30 research outputs found
Ian Bogost at X-Media Lab: serious gaming
No full textVideo games are usually viewed as a form of escapism: pure entertainment and shoot-em-up fantasy. But increasingly, games are being recognised as educational tools, or as deliverers of social or political messages. This evolving medium is taking on complex environments and issues, and providing a platform for people to explore a world or situation in an interactive way. In this talk at the X Media Lab in Sydney, video game theorist and designer Ian Bogost gives an overview of how video games can benefit human existence.
Ian Bogost is author of "Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism", recently listed among "50 books for everyone in the game industry". He also wrote "Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames", and was co-author of "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System". He is widely considered an influential thinker and doer in the videogame industry and research community.
 
Episode 068 - Ian Bogost
No full textIan Bogost is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the George Institute of Technology. He’s an author of multiple books, an award-winning game designer, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Ian studies games by making games and is an incredibly deep thinker about an impressively broad array of topics, as you’ll hear from this conversation
JPEG: the quadruple object
No full textThe thesis, together with its practice-research works, presents an object-oriented
perspective on the JPEG standard. Using the object-oriented
philosophy of Graham Harman as a theoretical and also practical starting
point, the thesis looks to provide an account of the JPEG digital object and
its enfolding within the governmental scopic regime. The thesis looks to
move beyond accounts of digital objects and protocols within software
studies that position the object in terms of issues of relationality,
processuality and potentiality. From an object-oriented point of view, the
digital object must be seen as exceeding its relations, as actual, present and
holding nothing in reserve. The thesis presents an account of JPEG starting
from that position as well as an object-oriented account of JPEG’s position
within the distributed, governmental scopic regime via an analysis of
Facebook’s Timeline, tagging and Haystack systems.
As part of a practice-research project, the author looked to use that
perspective within photographic and broader imaging practices as a spur to
new work and also as a “laboratory” to explore Harman’s framework. The
thesis presents the findings of those “experiments” in the form of a report
alongside practice-research eBooks. These works were not designed to be
illustrations of the theory, nor works to be “analysed”. Rather, following the
lead of Ian Bogost and Mark Amerika, they were designed to be
“philosophical works” in the sense of works that “did” philosophy
Faculty Panel: Open Access and the Digital Humanities
No full textOpen Access @ Georgia Tech event held in conjunction with International Open Access Week. Presented on October 25, 2013 from 3-4 pm in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Seminar Room 1116.Dr. Ian Bogost is a scholar, author, and game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. As an author, he writes about videogames as a medium with many uses. As a game designer, he makes games for political, social, educational, and artistic uses. Bogost is author or co-author of seven books: Unit Operations, Persuasive Games, Racing the Beam, Newsgames, How To Do Things with Videogames, Alien Phenomenology, and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Bogost's videogames cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally. His game A Slow Year, a collection of game poems for Atari, won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 Indiecade Festival.TyAnna Herrington, JD, PhD, is a Professor at Georgia Tech. She specializes in intellectual property law and in international technical communication. Her books are in law and her articles treat issues in law and international communication, focused on digital learning. She serves on ATTW's Executive Committee as its Information Officer, is an Executive Advisory Board Member for CPTSC's Programmatic Perspectives, and is a member of the CCCC"s Intellectual Property Task Force. Herrington served as a member of Georgia's State Board of Regents Copyright Committee and has delivered keynote, featured, and plenary addresses in venues including the NINCH Copyright Town Hall, CCCC, and CPTSC.Robin Wharton holds a law degree (1999), and a PhD in English with an emphasis in late-medieval English law and literature (2009) from the University of Georgia. She was formerly a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and then Assistant Director of Writing and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At present, she is a collaborator on the Hoccleve Archive, a collection of resources related to study of the fifteenth century London-based poet Thomas Hoccleve and his works, a co-founder and director of the Calliope Initiative, a non-profit organization building open source tools for project- and process-oriented multimodal composition pedagogy, and the Production Editor at Hybrid Pegagogy, a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology. An advocate for open access and open source development and distribution models, her interdisciplinary scholarship--in digital humanities and pedagogy, critical theory, and medieval studies--considers the complex discursive exchange among literary, academic, and legal modes of