A new journal about video game research

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This seems to be brand new: Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media:

Games & Culture is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due March 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking and germinal work in the field of game studies.

Games & Culture's scope will include the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives, including textual analysis; political economy; cultural studies; ethnography; critical race studies; gender studies; media studies; public policy; international relations; and communication studies.

Judging from the associate editor, it seems pretty valuable. I don't know why the psychological dimension is missing (for instance social and cognitive psychology are very keen on that topic...)

A compelling fingerprint maze

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A very nice and calm project by David Lu, Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine: Fingerprint maze. The point of this installation is to let one wander through a 3D labyrinth made from one's own scanned fingerprint. They use this hand crafted fingerprint scanner: This is how it works:

The scanned fingerprint is saved to another computer running the Fingerprint Maze game. An OS X application, written in C++ and OpenGL, picks up fingerprint files and renders them in 3D. For each dark pixel it finds in the image, it places a translucent cube in virtual space. The labyrinth can be navigated from above, or explored at ground level, as seen here. What we made is something between copy machine art and generative architecture. At left is what resulted when Amy kissed the surface of the scanner. I saw this project as an opportunity to encourage reflection about fingerprinting and identity, which are very interesting issues in the current political climate, in a very neutral, understated way—a non traditional, non-violent video game.

Experimental Ethnography with Urban Tapestries

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A nice paper about the Urban Tapestries project: Urban Tapestries: Experimental Ethnography, Technological Identities and Place, an LSE Electronic Working Paper by Roger Silverstone and Zoetanya Sujon.

Urban Tapestries provides a mobile location-based platform to connect people with the places they inhabit through their stories, experiences and observations. Currently based on an 802.11b mesh network in the heart of London, ordinary people author their stories of the city and embed them in the places that inspire them. Others who are logged into the system can read these stories, author their own and engage the largely invisible, multidimensional layers accumulating in the city. Our research asks if people use UT in meaningful and interesting ways. Drawing from theories of everyday life and urban space, we have developed experimental ethnography as a method for investigating the relationships between communication technologies, users and the socio-geographic territories around them. Respondents are asked to play with an early Urban Tapestries prototype and this research explores what they do, their technological identities, their relationship to place and the meanings they generate. Urban Tapestries facilitates the negotiation of boundaries and we found that it does augment notions of connectivity – to place and to those within that place. However, our research revealed that some do not interpret this connectivity positively.

Why do I blog this? I find interesting to have a usage analysis of a specific locative media. The study if very relevant (I appreciated the fact that they took into account the level of technological comfort which is very important if you want to deploy this kind of tech at a large level). The content analysis of the 'pockets' is nice as well:

  • Recommendations (good or bad)
  • Personal experiences (I was here, I did this, this reminds me of)
  • Information (this place is)
  • Speculations (questions, fiction, maybes and whatifs)
  • History
  • Observations and Descriptions

Perhaps the most interesting part is the conclusion in which they extract the most significant results (I quote):

What we have found and suggested during the course of the study are a number of dimensions of this problematic of socio-technical change, dimensions which are particular to the affordances offered by UT.

  1. The first is the question of the contradictory and unstable relations that individuals have with their technologies. Everyday life is, albeit variably as our respondents have illustrated, dependent on a range of increasingly portable technologies that are both enabling and disabling of social interaction; that are both liberating and constraining.
  2. The second is the issue of identity. Marshall McLuhan famously described media technologies as extensions of ourselves. (...) Our research suggests how important such a notion is, and in what ways these extensions are, or can become, crucial parts of our identities, as projections of the self, as well as props and supports in our struggle to sustain ourselves as viable social beings. (...) But understanding technology as a constituent of identity is key if we are to further an understanding of how such technologies as UT could develop, or indeed how indeed one might develop UT in the future.
  3. Mobile telephony is both an extension of self and an intrusion. UT technology likewise. Its essential double-edge will need to be managed if it is to have a value in the enhancement of social life.
  4. a number of them [users -n] talked about UT as, possibly, an opportunity for play. And the idea of playing in and with the city appears, at least to some, attractive. (...) UT was seen as toy-like, and as such possibly marginal to the real issues of the everyday. [indeed, see anne galloway's work]
  5. This leads to the final issue. The issue of place. UT is a technology that engages directly with space and place. It offers a way of fixing location, a kind of marking of the city with meaning. (..) UT is a way of marking that significance both for the individual and, in principal, for the collectivity – both the ad hoc collectivity of passing tourists and the more grounded collectivity of neighbourhood and community. [here see timo arnall's work]

I also liek the conclusion "The research reported here, then, suggests that technologies are never less than social. They emerge from social action, and they continue to be dependent on social action if they are to have any meaning or usefulness.". That is definitely the point here with today's technology. Such technologies will work only if a critical mass of people use it, the real power will emerge from this.

