MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Futures of Entertainment 4
2009-11-20 - 2009-11-21 | MA
Convergence has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 4 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion
2009-11-19 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jeff Vandermeer with Kevin Smokler.
Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of “artifacts” that, although they support a writer’s career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her “self” in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer’s life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? Examining these issues leads naturally to a discussion on the tension and cross-pollination between the private and public lives of writers in our transmedia age, including the strategies and tactics that best serve those who want to survive and flourish in this new environment. What are we losing in the emerging new paradigm, and what do we stand to gain?

Richard Rouse, "Cinematic Games"
2009-10-29 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Richard Rouse
Many people talk about “cinematic” games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture will present film clips from a number of classic movies, analyze how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggest ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.
Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven FPS Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.

Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture
2009-10-15 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Elisa Kreisinger
Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We’ll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix’s ability to effect actual change.
Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.

Race, Politics and American Media
2009-10-08 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The election of an African-American president in Nov. 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama’s ascension transformed anything? Many people’s answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media’s coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?
Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News will discuss these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the MIT Communications Forum.

How Not to Be Seen
2009-09-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hanna Rose Shell
Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT. This is a talk about camouflage framed by the question of “how not to be seen”–in film, on film, as film. In the first part, Shell introduces “how not to be seen” in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. In the second part, Shell screens and discusses her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Blind as in blindness, and blind as in that actively constructed structure intended for the concealment of a hunter from her game.

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
2009-09-17 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ethan Gilsdorf will discuss some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds–from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such “escapist” adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?
Gilsdorf will talk about the culture’s discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and will look at society’s ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author’s own past misgivings and final acceptance of his “geek” identity.

2009 Julius Schwartz Lecture with J. Michael Straczynski
2009-05-22 19:00 - 22:00 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
J. Michael Straczynski
The second annual Julius Schwartz Lecture brings J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the cult science fiction hit Babylon 5. The Julius Schwartz Lecture is an annual event held to honor an individual who has made significant contributions to the culture, creativity and community of comics and popular entertainment.
The lecture is hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include co-founding the first science fiction fanzine in 1932, the first science fiction literary agency in 1934, and the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for well over 42 years, during which time he helped launch the Silver Age of Comics, introduced the idea of parallel universes, and had a hand in the reinvention of such characters as Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom.
The event is typically structured as a short lecture presented by the honored speaker, followed by a question-and-answer discussion between the speaker and the head of the Comparative Media Studies program, media scholar Henry Jenkins III. This will be followed by an open question-and-answer session between the lecturer and the audience. The inaugural speaker for the series was New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman.

Ralph Baer, Baer Consultants
2009-05-07 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ralph Baer
A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cites numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and draws some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.

NML Spring Conference - Learning in a Participatory Culture
2009-05-02 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Comparative Media Studies and Project New Media Literacies will host a one-day conference at MIT, Building 6-120, from 8:30 am to 5 pm on Saturday May 2, 2009. The $35.00 registration fee includes a choice of 4 out of 14 workshops, 2 presentations, and breakfast and lunch. Registration is available online at www.newmedialiteracies.org, and must be submitted by Friday 4/29.
Summary of conference: At Learning in a Participatory Culture, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include “The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP,” “Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries,” “Using Wikipedia in the Classroom,” “21st Century Assessment,” and more. Henry Jenkins’ closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.
Panelists at this conference will include members of the NML team, educators who have been working with NML materials in the field, and educational researchers. The conference is designed to engage anyone with an interest in the future of education, especially high school teachers and afterschool coordinators. The format itself will be participatory – we hope that attendees will join the conversation, and leave the conference equipped with new ideas and strategies.

The Discipline of Political Messages in an Unruly Era
2009-04-30 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Tucker Eskew
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians’ virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship — on statecraft and stagecraft — lie at the core of democracy today. Tucker Eskew explores the permanent campaign(s) of the last ten years. What is “message discipline” in an era of atomized opinion leadership — a necessity or a fool’s errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era’s favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is “Fire!” being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo’s “new ways”, he will welcome dialogue on all.

