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New Publication: “A Unified Approach to Preserving Cultural Software Objects and their Development Histories”

By ekaltman | Published: February 10, 2015

Report Cover

We are pleased to announce the publication of our recent National Endowment for the Humanities supported white paper on archiving and appraising academically produced computer games. “A Unified Approach to Preserving Cultural Software Objects and their Development Histories,” is aimed at providing a first step towards an archival methodology for computer games and their development documentation. The report provides an in-depth look at the development of Prom Week, EIS’s social simulation game, with a focus on its development process, context, and documentation. We highlight key moments in its development timeline, and elaborate on the different types of documents produced, and the challenges encountered in gathering everything together for deposition into the University of California’s Merritt Repository.

The report is available at CPGM’s main website (permanent URL link at the bottom of the page): https://games.soe.ucsc.edu/project/prom-week-development-archive

The development archive is available here: https://merritt.cdlib.org/m/ucsc_lib_promweek

We would like to thank the NEH Digital Start Up Grant (HD-51719-13) program for providing the funding for this effort!

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Faculty Job in Games Research at UCSC

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: November 24, 2014

I’m pleased to announce that the newly-formed Computational Media department at UC Santa Cruz is advertising an open-rank faculty position in interdisciplinary computer games research. As the official job flier puts it, our ideal candidate is someone “connecting novel technology research with practices of design and/or interpretation.”

I’m excited by the great community we’re building around games research, and computational media broadly, at UC Santa Cruz. This includes two key hires in the Arts this year (Robin Hunicke and Susana Ruiz) and the founders of the new MS in Games and Playable Media (Brenda Romero and John Romero) hired last year, as well as the pre-existing CM faculty (Arnav Jhala, Michael Mateas, Sri Kurniawan, Marilyn Walker, Jim Whitehead, and yours truly) and other faculty in the Center for Games and Playable Media (e.g., Brenda Laurel, Soraya Murray).

I’m a member of the search committee, so please feel free to contact me with any questions. More details are below. Read More »

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GDC 2014: U.S. National Investment in the Future of Games?

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: March 22, 2014

At the just-concluded 2014 Game Developers Conference I organized and spoke in a session titled, “U.S. National Investment in the Future of Games?” I was joined by William S. Bainbridge (Program Director for the National Science Foundation), Elaine Raybourn (Principal Member of the Technical Staff in Cognitive Systems at Sandia National Laboratories, on assignment from to the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense), and Jason Rhody (Senior Program Officer for the Office of Digital Humanities in the National Endowment for the Humanities). I’m posting here my slides and notes from the session introduction and my talk, the latter of which focused on three recommendation areas from the Media Systems final report that would benefit from joint effort by federal agencies and the game development community. Read More »

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GDC 2014: Game Grants for Scholars, Librarians, and Artists

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: March 21, 2014

This week at GDC I gave a talk as part of the session “Federal Opportunities for Game Faculty and Students.” I was joined by William Bainbridge (Program Director, National Science Foundation) and Jason Rhody (Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities). My presentation focused on my experiences as a Principle Investigator on a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

The slides and my talk notes are below. I hope they’re helpful! Read More »

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New Publication: “Envisioning the Future of Computational Media” (Media Systems)

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: March 19, 2014

Media Systems logo

Today we are publishing the final report of the Media Systems project — including a set of 12 key recommendations for building the future of computational media.

This report is the result of bringing more than 40 field leaders together for a meeting made possible by an unprecedented set of organizations: the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, Microsoft Studios, and Microsoft Research. We followed the meeting with more than a year of additional analysis, conversation, and writing.

Our report, “Envisioning the Future of Computational Media,” starts with the fact that the future of media is increasingly computational — video games, smartphone apps, ebooks, social media, and more.

As media evolve and change, the stakes are high, on many fronts — from culture and the economy to education and health. Read More »

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March 3rd Deadline: Intelligent Narrative Technologies @ ELO

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: February 15, 2014

(int)7 — INTELLIGENT NARRATIVE TECHNOLOGIES SEVEN
Call for Participation
http://int7.westphal.drexel.edu/

KEY DATES:

• (int)7 Submission deadline: March 3, 2014
• Workshop: June 17-18, 2014, Milwaukee, WI

(int)7 & ELO registration information is now available:
http://conference.eliterature.org/conference-registration

The Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT) workshop series aims to advance research in artificial intelligence for the computational understanding, expression, and creation of narrative. Previous installments of this workshop have brought together a multidisciplinary group of researchers such as computer scientists, psychologists, narrative theorists, media theorists, artists, and members of the interactive entertainment industry. From this broad expertise, the INT series focuses on computational systems to represent, reason about, adapt, author, and perform interactive and non-interactive narrative experiences.

(int)7, the seventh workshop in the series, will highlight both the computational and aesthetic aspects of narrative systems and the narrative experiences they create. It will be co-located with the 2014 Electronic Literature Organization Conference (ELO 2014) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. ELO is the most significant international organization and conference series for creators and scholars of digital fiction, poetry, and drama. By co-locating with ELO we hope to create an opportunity for greater awareness between the two communities. INT work can be strengthened by awareness of the challenges and goals of authors creating a wide variety of computational literary works, as well as the models being developed by scholars of this work. The ELO community can be strengthened by greater awareness of the types of basic research undertaken and experimental systems created by the INT community, broadening conceptions of the field and imaginations of its possible futures. It is possible that co-location may even result in identifying potential collaborations between members of the two communities. Read More »

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