cultural production.Stewart Varner is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library. He works with scholars who want to incorporate technology into their research and is particularly interested in building a robust role for libraries in Open Access digital publishing. He joined the staff at Emory in 2010 after working for three years as a graduate student fellow in the Beck Center for Electronic Texts. He earned his doctorate in American Studies from Emory's Institute for the Liberal Arts and his MLIS from the University of North Texas.Brian Croxall is Digital Humanities Strategist and Lecturer of English at Emory University. In the new Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), he helps carry out an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-sponsored grant. Along with developing and managing digital scholarship projects in collaboration with faculty, graduate students, librarians, and developers, he teaches courses on digital humanities, media studies, and American literature. He has co-edited an issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on steampunk, is co-editing a book on the same subject, is a cluster editor at #alt-academy, and is a writer for the group blog ProfHacker.Runtime: 64:54 minutes
No Center Objects and Material Investigations
No full textI den här essän dyker jag in i materialens och objektens värld. Det är en text där de betecknas som potentialiteter och berättare. Min skulpturella praktik, som är baserad på materiella relationer, förankras här med koncept så som Strange Stranger av Timothy Morton, objektorienterad ontologi och Ian Bogosts unit. Det är alla termer som sträcker sig mot det porösa i objekt, till mångfaldigheten de kan förkroppsliga.In this essay I'm diving into material means. The text is based on the notion of objects and materials as possibilities and narrators. I will anchor my sculptural practice, which centers around material relations, with concepts such as Strange Stranger by Timothy Morton, Object Oriented Ontology and Ian Bogost´s unit. All the terms are reaching for the porousness of objects, the multitude they can embody
The dynamics of the player narrative: how choice shapes videogame literature
No full textThe author narrative and the player narrative are distinct and separate parts that make up the whole of videogame literature. The videogame medium encourages a mixed-media understanding of conventions and the rejection of essentialism that leads to, inspires, and facilitates the player narrative. Videogame literatures require discreet actions that, as part of any possible reading, the player must do-- and in doing the player must make a choice with mind and body that involves a human-to-machine expression of agency within constraints that define the player narrative. So the decision making process in videogame storytelling is that human-to-machine interaction that can be understood as both the means by which the videogame story progresses, and the process by which the player wields his or her narrative within the procedural possibility space. Videogame literary analysis requires understanding how players make those decisions, understanding how the player leverages media conventions in order to wield power over the narrative, and understanding what role the player has in videogame storytelling. The choice dynamics of a videogame narrative are the key narrative elements within videogame literature that provide players and researchers tools for evaluating choice opportunities within videogame literature toward forming a better understanding of the space between and connection to the author narrative and the player narrative. All of these analyses combine to form a picture of decision making processes in videogame literature that are complex and contradictory path making endeavors that define the narrative experience in videogame literature, and the interconnected dynamics of the author and player narrative space.M
Ivan Allen College NEWSLetter [September 2010]
No full textNOTE: These HTML files may contain links to URIs outside of SMARTech. The Georgia Tech Library and Information Center cannot guarantee the authenticity of resources that reside outside the smartech.gatech.edu domain.Issue includes: Message from Dean Jacqueline Jones Royster; FutureMedia Fest Interactive Mash-up Takes Place October 4-7; Poetry at Tech Tribute to Henry C. Bourne October 5th; Award-Winning Science Fiction Author Goonan is LCC Visiting Professor; HTS Visiting Professor to Expand Western China’s Perspective on U.S.; Goodman Keynotes Cyber Security Conferences; Air Force ROTC’s Andino Retires; D'Unger Elected to President of Georgia Tech Academic Advising Network; SPP Students Speak at New Student Convocation; Alumni Profile — Rizwan Ladha – IAML 2007; Hoffman Awarded $400,000 DOE Grant; #@&%*! The New Republic Reviews Herbst's "Rude Democracy"; Gampro Picks GT/Bogost in Six Game Design Schools to Watch; Schneer Book in NYT Book Review, Seattle Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, London Sunday Times; Ries in Florida Times Union, Savannah Morning News; Kingsley Study in Architect Magazine
Pasted Up and Printed Out : Watchmen as Ontographic Network