The 11th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2009-04-29 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
An honored tradition returns on April 27th at 7PM when CMS presents the eleventh annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device (mobisode anyone?). Since the dawning of YouTube and other user-generated video websites, the number of submissions has increased substantially.
The event is hosted by Professor Henry Jenkins and judged by esteemed members of the CMS community as well as Cathy Pomiecko, the sister of the late CMS program administrator Chris Pomieicko. After all of this year’s selected pieces are screened, the undergraduate winner for best film will receive a cash prize and the Chris Pomiecko Trophy followed by the Claude Berry Award for the best non-undergraduate entry.

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
2009-04-24 - 2009-04-26 | MIT Building E51, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media.Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space.
Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts. Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.
His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.
Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?
What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?
What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private? We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes. Potential topics include:

The digital archive
The future of libraries and museums
The past and future of the book
Mobile media
Historical systems of communication
Media in the developing world
Social networks
Mapping media flows
Approaches to media history
Education and the changing media environment
New forms of storytelling and expression
Location-based entertainment
Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
New modes of circulation and distribution
The transformation of television — from broadcast to download
Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
Virtual worlds and digital tourism
The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
The fate of reading

MIT European Short Film Festival 2009
2009-04-17 - 2009-04-19 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s European Short Film Festival — now in its 5th year — offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe.

Chris Claremont: "Opening Doors, Building Worlds"
2009-04-16 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series — a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Claremont will address thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules. Questions and answers to follow.

MIT European Short Film Festival 2008
2009-04-11 - 2009-04-13 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s 4th European Short Film Festival offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe.
The MIT European Short Film Festival caters to a diverse audience drawn from many local universities and a rich mix of international communities from the larger Boston area. The festival is co-sponsored by a variety of MIT departments and European cultural institutions located in Boston.
Topics for this year’s festival include: Migration, Anxiety, Media Culture, Food (Culture), Toys and Games.
All films will be shown in Room 32-123 (Stata Center), all programs start at 7:00 pm.
Free Admission — All films with English subtitles.
The Festival is co-sponsored by:

The Foreign Languages and Literatures Section (MIT)
The Comparative Media Studies Program (MIT)
The Goethe-Institute, Boston

The Festival is presented in conjunction with Dr. Kurt Fendt’s course “20th/21st Century German Literature – Grenzgänge” (21F.416)
For further information please visit http://web.mit.edu/shortfilm/ or contact the Festival Team: <mitshortfilm@mit.edu>

Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law
2009-03-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?
Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.

Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan
2009-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jennifer Roberston
In humans, gender–femininity, masculinity–is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Jennifer Roberston explores and interrogates the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She shows that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a “posthuman sexism,” and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.
Co-Sponsored by Cool Japan and Foreign Languages and Literature.

Politics and Popular Culture
2009-02-26 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post- World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling alleys and other spaces where community members gathered. Might the political consciousness of the new generation be taking shape in and around popular culture? Are we seeing a blurring of the roles of citizen and consumer? Is this fusion between entertainment and news a good or a bad thing? What links exist between our cultural and our political preferences? How are activists and political leaders utilizing metaphors from popular culture as resources to mobilize their supporters? Is it possible that aspects of our popular culture may generate utopian visions that fuel political change? These and other questions will be explored by panelists Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC; David Carr, media and culture writer for the New York Times; and Stephen Duncombe, associate professor at NYU and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Henry Jenkins will moderate.

Curveship: Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narration
2009-02-20 12:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Interactive fiction (often called "IF") is a venerable, well-defined category of computer programs that includes the canonical Adventure and Zork as well as some work by established literary authors and recent independent developers. These programs are often correctly referred to as games, but they can also be rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of literary art.
Unlike many other new media forms, interactive fiction computationally simulates a world underlying the textual exchange between computer and user. Theorists of narrative have long distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user).
While IF development systems have offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers, they have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is told. Developers have not been able to use separate modules to control the content and expression levels independently, so there has been no easy, general way to control narrative style and create variation in the narrative discourse.
Nick Montfort will discuss a new interactive fiction system, called Curveship, which draws on narrative theory and computational linguistics to allow the transformation of the narrating.
Nick Montfort is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nick is on leave Spring 2009. More information at http://nickm.com

Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online Games & Virtual Worlds
2009-02-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Celia Pearce
This talk, with Celia Pearce, Asst. Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explores the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of “fictive ethnicity” tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce will use the example of the Uru Diaspora, a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of “Uru Refugees”, and referring to Uru as their “homeland”.

