New Game Design Lecturer appointed in Digital Arts

Vanity post: 

Here is an article about me published on the Wits School of Arts website in the news section of March 2011.

Written by Christo Doherty.

Photo Christo Doherty. 
Related post also on www.atjoburg.net
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New Game Design Lecturer appointed in Digital Arts

Hanli Geyser has  been appointed as  the first Game Design Lecturer in Digital Arts.  As both an avid gamer and an academic researcher into popular cultural production, Hanli has the background necessary to develop the exciting new Games Design courses which will be launched by Digital Arts, in collaboration with the Wits School of Electrical Engineering,  in 2012.

Hanli’s research and teaching interests are diverse, spanning many areas of popular cultural production. She is primarily fascinated by the conjunction between visual arts and narrative texts found in video games, hypertext fiction, comic books and film.  She graduated with an MA in History of Art from Wits in 2008 with a dissertation entitled Surface Tension - Examining the implications of intentional disruption of the Photographic Surface.  . Extending her interest in disruptions to the surface into the digital realm her PhD, provisionally titled An Investigation of the Hyperlink as both Mark and Rupture on the Imagined Hypertextual Surface, focuses on the use of the hyperlink in visual arts. Areas of research in which she is actively involved include Interactive Narrative as well as Adaptation Studies.  Interactive narrative covers a vast range of practices that involve some degree of user participation to drive the narrative structure.  Her interest here is in both literary and visual story telling forms, and extends from ‘text adventures’ through hypertext fiction to video games.  In adaptation studies, the study of transition between media in narrative texts, she is primarily interested in the impact of medium on the narrative structure and the effect it generates.  Her investigation in this area has centered on transitions between comic, film, and video game formats.

Hanli has always been an avid gamer, actively playing a wide range of games.  Her enjoyment of games stems both from narrative satisfaction as well as a keen interest in ludology and game mechanics. She is currently writing a paper on the post-colonial representation of the African landscape in the popular commercial title Far cry 2 (2008).

While she plays many commercial titles (her current favourites include The Witcher, Fall Out, Machinarium, and Braid) she has a keen interest in games as a form of artistic expression.  She therefore actively engages with independent, experimental, and art games.

Hanli is an energetic researcher but she is also equally committed to her students and to teaching.  She is passionate about education as an ideal and there is nothing she enjoys more than being able to teach and engage with students. "

Reblog: Video game in your browser's location bar

Cory Doctorow at boingboing points to this amazing little game:

URL Hunter: http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

Video game in your browser's location bar:
  

Probably Corey's (sic. Should read Probably Interactive's) HTML 5 video-game 'URL Hunter' takes place entirely in the URL bar of your browser, in which you must chase down rogue 'a's with your mighty 'O' and clobber them with the spacebar. I keep running into croggling demos of HTML5's capabilities -- last week in Toronto, Mozilla.org's Brett Gaylor showed me a WebGL demo that left me with my jaw on the floor. It's going to be a cool couple of Web-years, most surely.
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Reblog: Browser Game Pick: RIZK (Playerthree)

An truly fantastic game reflecting on the environmental impacts of resource gathering. Well worth a play.

Found thanks to IndiGames.com. 
Article below by Cassandra Khaw.
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Back in the early nineties, long before the gaming industry became obsessed with sex and other drivel, edutainment-related material was everywhere. Sadly, only a handful were brilliant; the rest were mostly boring or, at times, borderline preachy. Granted, that's how my nine year old self remembers it - your mileage might vary. Thus, when I first heard of RIZK, a part of the Science Museum's three-year series entitled 'Climate Changing..', I was extremely skeptical about its production values. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
RIZK is, essentially, a 2D tower defense-like game that requires you to nurture and safeguard an alien plant that serves as your only means of escaping to the next level. In order to accomplish this, you'll have to carefully budget a somewhat meagre stash of coins in order to create your strangely ameobic-like minions. There isn't any violence in the game, though. Your enemies here are not hungry herbivores but indigenous vegetation that release spores capable of hurting your plant; your own critters won't do anything outside of generate protective shields of varying strength and range.
According to the press release that popped up in my mail today, RIZK's visual presentation is apparently greatly influenced by the sci-fi posters of the 50's and 60's and honestly, there's something quaintly charming about the game's looks. Most of the terrain is nothing but silhouettes framed against a stary, pastel-flooded sky. The placid outlook, however, bellies the surprisingly intricate gameplay; it rapidly becomes less a question of resource management and more a case of you attempting not to agitate the planet's residents too much.
It took a little while for the message to sink in but once it did, I was impressed with the work put into the game by its developers. RIZK, without sounding overtly 'in your face', rather neatly encapsulates the antagonistic relationship man's technological progress has with Mother Nature. I'm not going to explain exactly how it all works out simply because it'd detract from the message but I can assure you that it'd at least trigger a brief 'Huh' when the epiphany finally strikes.
Play the game now at the Science Museum's official website.
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Reblog: Mateas on Agency

This post by HTLit points to a very interesting and helpful article by Michael Mateas. Isn't it fantastic how we find things?

