atc @ ucb: Jane McGonigal Monday 14 Mar

(* David Byrne [heart] Berkeley, see details below… *)

UC Berkeley's Center for New Media Presents
An Art, Technology, and Culture Laboratory Special Lecture:

Why I Love Bees, or, a Massively-Scaled Ludic Worldview
Jane McGonigal, Department of Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Mon, 14 Mar, 7:30-9pm: UC Berkeley, 160 Kroeber Hall
Free and open to the public.
=====================================================

McGonigal will discuss her firsthand experiences designing, directing
and performing in the supergaming genre. She proposes that massively
scaling digital communities is not only possible, but that scaling
leads to the emergence of important changes in our understanding of
the network, of the possibility of digital community, and indeed of
"community" itself.

The massively-scaled ludic worldview is a design imperative for social
software engineers, game developers, network designers and all the
other architects of digital community: more, more, more play and
players.

Why more? "The more the better" - players experience phenomenological
pleasure in being part of a much larger, co-present whole. "More is
different" - unexpected things happen when you scale up. "More is
needed" - to become exponentially more powerful, to pass the coveted
threshold to "super," you need to connect as many individual parts as
possible. These three tenets comprise the more, more, massively more
connectivity she dreams of for playful network communities in the today's
new media landscape. Massively more is a vision of digital social
networks designed and deployed to produce more pleasure, more
emergence, and more superpower through a massive scaling of gamer
communities.

This vision flies in the face of one of social software's favorite
conventional wisdoms: digital communities don't scale well. But
recent San Francisco-based cluster of pervasive play and performance
practices - the urban superhero adventure the Go Game, flash mobs,
flash mob supercomputing, and the flash mob gaming missions in the
massively-multiplayer alternate reality game I Love Bees - suggest
otherwise. Together, these experiments in massively-scaled, public
collaboration comprise the avant-garde of an emerging constellation of
network practices that are both ludic, or game-like, and spectacular -
that is, intended to generate an audience. She calls this tactical
combination of network-based play and spectacle supergaming.

http://www.ilovebees.com (the game)
http://www.avantgame.com (Jane's website)

===================================
Jane McGonigal is a game designer and games researcher, specializing
in massively collaborative games played in everyday spaces. She is a
Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at UC Berkeley, researching
collective play and practicing design for collaboration as a member of
the Berkeley Institute of Design and the Alpha Lab for Industrial
Engineering and Operations Research. She is also a creative designer
for 42 Entertainment, where she most recently served as community lead
and puppetmaster for the Halo 2 alternate reality game I Love Bees,
which won the 2005 International Game Developers Association's
Innovation Award and was named by the New York Times' "Year in Words"
one of the most influential and touchstone catchphrases of 2004. Her
previous pervasive gaming and collaborative play projects include
Place Storming (Intel), the Place Storming/Wi-Fi Bedouin Mash-up
(commissioned for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art), The Go
Game (Wink Back, Inc.), Organum (BID lab), and Tele-Twister (Alpha
Lab). Jane has taught game design as the San Francisco Art Institute
and game culture at UC Berkeley, and is a member of the International
Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. She is currently working with
the MacArthur Foundation on an educational gaming initiative and is on
the Interactive City programming committee for ISEA 2006.

=====================================
This talk is associated with the ATC Colloquium's F04-S05 program.

PS. 500 watched the webcast and 500 people attended David Byrne's
presentation on 7 March, including the surprise presence of the creators of Powerpoint
(Berkeley alum) in the audience. See photos and summary at:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03/08_byrne.shtml


=====================================

The ATC is sponsored by UC Berkeley's: Center for New Media, Office of the
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, College of Engineering
Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Center for Information Technology in
the Interest of Society, Consortium for the Arts, BAM/PFA, Townsend Center
for the Humanities, and the Intel Corporation.

ATC Director: Ken Goldberg
ATC Associate Director: Greg Niemeyer
ATC Exec Assistant: Irene Chien
Curated with ATC Advisory Board

Full F04-S05 series schedule and video archive:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/

Contact: [email protected], or phone: (510) 643-9565





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