Playing with Play: Machinima in the Classroom

“So, machinima is really a genre, and not a medium?” The students in my Digital Media and Rhetoric course are grappling with both how to define machinima and how to evaluate whether one is “good” or not. I frustrate them by refusing to provide a definitive answer to this and other similar questions they have asked about the form. This intentional frustration continues as, after watching a few examples they ask me what grade I would give those machinima, if they were turned in for this assignment. Rather than providing a simple answer I redirect, asking them what criteria they would use to evaluate machinima and how the examples we’ve seen in class stand up to this scrutiny. At the beginning of this particular unit, when I announced that we wouldn’t be writing another research paper, they were exuberant. Now, however, the complexity of the task before them is slowly unveiling itself. While a majority of these students are gamers, few of them have experience in video production. None of them have previously looked at fan culture as a source of meaning and knowledge production. We are in unfamiliar territory, and they are getting restless

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

The Cowl - v.81 - n.8 - Nov 3, 2016

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 81 - No. 8 - November 3, 2016. 24 pages

Psychomotor Skill Measurement of Video Game Players

Psychomotor skills are a combination of innate abilities as well as skills developed because of repeated actions. Researchers have dedicated many studies to understand the extent to which past videogame play contributes to psychomotor skills and fine motor control dexterity. However, not all gamers are created equal. With today\u27s proliferation of platforms, many people are gamers who never pick up a controller. Grouping all gamers together forms dangerous confounds when trying to generalize across a population as diverse as today\u27s gamers. The current study aims to study a population comprised only of gamers to see if there are significant differences in their psychomotor skills. A psychomotor skills test has been developed, which is designed to simulate proven physical tests, with the express purpose of exposing differences between gamers. After filling out an extensive survey of gaming habits, participants completed the psychomotor skills test. Participants were then grouped by measured psychomotor ability and a selection of high and low performing gamers completed four tutorial exercises on the dV-Trainer by Mimic Technologies, a validated robotic laparoscopic training device. The study shows that the number of hours reported per week using analog controllers is correlated with the psychomotor score as measured by the newly developed simulation. In particular, the Purdue Pegboard and Finger Tapping simulation software is the best discriminator among members of the gamer population

Utilising gamification approaches to derive crowd pattern/crowd context from aerial images of major events

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesA large number of casualties occur during emergencies in highly-crowded public spaces of major events like annual anniversaries, religious festivals, big parties and football matches due to stampedes. It has been often observed that poor resource management is one of the key areas that could be improved to solve this problem. In this study,a geo-game-based approach has been adopted to alert responsible authorities of highly crowded regions as an early warning system and also provide them with optimal dispersal routes. In the Android-based game that was developed for this study, the players could draw polygons on real-time imageries of the area under study obtained from unmanned aerial vehicles and classify them into categories based on how crowded the region is. This data is submitted to a web server which is processed to find suitable least-cost routes by which the people in the crowded regions can be brought to safety in case of an emergency. The spatial distribution of people could be forwarded to appropriate authorities in-charge of the administration highlighting extremely crowded regions which need their attention thereby prompting redirection of security personnel. Additionally, the calculated dispersal routes could be used by them as suggestions to avoid a stampede and ensure safety in case the situation turns worse

Spartan Daily, February 14, 1975

Volume 64, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5943/thumbnail.jp