Game Culture

This well thought out speech on gaming makes you really just wanna play. It brightened my day. Jane McGonigal explains video gaming and why it will save the world. She explaing gamers reactions and dwells into the earliest forms of gaming using sheep knuckles. I would have loved if she gave the  valedictorian speech at my high school graduation. I highly recommend t stop what your doing, listening to the whole speech, then discuss it with others. It's probably the most pofound talk on gaming I've ever heard.

In things I wish I attended recently "Avant-game" would be at the top of the list. Strangely enought that's the site of Jane McGonigal (is there a connection?). LA weekly brought it to my attention the day after it happened.. A few UCLA students made seven shorts using video game footage or technology in someway.  Karina Longworth wrote about a few of the shorts. Karina explained Windshield Baby which seems to be the scariest short as one of the students took the video footage of a car accident and put it through a gameboy. Yes, you see a baby die, but through the computing power of a gameboy. Others seems less tragic. She puppet uses footage of Lara Croft dying, but the footage only shows Lara from behind, so the viewer might see Lara moaning and going backwards as something else. Overall I would have just wanted to see what people could do with game footage and turn it around to mean something else or see what emotions can be evoked using gaming footage used in a different context.

The article mentions LUDUS, a gaming orginaztion I've never heard of that just sounds cool , but evil that helped create Avant-grade. I couldn't find much about it.  Except this,

LUDUS, is a graduate student game-theorizing organization conceived of by students in the cinema and media studies program at ucla. in order to broaden the scope of our own gaming research, LUDUS engages with academics in the fields of ludology, semiology, film theory, and narratology, as well as persons who work within the gaming industry.

I hope to hear about more events here in LA from this group they sound fun. I'll post more about them if I find a working webpage for them. I also wish to talk to Ms. Gonigal.

Jane Mc Gonigal's site Avant GAME