Posts in the "Innovation" Category

• Gamejam 08 is coming

  Emotion in Games
  

  Gamejam 08 is coming up very soon. A group of us are running a game pitching event this coming Saturday from 10am – 4pm at AFTRS in the Entertainment Quarter in Sydney. Come along and demo a game, pitch an idea for a game or virtual world or attend our rapid ideas development workshop. Among [...]

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• Make it

  Animation
  

  On Friday we launched a new range of courses at AFTRS to be run in 2009. More information can be found here. Among the new courses are Graduate Diplomas in Game Design, Animation Directing and Virtual Worlds. The unique approach of these courses is to share core coursework in Directing Concepts and Skills, Emerging Media [...]

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• Emotional Games

  Design
  

  I instantly fell in love with Jenova Chen’s game FlOw when I first played it last year. It’s such a contemplative experience to play the game – a rare thing in an increasingly accellerated and anxiety ridden world. Tonight I discovered Jenova’s earlier game Cloud which he completed while a student at USC. I had [...]

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• Experience Design

  Design
  

  Recently we have been brainstorming concepts and furiously writing new curriculum which we are going to teach at AFTRS in 2009. The work we have been doing at our Laboratory of Advanced Media Production has been influencing many of our new offerings in games, virtual environments and more generally in screen content. The process of [...]

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• Randy Pausch

  Education
  

  I’m not a huge Oprah fan but this is an amazing video from a courageous and inspiring man called Randy Pausch giving his ‘last lecture’. I’ve blogged about Randy Pausch before – he is one of the founders of the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center and was jointly responsible for developing an amazing and [...]

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• BAFTA Award for Game

  Education
  A couple of graduates of the USC games course have just been nominated for a BAFTA Award for Games Innovation. I’ll warn you now, their short game flOw is highly addictive as well as strangely beautiful from a visual and audio perspective. It’s great news that the BAFTAs have been far sighted enough to recognise [...]

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• My World

  Innovation
  A student at Arizona State University has posted on a Mac rumours forum some observations about a new 3D social network being developed and tested there. The blogosphere has since come alive with rumours that Google is about to launch ‘My World’, a virtual world/social network which may link to Google Earth and Maps applications. [...]

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• Who’s afraid of MySpace?

  Education
  I don’t know what social networking guru Danah Boyd would have made of Melbourne’s RACV club where I heard her speak last week. It’s a such a weird architectural collision of old and new Melbourne Australiana with a massive wood panelled foyer overlooked by two huge silver kookaburras. What better place for an Australian education [...]

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• De Blob

  Courses
  Fresh, compelling and rapidly developed. De Blob was created by a group of students at the HKU (Utrecht School of the Arts) and Utrecht University. The game was subsequently bought up by THQ and is now being developed as a new Wii title by Blue Tongue games in Melbourne. This is a great example of [...]

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• The End of Big Media?

  Digital Distribution
  Raph Koster is the author of the book ‘A Theory of Fun’ and presents some groundbreaking ideas in a GDC Podcast titled ‘Where Game Meets the Web’. Raph’s blog can be found here. The linear media industries have been hearing about all the implications of Web 2.0 for the past two years and it’s taking [...]

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