Perth.
The second session on this last day of PerthDAC starts with a paper by Larissa Hjorth, who examines camera phone practices in Seoul and Melbourne (the paper is presented by Christy Dena, though). Mobile media is positioned here as a prosumer machine through which we experience media and art in everyday life; mobile phones have become an integral part of everyday life- no longer a symbol of business or a class status symbol, they are now part of almost all social practices, and their uses have grown well beyond voice telephony and SMSing. Mobile phones remain connected to locality in a process of mobility and mobilism; they inform and locate co-present communication. Forms of mobile media are ongoing personal ethnographies, and are frequently banal and implicated in the politics of banality, which requires further analysis.

Perth.
The third day here at PerthDAC has started, and kicks off with a paper by Jean Bridge. She's involved with the interactive arts and science undergraduate programme at Brock University in Canada, and in this programme encourages thinking with and thinking about interactive technologies, which are situated in a wider social and cultural context. It is a humanities-based programme which concerns itself with the content and analysis of the products of human creativity, by following four core principles: capitalising the fact of computing as central to contemporary life, identifying the need for constant evaluation of the role of content and form, accepting the necessity for new and innovative methodologies, and achieving a centrality of interdisciplinarity and praxis. Students in this programme are largely digital natives who are content creators, aggregators, and intertextualisers, who think though codes, strategies, and roles, and who are willing to probe, manipulate, set goals, and construct their own pathways. The programme, then, aims to prepare them as people who can bridge theoretical and practical aspects of working creatively in new media - as creators, writers, directors, designers, managers, scholars, critics, and policy makers.

Perth.
The second PerthDAC session for today starts with Adrienne Shaw, who focusses especially on the in-game representation of gay, lesbian, and transgender communities in online games. There is already a complicated history of the presence of such communities in games, which are often ignored, ostracised, or poorly represented. Adrienne has engaged in a programme of research working with such communities to develop a greater understanding of their interests and needs. Such research also links back to questions of representation in other media forms - the discussion of such representation in those forms is repeated here, similarly shifting from invisibility through stereotyping to more intelligent representations.

Perth.
The last session on this first day of PerthDAC focusses on virtual worlds in games and beyond, and begins with a paper by Nicola Bidwell, David Browning, and my colleague Jane Turner. Their work is related to the ACID project Digital Songlines, and are interested in developing digital representations in which the landscape itself matters - this is not about games for play, but bout virtual worlds as representations. Most current game worlds represent experience from a designed path, and this carving of paths is enmeshed in a western ideology of human power over landscape; landscape is only a passive framework for narrative. The Digital Songlines environment, by contrast, is an environment in which the landscape matters; it was developed in collaboration with the indigenous design company CyberDreaming and the indigenous people of south-west Queensland. The gameplay tools in this world interfere with the experience of this simulated world as first-hand, though, as does the embedded, usually tacit knowledge of the indigenous custodians of the land.

Perth.
The second session here at PerthDAC starts with Torill Mortensen, who is also the leader of the World of Warcraft Research Guild and begins with an overview of games studies itself - an area which has experienced considerable turf wars in the past decade. She outlines a number of approaches: immersive studies (ethnological and anthropological studies of games and gamers), structuralist studies (including the bitter battle between ludologists and narratologists), and contextual studies (examining for example the economic and legal aspects of gaming). Immersive studies mean that researchers also need to play the game they study, resulting potentially in a loss of critical distance; structuralists examine the structure of the game and its rules; contextual studies also point towards the wider impact of gaming, especially also examining the rise of 'serious gaming'. There are also some other research approaches, of course - data mining and quantitative research, psychologically inflected studies, and many others.

Boston.
We're now in the second plenary session at MiT5, which was opened by Tom Malone who began by introducing the concept of collective intelligence (and MIT is now starting a Center for Collective Intelligence). The first speaker is Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity, and he notes that one of the key questions in participatory, collective environments is now that of labour - all the many activities performed by the users in such spaces can be described as a form of labour, but in the main such labour contributes particularly to the value of the spaces within which it takes place, not so much to the fortune of those performing that labour. This, Trebor says, is a further move towards the commercialisation of social life - the very few benefit from the work of the very many, in a classic capitalist move.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Maggi Savin-Baden and Christine Sinclair (as well as their Second Life avatars Christine Sanders and Second Wind) are the last presenters at ICE 3 for today (full paper here). Both are students in the MSc in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh, which in part focusses on the use of digital game-based learning environments. They begin by describing their journeys into this degree, which were motivated for them as academic professionals in part by an interest in learning about what it means to be a student in the present university environment, and an interest in exploring possibilities for e-learning which were not covered by WebCT and other standard solutions.

Next Wednesday is World Intellectual Property Day - and I'm going to be part of an event which takes place within the virtual world of Second Life. This is my first venture into Second Life, and it should be an exciting event. We'll be meeting at Pooley Stage, Pooley (251, 16, 55), at 2 p.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday 26 April (which equates to 9 p.m. Server Time on Tuesday 25 April).

21st Century Creativity in a Copyright World: How Can the Potential Be Realised?

You are invited to join the QUT Law Faculty's Intellectual Property: Knowledge, Culture, and Economy Program, in conjunction with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, for a free seminar on World Intellectual Property day at 2pm on Wednesday 26 April 2006. The rapid pace of technological change that we are experiencing requires us to always be aware of the balances inherent in copyright law; we must attempt to provide adequate protection to copyright owners, while at the same time allow for a rich culture of experimentation and innovation. Particularly, we must be careful not to close off new avenues for expression and creativity before they have a chance to develop. Join us for a discussion of the current context, covering fair use/fair dealing, blogs, mash-ups, parody, and much more.