Is This On? (Learn To Be a College DJ)
2009-01-28 18:00 | MIT Building 50, Room 030, 142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Checking levels, making a segue, cueing vinyl (vinyl-what’s that?).
Get to know your campus radio station (WMBR) as DJ Generoso teaches you various skills of doing a radio show. Then, learn some history of WMBR (the first punk rock radio show in the USA), have a tour of the station and obtain membership information.
Freshly baked cookies and milk will be provided because Andy would’ve wanted it that way.

19th Annual Salute to Dr. Seuss
2009-01-26 19:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Gather around, boys and girls of all ages, for a celebration of the sublime and wacky world of Doctor Seuss. You will hear Prof. Henry Jenkins read from his works and talk about Seuss’s relationship to Modern Art and popular culture. We will also screen his remarkable live action feature film, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. An MIT Tradition marches forward. No need to enroll! All are welcome.

A short, practical course on Focus Group Research in Academic and Corporate Settings: The Whys and Hows
2009-01-19 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 142, 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Instructor: Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D., who is co-director of the Center for Mental Health and Media at MGH, and splits her time between academic research and real-world consulting. She’ll use her own focus group studies with teens and parents about video games as teaching examples.
Content includes:

When and why to consider focus groups (qualitative studies) in academic or corporate research.
Using focus groups for media research.
Planning your research (from research questions to human subjects paperwork).
Designing a focus group protocol (questions and procedures).
Budgets and practical concerns.
Recruiting participants.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- Jason and Generoso Fav Episodes
2009-01-18 19:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Comparative Media Studies’ Jason Begy and Generoso Fierro will be showing their favorite episodes and clips of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The Sunday session is FREE.

Experience Design Workshop: Taught by Razorfish
2009-01-12 - 2009-01-14 | MIT Building 1, Room 134, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nadya Direkova MIT Alum, Senior Information Architect, Razorfish; Generoso Fierro
Buying e-tickets, downloading a song, chatting with friends on Facebook… you live through digital experiences every day. We invite you to learn how these experiences can be designed so that you can easily find and do what you want. Whether you are an engineer or designer, this course will challenge you to start work by studying users – not technology – first. We’ll talk about user personas, their moment-by-moment decisions and their full lifecycle relationship with your design. In the first part of the course, we’ll present classic design practices, digital trends and analyze experiences that work well and those that don’t. In the second part, you will create a design document for a website of digital campaign. The class will end with a design competition.

Designing Serious Video Games for Autism Research and Therapy
2009-01-11 13:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Belmonte
Why use video games to do science? Well, if you’ve ever participated in a psychology experiment, you probably don’t remember it as being particularly entertaining! This is bad for all concerned, the scientist isn’t going to get good data unless the subject is engaged with the task. My research group is answering this challenge by embedding experiments in a video game which we use to study autism. I’ll discuss the player-centred, event-driven design philosophy behind the game, talk about how neuroscientists and game designers work interactively to make the game relevant to people with autism spectrum conditions, and describe our goals for making the game a platform not only to measure autistic cognitive skills, but also to facilitate autistic cognitive skills by removing barriers to their expression.

GAMBIT: Videogame Company Tours
2009-01-09 - 2009-01-23 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
GAMBIT, a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore created to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium. Philip Tan, the executive director of US operations for GAMBIT will be leading tours of local video game companies to help you understand the day to day goings on of the rapidly growing video game industry.

Making Deep Games: An inspirational workshop about harnessing the power of metaphors for experience design
2009-01-08 10:00 | MIT Building N25, Room 373, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In this workshop, attendees will learn how to become more conscious about the mechanisms of complex abstract concepts, to pin down their evasive elements, to translate them into concrete rule sets and to make them tangible via procedural metaphors. This workshop aims at demystifying complex abstract ideas such as HONOR, REGRET, LOYALTY or JUSTICE by teaching a methodology to analyse and dissect them. It is a step-by-step tutorial to foster awareness, reflection, inspiration and a systematic approach to the purposeful design of deep games.

Futures of Entertainment 3
2008-11-21 - 2008-11-22 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment 3
Futures of Entertainment is organized around a “talk-show” style model, with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches.
This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year – media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution – with the Consortium’s new projects as we move towards an increasingly global understanding of media convergence and content flows. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia, franchising, digital extensions and world building, comics, convergence and commerce, social media and spreadability, as well as renewed discussion about how and why to measure audience value.
Head over to the program page to see what we’ll be discussing this year.