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Recent interest around Eastgate in the role of agency in narrative immersion has led me to a fascinating essay by Michael Mateas, co-author of Façade. Using Aristotle’s theory of drama as a starting point, Mateas diagrams the role of agency in interactive drama, adding an additional model of choice and causation atop Aristotle’s diagram of narrative causation. This addition results in the proposition that “a player will experience agency when there is a balance between material and formal constraints.”Leaning heavily on previous work by Murray and others, the essay provides and interesting perspective for anyone interested in agency and its relation to interactive narrative."

Reblog: Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron

The following article was posted by Nicholas Carr on his blog Rough Type.   Many of the assertions are ill researched and misconstrued. I find the article rather unfortunate since it displays an emotional response shrouded in vaguely academic terminology.

'December 08, 2010 Craig Mod is psyched about the future of literary storytelling. "With digital media," he writes in "The Digital Death of the Author," an article that's part of New Scientist's "Storytelling 2.0" series, "the once sacred nature of text is sacred no longer. Instead, we can change it continuously and in real time." E-storytelling is to storytelling, he says, as Wikipedia is to a printed encyclopedia. And that's a good thing:

The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. Digital media changes books by changing the nature of authorship. Stories no longer have to arrive fully actualised ... [Ultimately,] authorship becomes a collaboration between writers and readers. Readers can edit and update stories, either passively in comments on blogs or actively via wiki-style interfaces.

Sound familiar? It should. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when personal computers were new and their screens appeared to literary theorists as virgin canvases, there was enormous excitement over the possibilities for digital media to revolutionize storytelling. The enthusiasm back then centered on hypertext and multimedia, rather than on Internet collaboration tools, but the idea was the same, as was the "death of the author" rhetoric. By "freeing" text from the page, digital media would blur the line between reader and writer, spurring a profusion of new, interactive forms of literary expression and storytelling. As George Landow and Paul Delany wrote in their introduction to the influential 1991 compendium Hypermedia and Literary Studies, "So long as the text was married to a physical media, readers and writers took for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded, and fixed." The computer would break this static structure, allowing text to become more like "a network, a tree diagram, a nest of Chinese boxes, or a web." That in turn would shift "the boundaries between individual works as well as those between author and reader," overthrowing "certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text." Then, as now, the celebration of the idea of interactive writing was founded more on a popular ideology of cultural emancipation than on a critical assessment of artistic expression. It reflected a yearning for a radical sort of cultural democratization, which required that "the author" be pulled down from his pedestal and revealed to be a historical accident, a now dispensable byproduct of the technology of the printing press, which had served to fix type, and hence stories, on the page. The author was the father who had to be slain before culture could be liberated from its elitist, patriarchal shackles. The ability to write communally and interactively with computers is nothing new, in other words. Digital tools for collaborative writing date back twenty or thirty years. And yet interactive storytelling has never taken off. The hypertext novel in particular turned out to be a total flop. When we read stories, we still read ones written by authors. The reason for the failure of interactive storytelling has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with stories. Interactive storytelling hasn't become popular - and will never become popular - because it produces crappy stories that no one wants to read. That's not just a result of the writing-by-committee problem (I would have liked to have a link here to the gruesome product of Penguin Books' 2007 wiki-novel experiment, but, mercifully, it's been removed from the web). The act of reading a story, it turns out, is very different from, and ultimately incompatible with, the act of writing a story. The state of the story-reader is not a state of passivity, as is often, and sillily, suggested, but it is a state of repose. To enter a story, to achieve the kind of immersion that produces enjoyment and emotional engagement, a reader has to give up not only control but the desire to impose control. Readership and authorship are different, if mutually necessary, states: yin and yang. As soon as the reader begins to fiddle with the narrative - to take an authorial role - the spell of the story is broken. The story ceases to be a story and becomes a contraption. What we actually value most about stories, as readers, is what Mod terms, disparagingly, "full actualization" - the meticulous crafting of an intriguing plot, believable characters and dialogue, and settings and actions that feel true (even if they're fantastical), all stitched together seamlessly with felicitous prose. More than a single author may be involved in this act of artistic creation - a good editor or other collaborator may make crucial contributions, for instance - but it must come to the reader as a harmonious whole (even if it comes in installments). I agree with Mod that the shift of books from pages to screens will change the way we read books and hence, in time, the way writers write them, but I think his assessment of how those changes will play out is wrongheaded. (See also Alan Jacobs's take, which questions another of Mod's assumptions.) A usable encyclopedia article can, as Wikipedia has shown us, be constructed, "continuously and in real time," by a dispersed group of writers and editors with various talents. But it's a fallacy to believe that what works for an encyclopedia will also work for a novel or a tale. We read and evaluate encyclopedia articles in a completely different way from how we read and evaluate stories. An encyclopedia article can be "good enough"; a story has to be good.
Posted by nick at December 8, 2010 03:26 PM'