Just received the sad news from our beloved SL designer, DoctorAsp:
The Metaplace development team made the announcement today that no fan of a game likes to hear: “Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community. We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific.” The bottom line to the reasoning behind the decision is that Metaplace simply is not making enough headway to be a viable (read: profitable) product. Fans will surely have a number of questions about this, and the community team has provided a FAQ to answer most of them.Tami Baribeau also shared some hopeful news in a blog post: “Metaplace, Inc. as a company (and as a tool) isn’t going away. We have whole new shift of focus ahead of us and a smaller team set out to accomplish some big goals.”
While it’s sad news for both staff — a significant number of whom have been laid off due to the closure — and fans of Metaplace, the community team is holding their heads up and maintaining an optimistic outlook. The goodbye party on January first is being treated as a celebration of the fun that’s been had, rather than a gathering to mourn the ending. Community Manager
Our sympathies are with the staff members affected by this, and with everyone who has invested their time, creativity, and effort in Metaplace. However, we join their team in looking forward to the good things anticipated by the company.
Watch the live stream at 13:30 today, January 14th.
Come join us for an exciting new year’s seminar with Professor Jeffrey Schnapp, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, and Associate Director Henrik Bennetsen from Stanford Humanities Lab. This afternoon will bring us up to date on the new open source virtual world, Sirikata, and propose innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge production and reproduction in the arts and humanities. The day will provide new visions of how one might reinvent museums and archives as institutions under digital conditions as well as model some successful practices and prospective projects that involve the concept of the animated archive and the augmented museum.
WHEN AND WHERE: Thursday, January 14th 2010, 13:30-17:00, room 43.3.29, house 43, Roskilde University. Map of the university
Followed by dinner at Rådhuskælderen, Roskilde. Registration is necessary for dinner only. All are welcome.
Jeffrey Schnapp occupies the Pierotti Chair in Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000 with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary platform for testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world. Stanford Humanities Lab is a hybrid institution, a kind of Media/Tech Lab wedded to a Humanities & Arts research center, devoted to thinking outside of the box, to experimenting with public forms of scholarship and culture and to exploring the interstices between research and art practice. Schnapp’s current research interests lie in the domain of mixed reality approaches to scholarship, curatorship, and cultural programming and in a broad range of challenges placed under the general banner of “animating the archive.” Recent projects for example include a Mixed Reality Performance at the MITO Festival, an experiment in which physical spaces and musicians from different continents encountered one another on-line.
Henrik Bennetsen is the associate director of the Stanford Humanities Lab. He maintains a strong interest in virtual worlds and open source technology and is currently engaged in the Speed Limits research project (a collaboration with the Danish Bornholm’s Kunstmuseum) that explores artistic expression and archiving inside virtual space. Previously, Henrik led the Life Squared (L2) research project and the construction of a 3D immersive art archive inside the virtual world of Second Life. In 2007 Bennetsen co-founded the Stanford Open Source Lab that has since grown to about 60 members from across the Stanford community. Henrik is Danish and has a MSc. in Media Technology and Games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc. in Medialogy from Aalborg University. Before his return to the world of academia, Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self-expression augmented by technology.
We can finally announce that Ciskovan’s “The Workout” has been chosen by the audience as best Metrotopia Machinima! Congratulations to Ciskovan, who will receive 25.000 L$. As for the jury award… well, it wasn’t an easy decision. The jury, research project members with varied backgrounds, had different opinions about the various entries. We really enjoyed watching the way these movies make use of the island and in different ways work with the machinima possibilities of Second Life. The result of our discussions is a split top prize; between Dope Zepp’s “See, Speak No Evil” and Glasz DeCuir’s “Wonder Woman” who both will receive 25.000 L$ as split winners of the 1st prize jury award. “See, Speak No Evil” illustrates excellent work with avatar customization and animation, scenography and editing, and plays well with a surreal mood and life/death theme. “Wonder Woman”, on the other hand, really showcases Metrotopia as a superhero island for all and the film’s message and humor just made us all laugh and smile. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all for participating!!!
An inspiring day of films and discussion about Machinima film-making, including its history related to animation, puppetry and games, the future directions and design tools. First, I give a review of the four parts of the day, then unpack two topics (Machinima as folk art and choosing style in regards to game engine). See more information at the end of the post (links, biographies and more). The four parts of the seminar:
- Speedmaster Bing (aka Jimmy Hansen) reviewed the history of Machinima, mainly from a technical viewpoint and he showed a wide spectrum of films (see his blog mirrorworld.dk).,
- Britta Pollmuller (Pigment Pye in Second Life) joined us in SL. She is a Machinima artist, a PhD student and also teaches classes on how to make Machinima under the Schome Initiative, at UK’s Open University. Britta demonstrated the versatility of designing scenes and figures in SL, highlighted the cheap cost and aesthetic potentials – as well as limitations.
- Hugh Hancock is a Machinima pioneer and part of Strange Company, Edinburgh. He took us on a whirlwind tour of the state of the art of making films in virtual worlds. He discussed what he termed “about 15 types and many production techniques… a whole continuum” under the umbrella term Machinima, which he came up with (a combination of machine + cinema + anime, although anime due to spelling snafu). Hugh also led a fun demo of an open source online Machinima film-making “tool” specifically for setting up and recording realtime animation (see Moviestorm.uk.co)
- I summarized and led a brief discussion on Machinima as a “folk art” from a wider historical perspective on the arts and media convergence.
I continue to speculate on two particular topics from the seminar: (1) how art forms evolve over historical epochs and the idea of Machinima as folk art, and (2) how machinimators work within a virtual world and go about choosing a style and look (in a game engine) to fit with their story. Continued…
Play for Free was held Nov. 19th at the Danish Film Institute, organized by MEDIA Desk and DADIU. Different perspectives on the game industry regarding the rise of online free games were discussed. The concept is that while the games are basically free, often the users generate contents and the users can select to pay – for special items, or add-ons to games or even to pay to turn off ads. For example, Habbo Hotel by Sudake (which is more of a virtual world than a game) offers rare items for purchase. Continued…
Title: Do you want to play? How making-sense of entertainment innovations relates to engaging with media products
Abstract: With the rise of digital media and advancement of the internet as a distribution medium, there are increasingly more media products being offered as sources of entertainment. The digital age of media has given us video games, computer games, massive multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual social games, and so forth. But how entertaining are these innovations in delivery systems seen compared to more traditional media, such as movies? In other words, how do people make sense of the innovations in entertainment as having entertainment value to them, and how does the perception of entertainment value relate to their engaging with that media product? This study primarily focuses on conceptualizations of virtual worlds and how they are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern media environments. This study investigates how media products that vary in their technological innovation are seen as being entertaining by using a quasi-experiment method under the aegis of Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology (SMM). To do so, people with a variety of experiences engaged with four different media products: a motion picture; a video game; an MMOG (massive multiplayer online game); and an SVW (social virtual world). This presentation provides some of the first analysis of the data, where the experiences of the individuals were gathered in interviews and retold as narratives. These narratives demonstrate the complexity of their engaging with the media, and in doing so demonstrate the utility of this interpretivist approach for helping us compare engagings with a variety of media products, both “old” and “new”.
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