All of the ‘classic’ anthropological fieldworkers collected the artefacts of the cultures they did research on. For a long time ‘material culture’ was a big issue in anthropology, but became less and less important through time. It indeed became some sort of ‘deprecated’ subdiscipline. Only during the last years ‘material culture’ was reborn in the wake of globalization and research on commodities and consumption. Game-modding communities actually produce a lot of artefacts, therefore they possess what anthropologists call ‘material culture’, although the artefacts are almost exclusively immaterial by nature (text, program-code, applications, 3D and 2D computer-graphics [still and animated, interactive … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: December 2005
If you embrace over-the-top renditions of martial arts as to be seen in the famous Xiaoxiao-movies (see ↵style and ↵megaman and xiaoxiao) then ↑Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter 2 [.swf | 5.3MB] definitely is something for you. Hilarious and, well—even touching … ? In any case perfect for Christmas. Don’t miss its predecessor ↑Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter [.swf | 4.0MB]. And here’s an ↑interview with Proxicide, creator of both flash-movies. These crossovers between two computergames immediately reminded me of the first DC/Marvel ↑crossover comic from 1976: ↑Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man (↑pics). In a way crossovers very much … Continue reading
↑Henry Jenkins III, one of the directors of ↑MIT‘s ↑comparative media studies, has written an article called ↑Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked. The eight myths [in this context to be understood as ‘false beliefs’] he deals with are: 1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. 2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression. 3. Children are the primary market for video games. 4. Almost no girls play computer games. 5. Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who … Continue reading
↑ClustrMaps provides the HTML that gives a thumbnail map—when it loads, it increments a counter and shows the locations of all the visitors to your page, cumulatively (even for huge numbers). Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and (optionally) lets you zoom in to the continents. via entry at anthronaut … Continue reading
Lorenz Khazaleh, the unstoppable force behind ↑anthropologi.info, has ↑interviewed Benedict Anderson, creator of the concept imagined communities—said concept time and again pops up in the vicinity of trying to understand online communities, hence I file this entry under cyberanthropology. via entry at anthronaut … Continue reading
“Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space.” —Sir Timothy Berners-Lee Sir Timothy “Tim” John Berners-Lee, the legend who invented the World Wide Web, now has a weblog: ↑timbl’s blog. Till a second ago there only was one entry yet (↑So I have a blog, written one week ago), but—hold your breath—already 395 comments. This of course goes directly into my blogroll. via entry at boingboing … Continue reading
Besides the ↵White Room there now is yet another fine instance of the appropriation of computergames by fine art, Alison Mealey’s ↑Unrealart: All artworks have been created using data from the game “Unreal Tournament”. Each image represents about 30 mins of gameplay in which the computers AI plays against itself, there are 20-25 bots playing each game. The Bots play custom maps I create. Each map has been pathed so that the bots have a rough idea of where to go in order to create the image I want. I log the position (X,Y,Z) of each … Continue reading
↑Static, the ↑London Consortium‘s online journal, ↑aims at initiating “interdisciplinary intellectual debate about paradoxes of contemporary culture, Static presents contributions from an international team of academics, artists and cultural practitioners.” The ↑first issue‘s core topic was play and violence—the ↑editorial sounds very promising: During the month of July 2005, the London Consortium organised a conference on the theme of “Playtime”. This event, which took place at the ICA, was an opportunity for a team of international scholars and artists to discuss the theme of playtime in relation to sports, video games, films, art, and other forms that play can … Continue reading
Well, this again is not an artefact that stems from ‘my community’, but just for ye olde times’ sake, the days when we pulled through the ↵Lightsaber mod [download link there ;-], I simply can not resist to post something on ↑Lost Vectors‘ [Jason Reinsvold] ↑Jedi Trainer 2.0. Jedi Trainer is “a weekend project that started with the thought ‘I bet I can make a flash light saber’.”—a flash game which lets you relive Luke’s experience on board of the Millenium Falcon, when Obi Wan starts to train him in the force and the usage of a lightsaber by … Continue reading
↑According to the ↑MP2-section of L4Y the highly acclaimed and desperately awaited MP2-TC ↑Equilibrium: Hall Of Mirrors has gone gold and awaits its release: “Hall of Mirrors is a Total conversion of Max Payne 2 that allows you to live out the journey of Cleric John Preston. Gunkata your way through sweepers and clerics to destroy the regime you once held so dear.” … Continue reading