantastic assortment of student work Thursday of this last week called “Gradyfest.” I went in with very little in the way of expectations, but I was simply blown away. Not only was I blown away, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the evening. What perhaps impressed me the most was just how indicative many of the Grady creations were so indicative of Fan/Remix Culture in ways that are simply indescribable. One creation in particular caught my eye and ear. I cannot for the life of me remember the title of it, though the production “company” “Level 84” certainly sticks in my head considering something about 8 and 4 sticks out at me from writing my dissertation, or perhaps it was playing a game released in 1985 in the United States on a little grey box. Continue reading »