3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA 2008) :: September 10-12, 2008 :: Athens Information Technology (AIT), Athens, Greece :: Call for Papers and Artworks / Games / Demos :: Deadline: May 12, 2008.

The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player /online gaming, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created new forms of entertainment that attract, immerse and absorb their participants. The phenomenal success of such a “culture” to initiate a mass audience in patterns and practices of its own consumption has supported the evolution of an enormously powerful mass entertainment, digital art and performance industry extending deeply into every aspect of our lives, leading further to major societal and business contacting changes. Continue reading

Ars Virtua is pleased to announce _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mary-Anne (Mez) Breeze. Mez has initiated this work as part of her ongoing interrogation of the space, place and language of synthetic worlds. This text brings Mez’ prodigious talents and experience to bear on several fundamental issues relating to the nature of game and social space:

“_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ explores concepts that shape and are shaped by an extensive range of online / synthetic encounters. These concepts are formed through principles generated internally within specific online environments. Continue reading

Shoot ‘em up (or shmup for short) is a computer and video game genre where the player usually controls a vehicle or character and fights large numbers of enemies with shooting attacks, typically of a highly stylized nature. In Japan, where the genre is still a lively one, they are simply known as “shooting games” and they are focused on avatar actions using some weapons. But what could happen when the weapons are instead “memes”? The game might become a memetic simulation as in Joseph Hocking’s Memetic simulation no.2.

Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the “meme”. Started from a metaphor used in Richard Dawkins popular writings, it has later turned into an approach in the study of self-replicating units of culture. Continue reading

You don’t need to be a videogame fan or being a teenager in the seventies / eighties to know videogame classics like Space Invaders, Pacman or Tetris. Their iconic power is still intact in the public imagination, also thanks to many reinterpretations and updates. Their patterns are often used by game artists as metaphors to create new connected sense: Mario Bros. can be restyled with a new graphic, so you can take your cue from it to discuss immigrant labor conditions, Space Invaders can be used to represent the never ending battle among Linux and the proprietary operating systems and so on. Sometimes the action’s target is the algorithm itself. Continue reading

[Image: Operation Urban Terrain (OUT): 2004-6 by Anne Marie Schleiner] “Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the Situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958)

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. Continue reading

Homo Ludens Ludens - Locating Play in Contemporary Culture and Society :: Exhibition: April 18 - September 22, 2008 :: Symposium: April 19 - 20, 2008 :: LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón (Asturias) Spain.

Homo Ludens Ludens is an international exhibition and symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives and a speculation on the emergence of the “Homo Ludens Ludens”: the contemporary playing man. What does it mean “to play” and to be “a player”? The goal of this Symposium, organised jointly with The Planetary Collegium, is to provide the framework for contemporary play, to highlight its interdisciplinary nature, and to show the multifaceted reality of our present-day entertainment society. Continue reading

[Image: Still from “Amongst Fables and Men” Tonight artist Eddo Stern will host “QQ More”, a screening he curated of offbeat fan-made machinima dealing with real-life issues such as drugs, pornography, and death at Brooklyn’s Light Industry. The show begins at 8pm and will be followed by a discussion between Stern and Alexander Galloway. I conducted an email interview with Stern about his interest in the phenomenon and its relevance to his own art practice. - Ceci Moss

In gaming parlance, what does “QQ More” mean? How does this relate to the concept behind your program “QQ More”? Continue reading

Pong - the analog arcade machine (prototype #2: championship evening) - by André Gonçalves :: March 28, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Lisboa20 Arte Contemporânea, Rua Tenente Ferreira Durão 18B (Campo de Ourique).

Arcade machine, 2 joysticks, 2 tvs, coin dispenser, 5 diy arduino based network, 26 led score display, 2 motors, 2 fans, 4 optocoupled h-bridges, 2 printer head mechanics, hair dryer, 2 infra-red sensors, 4 switches, 2 potenciometers, button, 220v 5v relay system, 2 fluorescent lamps, 8 power supplies, wood structure, tripod, video camera. Continue reading

The latest issue of Artnodes Journal, the UOC’s e-journal on art, science and technology is now online. Gameplay: Art, Videogames and Culture is dedicated to exploring the relationships between art, videogames and culture, focusing on the idea of gameplay as the common thread to the monograph. In the study of play as a cultural phenomenon, there are a number of important milestones, such as the book Homo Ludens written by Johan Huizinga in 1938 or Man, Play and Games written in 1958 by Roger Caillois, which established a clear link between play and culture, where games are not merely an element in culture but an element of culture. Continue reading

Joseph DeLappe performs dead-in-iraq :: March 20, 2008; 7 pm :: Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st St., NYC.

On Thursday, March 20 — the date of the US invasion of Iraq — Joseph DeLappe will enact his ongoing protest and memorial work set within the Department of Defense’s online military recruiting and marketing video game, America’s Army. Using the login name “dead-in-Iraq”, DeLappe enters the multiplayer game as a player and, forgoing fighting, uses the game’s features to memorialize US military members killed in Iraq. “As of 1/17/08, I have input 3745 names. I intend to keep doing so until the end of this war. As of 1/17/08 there have been 3929 American service persons killed in Iraq.”