Home About EIS →

Author Archives: Jim Whitehead

Landscape of open source games

I recently gave a presentation on the landscape of open source software in computer games at the Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, where I am currently visiting the Libresoft research group. My slides are available here. While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Al Alcorn at 2009 California Extreme show

Pong designer and videogame pioneer Al Alcorn will be speaking at the 2009 California Extreme show this Saturday. He will be participating on a panel where he’ll join Mike Hally (Gravitar, Star Wars), Steve Ritchie (Flash, High Speed, Terminator 2: Judgment Day), and Owen Rubin (Major Havoc, Space Duel, Battlezone) and take Q&A from the […]

Posted in Gaming Culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Mateas named MacArthur Foundation Chair

Michael Mateas has been selected as the inaugural MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair for the UC Santa Cruz campus. The MacArthur Chair was established in 2009 for the purpose of supporting research, public service, and teaching that promotes the objectives of the MacArthur Foundation, which include working to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Craig Reynolds on Crowds and Emergent Teamwork

This past January, Craig Reynolds from Sony’s research group in Foster City gave a presentation at UC Santa Cruz on current challenges in creating computational crowds, especially those where the members of the crowd are cooperating to perform some task. A video of the talk can be viewed here: https://slugtube.soe.ucsc.edu/play-video.php?ID=1072 As a contrast to the […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Games for girls segment on Today show

This segment on the Today show, aired June 18, 2009, talks about how the games industry is increasingly focusing on girls and women in game creation and marketing. While the segment has its cringeworthy moments (floating talking head in a video game world, ew!), it mostly provides a good overview of current industry thinking about […]

Posted in Gaming Culture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Mark Henne talk at UCSC

On Friday, May 29, 2009, Mark Henne from Pixar came to UCSC and gave a talk on crowds in the movie Wall-E. You can watch the video here: https://slugtube.soe.ucsc.edu/play-video.php?ID=1070 I was impressed by the complexity of the AI underlying the characters that comprise the crowds, another reminder of just how complex seemingly simple real-world behaviors […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , | Comments closed