Category: research
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iPad as content producer #2
The website Mashable posted an interesting article about the number of users uploading images created on the iPad2 back in May. Given the one million plus iPad2 sold during its launch weekend in March, it was surprising to see only 12,811 photos take on the Ipad2 had been uploaded to Flickr.com. The site registered only…
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iPad2 as content producer #1
Early critics of the Apple iPad suggest the device was intended purely as a media content receiver, and the limited range of (buggy) content producing apps at launch in April 2010, seemed to vindicate this position. Then the flood of apps came and the apps for creating music, drawing and digital manipulation of images (read…
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Being a fan sometimes has its costs
I should be working on a book chapter, but the news today has me thinking in parallels. Elisabeth Sladen, the actress who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and the Sarah Jane Adventures has died due to cancer at age 63. It has been a bad year for fans with the passing of the…
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Hats of Affect
The article is finally out – many thanks to all at Game Studies for a great collection!
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Finish It! – Mortal Kombat and the missing R18+
The banning of Mortal Kombat in Australia this week is pushing all the right buttons. By ‘refusing classification’ for Mortal Kombat 8, the Classification Board has reignited an already well flambeyed interest in the missing R18+ rating for video games. Australia’s National Classification System (NCS) is without an R18+ classification for video games, making us…
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Realism and Immersion
(I’ve posted on this previously but this is an updated version, as part of some reflections on the topic for the chapter mentioned in the previous post) My issue with the use of the terms ‘realistic’ and ‘realism’ to talk about texts like movies and games started when I first went to the cinema to…
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FPS Abstraction
An abstract I submitted last year to a call for contributions for a book on First Person Shooter (FPS) games (with the awesome title: Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: The First-Person Shooter) has been accepted for further peer-review. Now I have to get cracking and write the chapter. Here is the abstract: Creativity, Contagion and Control:…
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World of Chaucer
The podcast from AUC conference on the interdisciplinary World of Warcaft machinima adaptation of Chaucer: http://betweenthebuttons.net/home/?p=336 I can’t stand the sound of my own voice so I haven’t listened to it yet – some body tell me if I sound like a tool or not.
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First Monday!
First Monday was the one journal that really sucked me into academia. At a time when nearly all the journals I was interested were locked behind a crazy paywall subscriptions system that makes them totally irrelevant to anyone outside of the the ivory towers, First Monday had escaped – it’s on the outside looking out.…
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Historical rationality: some thoughts on Civilisation 5
During a short trip to Tasmania last week for my grandmother’s fabulous 90th birthday celebrations, I managed to cram in two activities – reading a little of Raymond Williams (1977) Marxism and Literature, and playing quite a bit of Civilization 5 (Civ5) – about 15 hours worth. Civ5 is the latest in the turn-based strategy…
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