On a different note, I am stilll waiting locative media studies much more focused on smaller scales group. Like for instance how small groups of people use them to do something jointly. And what would be the socio-cognitive consequences of using such information. Well of course, it's closer to my phd topic ;)

Oroboro: a collaborative music controller

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Via reg:exp, Oroboro by Björn Hartmann and Jennifer Carlile is:

OROBORO is a novel collaborative controller which focuses on musical performance as social experience by exploring synchronized actions of two musicians operating a single instrument. Each performer uses two paddle mechanisms – one for hand orientation sensing and one for servo-motor actuated feedback. We introduce a haptic mirror in which the movement of one performer’s sensed hand is used to induce movement of the partner’s actuated hand and vice versa.

This is an amazing example of how tangible interaction techniques coudl support innovative joint activities. Applied to other context (i.e. ... video games) this would be nice.

BTW WHY \"PASTA and VINEGAR\"?

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Some people are wondering about the name of this blog, some others are going further, trying to think about which blog title might be the best (descriptive blog name, named after the author, something linked to the subject or off-the wall like here). Maybe it's time to tell you the story of this blog's name. Actually I did not think about it myself. It's more related to my weird foods habits: I used to cook some pasta with vinegar (+ tuna). At that time, my italian roomate/colleague Mauro Cherubini was so scared that he ended up running around in our former flat praising the Lord about this bloody french eating his country's pasta with aceto (i.e. italien for vinegar). Then it struck a chord. I was certainly not about to quit my odd food habit. However it reminded me the content of this blog: both serious stuff (about human-computer interaction, user expirience, locative media, tech stuff, futuristic trend, innovation) and weird things (about digital culture, street art, pictures, crazy toys or things...).

So that's the story I think the title matched pretty well the content of the blog... Sometimes I a bit pissed by this mix and I want to create different blog about each of the topics but I feel like it's funny like that. I am just wondering about how people make sense of all this mess.

On a personal note, it's a long time I have not cook pasta with vinegar.

BTW WHY "PASTA and VINEGAR"?

in

Some people are wondering about the name of this blog, some others are going further, trying to think about which blog title might be the best (descriptive blog name, named after the author, something linked to the subject or off-the wall like here). Maybe it's time to tell you the story of this blog's name. Actually I did not think about it myself. It's more related to my weird foods habits: I used to cook some pasta with vinegar (+ tuna). At that time, my italian roomate/colleague Mauro Cherubini was so scared that he ended up running around in our former flat praising the Lord about this bloody french eating his country's pasta with aceto (i.e. italien for vinegar). Then it struck a chord. I was certainly not about to quit my odd food habit. However it reminded me the content of this blog: both serious stuff (about human-computer interaction, user expirience, locative media, tech stuff, futuristic trend, innovation) and weird things (about digital culture, street art, pictures, crazy toys or things...).

So that's the story I think the title matched pretty well the content of the blog... Sometimes I a bit pissed by this mix and I want to create different blog about each of the topics but I feel like it's funny like that. I am just wondering about how people make sense of all this mess.

On a personal note, it's a long time I have not cook pasta with vinegar.

IEEE on interactive sonification

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IEEE Multimedia's last issue is about interactive (with) sonification. The point is that sonification "presents information by using sound (particularly non speech), so thatthe user of an auditory display obtains a deeper understanding of the data or processes under investigation by listening". Interactive sonification is then defined as "the use of sound within a tightly closed human–computer interface where the auditory signal provides information about data under analysis, or about the interaction itself, which is useful for refining the activity".This issue provides the reader with a good review of cutting edge projects:

  • Zhao et al. report on “Interactive Sonification of Choropleth Maps.” The extension of visual maps is not only interesting for blind people, it also inspires us to consider the extension of other visual techniques into the auditory domain.
  • Fernström, Brazil, and Bannon present in their article, “HCI Design and Interactive Sonification for Fingers and Ears,” an investigation of an audio-haptic interface for ubiquitous computing. This highlights how human beings can use the synergies between data presented in different modalities (touch, sound, and visual displays).
  • In their article, “Sonification of User Feedback through Granular Synthesis,” Williamson and Murray-Smith report on the progress in the domain of high-dimensional data distributions, one of the most appropriate applications of sonification.
  • From a completely different angle, Effenberg discusses in his article, “Movement Sonification: Effects on Perception and Action,” the enhanced motor perception in sports by using an auditory display. Effects on perception and action are reported from a psychophysical study.
  • In “Continuous Sonic Feedback from a Rolling Ball,” Rath and Rocchesso demonstrate the use of an interface bar called the Ballancer. Although this interface is not yet used to explore independent data, it is an ideal platform for studying the interaction at the heart of an auditory interaction loop.
  • Hinterberger and Baier present the Poser system in “Parametric Orchestral Sonification of EEG in Real Time.” The electroencephalogram is an interesting type of signal for sonification because it involves temporal, spectral, and spatial organization of the data.
  • Finally, in “Navigation with Auditory Cues in a Virtual Environment,” Lokki and Gröhn show how sonification can enhance navigation and operation in spaces that so far have only been explored visually.

