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Category Archives: Academics

Digital Humanities 2009: My First Humanities Conference

By Sherol Chen | Published: July 17, 2009

Trying to find traction in my pursuit of academic scholarship is quite daunting at times.  There are just so many people in the world doing so many interesting things, and it often feels like an endless catching up with the many experts of today.  What I do know is my childhood aspiration to tell stories […]

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Agency Reconsidered

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: July 13, 2009

Steven Dow, Michael Mateas, Serdar Sali, and I have an abstracted accepted for DiGRA titled “Agency Reconsidered.” We’re working on the full paper this month, and will certainly share it when available, but one of the things I value about blogs is that they provide a place to do academic work in public. So I’m […]

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Johanna Drucker is Pulling My Leg

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: July 9, 2009

Johanna Drucker has a thoughtful review of Matt Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms in the Spring 2009 issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly. I think most of what she says is spot-on. But she has to be kidding with this, right? Have any works appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value? Not yet. My first reaction […]

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Mateas named MacArthur Foundation Chair

By Jim Whitehead | Published: July 8, 2009

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, […]

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Craig Reynolds on Crowds and Emergent Teamwork

By Jim Whitehead | Published: June 20, 2009

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 […]

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Game Designers Design Players Too

By Adam M. Smith | Published: June 18, 2009

I’ve got a whole philosophy of game design I’m sitting on here, but today I’d like to share just one little provocative tidbit: game designers design players too. Imagine you thinking through the design of some cute little dungeon crawl.  You are going to have caverns connected by twisty passages, a hero/jerk who is capable […]

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