serial consign

[Civilization Revolution]

This morning my first contribution to Mez Breeze's excellent Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1 "GAM3R 7H30RY" blog went live. In the coming months I'm going to be developing a series of posts for Augmentology entitled Tentative Spaces which will explore the cultural and spatial quality of interface and information overlays in gaming. I'm interested in how gamers occupy these spaces and how they sit outside and "on top" of narrative. I plan to use this writing project to formalize and further develop many of the ideas I've explored in past posts on gaming like Ways of Seeing Digital Space, Notes on Operational Narrative and Learning from Liberty City. So rather than say any more, here is a link to the post.

The last week has been quite hectic! I'm in the midst of rebuilding Vague Terrain in Drupal, exploring some exciting new opportunities and knuckling down for an impending crunch at my day job. Despite all this activity, I've been diligently working through some great writing and media. Please note the following:

• _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, a new blogging project by the prolific poet/theorist Mez Breeze. Mez launched Augmentology this past April and she has quickly amassed an (expectedly) idiosyncratic series of posts which explore notions of presence, identity and play across a variety of gaming and social media platforms. Mez is in the midst of expanding the scope of Augmentology by inviting a number of guest contributors to provide content for the project - these will tentatively include: Joseph Delappe, Howard Rheingold, Azdel Slade, Trevor Dodge and Shane Hilton. I've also been invited into the fold, and I am excited at the prospect of further exploring some of the themes I've touched on in my previous posts on gaming.
• Last week Mitchell Whitelaw tipped me off about Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture, a paper that he recently co-authored with Troy Innocent and Mark Guglielmetti. The essay explores the implications of social software (facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) and some of the counterintuitive percepts and phenomena made possible by immersion in digital space. I found the discussions on death in gaming and character deletion particularly engaging.
• The video archives of the recent Software Studies workshop/symposium at UCSD have been posted. The two dozen or so pecha kucha-style presentations provide an incredible window into the current research projects of numerous top shelf digital theorists and practitioners including Jordan Crandall, Warren Sack, Nick Montfort, and many others. I've only watched a few videos thus far, but I found Ian Bogost's presentation on the forthcoming Platform Studies project quite fascinating.