My favorite is Fernström, Brazil, and Bannon's project.

Raytheon, Minority Report and gesture-based technology

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An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal: 'Minority Report' Inspires Technology Aimed at Military.

In the futuristic movie "Minority Report," Tom Cruise gestures with his gloved hands to sift through crime-clue data that are displayed on giant screens. With the twist of a wrist he can move information from one column to another or delete items. (...) Raytheon then hunted down the scientist who was behind the movie technology, John Underkoffler. Raytheon decided to fund an effort to try to turn his film fantasy into reality and explore its potential for speeding up intelligence analysis (...) The fruits of that investment are housed in a darkened room in a converted Los Angeles factory. There, a man wearing reflective gloves uses hand gestures to manipulate pictures projected on a panoramic screen. He slides an index finger forward to zoom in on a street scene; swivels a horizontal hand to the right to scroll through a video; sweeps both hands to the left to clear the screen. Raytheon believes such "gesture technology" can help solve one of the military's biggest problems: information overload (...) Raytheon isn't alone in chasing the command post of the future. And it isn't the only company injecting Hollywood into this race. Silicon Graphics Inc., which is known for special effects in movies, is working with the Army to develop the computing firepower that command centers will need.

And on a different note, video games are also looking in that direction:

Raytheon is working on more immediate applications, such as a device called a Common Tactical Blackboard to offer a portable bird's-eye view of a battle zone and software that suggests combat responses. But Mr. Underkoffler retains the right to pursue commercial uses, such as command-and-control operations for railroads and ports, and virtual wind tunnels for industrial designers. Videogames are also in the mix. With similar but less advanced technology, Sony Corp. already markets the EyeToy, in which a camera captures a person's movements and incorporates them into the game on the TV.

Paper in Psychnology about socio-cognitive functions of space

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My literature review about the socio-cognitive functions of space has been accepted for a special issue of Psychnology about Space, Place and Technology. The paper is entitled "A Review of How Space Affords Socio-Cognitive Processes during Collaboration". Here is the abstract:

This paper reviews the literature about social and cognitive functions of spatial features used when collaborating in both physical and virtual settings. Those concepts come from various fields like social, cognitive as well as environmental psychology or CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work). We briefly summarize the social and cognitive affordances of spatial features like distance, proxemics, co-presence, visibility or activity in the context of physical and virtual space. This review aims at grounding in an explicit framework the way human beings use space to support social interactions. This review can be used as a starting point to design efficient applications that take spatial context into account.

It will be online in few weeks I guess.

Poster for HCI 2005

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I'll be at HCI 2005 In Las Vegas to present a poster abou my PhD thesis. The short paper might be downloaded here. It's mostly the rough description of my first experiments' results.

A Mobile Game to Explore the Use of Location Awareness on Collaboration by Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin and Pierre Dillenbourg
This contribution presents an ongoing study focused on how location awareness feature modifies collaboration in the context of mobile computing. First it describes the environment we designed and implemented in the form of a mobile game called CatchBob!. This application running on TabletPCs engages groups of three participants in a collaborative treasure hunt over our campus. The game is used as a platform to run field experiments to get empirical results about how information concerning partners’ whereabouts impact collaborative processes. We are interested in processes such as division of labor, the inferences made by participants about others activities and the building of a shared understanding of the situation. Players can communicate by drawing information on the TabletPC that displays a campus map. Those drawings are broadcasted to each participant. Finding the object was achieved through a proximity sensor that indicates how close the user was from the virtual object. Collaboration among the peers lies in the fact that they had to surround the object with a triangle formed by their positions. We tested two experimental conditions. In one condition, users could see their partners’ positions. In the other condition, participants were not given location-awareness. This poster presents the game, how it enables us achieving our goals and specifies which kinds of data we are able to extract. We then report the results of a study we conducted. According to our ongoing experiment, there seems to be no differences between the two conditions with regard to the task performance. However, players without the location awareness indications have a better representation of their partners’ paths. This is due to the fact that they annotated more the shared map: positions indications (to compensate the absence of location-awareness) but also directions and strategy messages.

ipod to ipod connection

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icopulate is a new tool for ipod fans:

Now your iPod® can get some action and do direct data transfers at the same time! Here's how it works. Simply apply a dab of the included iLube© onto the dock connector of your iPod® and slip it into one end of the iCopulate's™ latex sleeve. Find another consenting iPod® in the vicinity and deftly insert it into the opposite end of the sleeve.