No full textThis thesis explores Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons\u27 1986-87 comic book series Watchmen according to its network structure, paying particular attention to page layout and the establishment of or deviation from the nine-panel waffle iron grid. This reading aims to better understand the comic book form, connecting the work of comics theorist Theirry Groensteen to certain elements of actor-network theory and Ian Bogost\u27s notion of the ontograph--a map of being that emphasizes the interobjectivity of networked nodes. This thesis explores the ontographic nature of the comic book form more generally before tracing the meta-textual ontograph in Watchmen. The thesis then examines the network within the single panel, the multi-panel page layout, and the collaborative network of artist and author. Finally, this thesis explores how Watchmen as an ontograph exploits the affordances of the comic book form in order to construct creative temporalities
Escape the Smart City: Critical pervasive game to question the AI-surveillance infrastructure in the smart city
No full textEscape the Smart City is a critical pervasive game for creating awareness about the implications of AI-surveillance technology in the smart city. It responds to growing concerns over the mass deployment of surveillance cameras that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) which are turning the cities into digital panopticons (Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015). Such concerns are amplified by the central role played by multinational corporations in developing the technologies that are said to render the city “smart”.The technologies behind AI-surveillance are proprietary and the nature of it is inherently a “black-box” which inhibits public from understanding it and having a say in its deployment. Due to this reason, the citizens that live in the cities with smart surveillance are often left behind not informed enough about the consequences of the pervasive technology in their environment. This research addresses this lack of awareness by creating an escape room like experience around the city where players locate hidden surveillance cameras, discover algorithmic biases, and try to fool facial detection algorithm in order to go against a fictional all-seeing AI-surveillance system. Consistent with Flanagan’s (2009) critical play model, the 8 problems of AI-surveillance defined in the research are communicated by the game’s procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007).It also questions whether critical pervasive games — which are the combination of critical design (Dunne & Raby, 2013) and pervasive games (Montola et al., 2009) — is possible of merging the ordinary world with the fictional game world to create a safe space to explore complex socio-technical problems in compelling, relatable ways. Through the play-test, it was made clear that by providing the players with interactive feedback on how AI-surveillance would perceive the world, the players were able to get a sense of the black boxed nature of AI and ask critical questions about their necessity and consequences. Also, the in-situ experience outside created a heightened awareness of existing surveillance infrastructures
A Fundamental Look at Electronic Storytelling: Subverting Expectations on a Procedural Level
No full textIn a book that explores the fundamental principles of sound storytelling, George Saunders tells us, “A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises” (11-12). Saunders explains that good storytelling depends on what an author does with those expectations, that “we could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments” (12). It is a universal technique for creating engaging stories: create an expectation, then either meet it or subvert it in an entertaining way.
Some have argued that the illusion of choice offered by games and interactive fiction ultimately detracts from the narrative, disrupting the reader’s attention (Bogost 2017; D’Aloia 2020; Mukherjee 2023). However, the tension between authorship and perceived co-authorship in electronic works of literature offers a unique surface on which the author can create expectations in ways that are not possible in linear works.
In order to demonstrate, this paper presents The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013) as an example of electronic literature that creates an expectation in its reader on a procedural level, and then undermines that expectation in a surprising manner. The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013) uses what is essentially ‘the trolley problem’—quite possibly the most recognizable archetype we have for difficult choices—as the climax of its narrative, in a medium that is known for offering choice to its reader. The reader is well-primed to feel the need to decide the direction the narrative will take. However, The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013) retains its own authorial control. This paper argues this work’s success hinges on its denial of choice, creating a different set of questions and reflections for the reader.
By examining how fundamental principles such as this apply specifically to electronic interactive media, we seek to better understand interactive media’s position on the spectrum of narrative works.
References
Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better Without Stories.” The Atlantic, 25 Apr. 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/.
D’Aloia, Adriano. “Against Interactivity. Phenomenological Notes on Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.” Series. International Journal of Tv Serial Narratives, vol. 6, no. 2, Dec. 2020, pp. 21–31. doaj.org, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/11410.
Mukherjee, Sreya. “The Paradox of Choice in Interactive Fiction: A Critical Analysis of Bandersnatch’s ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ Structure.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 46, no. 4, Dec. 2023, pp. 102–13.
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Random House. 2021
