PerthDAC 2007

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.

Perth.
I'm spending the next few days at the PerthDAC conference here in Western Australia; I'll be presenting a paper on Sunday afternoon as well... Right now, though, it's Saturday, and we're just about to get started. Jason Lewis is the first speaker, presenting on the NextText project from Obx Labs at Concordia University in Montréal. He begins by showing a video presenting a number of interactive installations which aim to visualise everyday spoken interactions, lending a visual quality to such ephemeral interactions. Much of this is inspired by the interrelation between the structure and content of poetry (the contribution of rhyme and rhythm to the meaning-making process of poetry), as well as the use of text in comics and urban graffiti, and the experiments with layout and formatting in early-20th century avantgarde art. This produces a tight coupling of text and structure, and highlights questions of how to represent text visually, how to make use of interactive possibilities in new media technologies, and how to blur the literal and aesthetic functions of written language.