Once the two iPods® are joined the real fun begins. Using the easy to navigate menu system of your iCopulate™, you can transfer music from one iPod® to the other; single tracks, albums, all songs, or even whole playlists. Since the iCopulate™ uses the dock connector for fast file transfers you can transfer several dozen tracks in less than 30 seconds. Now that's a quickie you can write home to mom about!

MMORPG addiction factors

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Nick Yee has an interesting take on addiction factors used by game desginers in MMORPG. To put it shortly, there seems to be 3 main attraction factors of MMORPGs that encourage time investment and personal attachment:

  1. the elaborate rewards cycle inherent in MMORPGs that works like a carrot on a stick. Rewards are given very quickly in the beginning of the game. You kill a creature with 2-3 hits. You gain a level in 5-10 minutes. And you can gain crafting skill with very little failure. But the intervals between these rewards grow exponentially fairly quickly. Very soon, it takes 5 hours and then 20 hours of game time before you can gain a level. The game works by giving you instantaneous gratification upfront and leading you down a slippery slope. And it overlays different reward cycles so you're always close to some reward - whether this be a level, a crafting skill, or a quest.
  2. the network of relationships that a player accumulates over time. There are several reasons why relationships of a platonic or romantic nature occur so frequently in MMORPGs. The anonymity and computer-mediated chat environment facilitates self-disclosure, and many players have told personal issues or secrets to online friends that they have never told their real life friends or family. The high-stress situations inherent in the game also help build trust and bonds between players very rapidly. Of course, another important reason is that the games were designed so that you have to group to achieve most goals.
  3. the immersive nature of these virtual environments. This factor works by encouraging players to become attached to their characters and the virtually valuable items that they own. The immersive nature also encourages players to become personally invested to what happens to their characters, and to be empathetic towards their characters. In the same way that a movie or fairy-tale enchants you, the immersive quality of MMORPGs tries to enchant you with a fantasy, and make you feel that you are part of something grand and extraordinary.

He gathered these information through a research process detailed here in the context of his Ariadne project.

Playshop: an open-access laboratory to create botanical gameboys

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Playshop is described as an "an open-access laboratory which encourages the free flow of ideas. It presents projects, workshops, seminars, art installations and a web site that collectively question or challenge the role of technology and propose alternatives to the cultural social and economic systems we live in. Playshop is where the energy of art production, education, curatorial practice and social interaction fuse to create a vital public space and an environment of exchange. "I like some of their projects:

The projects include: the Fingerprint Maze, a physical interface turns individual fingerprints into a 3D maze to wander through on screen; Community Connectivity, a workshop which presents instructions for building one's own wireless antennae; Botanical Gameboy, an installation of custom Nintendo gameboys powered by a network of lemon trees; and an interactive installation centered on the video game paradigm created by the student collective Artech. Transport, the online component of Playshop, will serve as a resource and window to the events and projects within the space consisting of a mailing list, database and gallery.

My favorite is definetely the gameboys powered by a network of lemon trees: the Botanical gameboy:

What\'s your personal video game history?

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The IFTF is starting new research project on games: What's your personal video game history?.

To help us develop this history, we’d like to invite you to share your personal experiences with electronic games. Videogames are definitely included, but even earlier is fine. As long as some bits and bytes are involved.

So what did you play? What games stand out in your memories? Did you play in groups, or by yourself – did this change over time, or from game to game? What skills do you think you learned from each game? Has a videogame ever helped you in “real life”?

Send your personal gaming history, or as much as your time allows, to games (at) iftf.org

What's your personal video game history?

in

The IFTF is starting new research project on games: What's your personal video game history?.

To help us develop this history, we’d like to invite you to share your personal experiences with electronic games. Videogames are definitely included, but even earlier is fine. As long as some bits and bytes are involved.

So what did you play? What games stand out in your memories? Did you play in groups, or by yourself – did this change over time, or from game to game? What skills do you think you learned from each game? Has a videogame ever helped you in “real life”?

Send your personal gaming history, or as much as your time allows, to games (at) iftf.org