I have just written the index for my next book Rethinking Virtual Places and hopefully the final proof. Started about 4-5 years ago so constantly updating it, hope it is out in November at IUP Spatial Humanities series website.
https://iupress.org/9780253058355/rethinking-virtual-places/
… thanks to a University of Jyvasklya Fellowship.. incredibly expensive flight booked. Permission to leave Australia for work granted.. more soon…
I have been accepted for/awarded a 3 month visiting fellowship (2021) (Professor Level) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. They are a partner in the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, funded by the Academy of Finland.
I would like to thank my hosts for this invite to the Alvar Aalto city.
I hope to take up this opportunity from early August to early November but everything depends on acceptance to leave the country by the Australian government (the only country I know of where citizens have to ask permission to leave, due to COVID-related border control).
Caption: photo of Aalto’s office in Helsinki, taken in 2009 when I was awarded a Massey University Research Fellowship. That trip led to the book Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture (Routledge 2019).
Today I received a letter from Charles Darwin University:
Outstanding Academic Achievement
The most recent review shows that you achieved outstanding results in the UDLF01 – Graduate Certificate of Digital Learning Futures for Semester 1, 2021.
It is with pleasure that I congratulate you on your results and the dedication you have shown to your studies throughout the semester. Academic standards are important to educational institutions and students who achieve Distinctions and High Distinctions are to be commended.
Hopefully I receive the actual grades and Certificate soon!
Macquarie University in Sydney, NSW, Australia, plan to hold the above conference 5-7 November 2021 in Sydney Australia (and remotely). I imagine the CFP will be out soon, website is at:
The Macquarie University Simulation Hub
Modern, innovative data collection and digital visualisation capabilities are able to capture ancient artefacts and structures, contexts, and traditions faster and in greater detail than ever before. Their sophistication and multi-dimensionality promise engagement with the past at many levels offering opportunities for deeper analyses and experiences to increasingly broader audiences.
This conference will be organised and hosted by the Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment (CACHE). CACHE is a multi-disciplinary research centre focused on research on cross-cultural interaction in ancient cultures from Western Europe to China. Concentrating not only on the history of the societies concerned, but on the languages used, with a special focus on the close study of physical artefacts from antiquity. CACHE engenders transdisciplinary research into ancient knowledge by gathering leading MQ researchers across several disciplines (archaeological science, ancient history and literature, bioarchaeology, biology, environmental sciences) and departments (Human Sciences, International Studies, Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Ancient History, Geography and Planning). CACHE particularly welcomes contributions reflecting the Indigenous Australian context – submissions concerned with Indigenous issues are especially relevant to the symposium and will be warmly welcomed.
CFP Web3D: “A Shared 3D Workspace” Virtual Conference (web3d.siggraph.org)
The goal of the conference is to share innovative and creative ideas about web-based interactive 3D applications, including content creation, 3D printing, fabrication, publishing technologies, web tools, annotation, VR/AR, rendering, and many others. This year the conference will be held in full virtual mode, next November 8-12, 2021.
Here the important dates:
July 30 submission deadline
August 2 bidding deadline
August 31 reviews assignment
September 1 reviews due
Was drafting a portfolio on canva to test it out and I notice the (huge) PDF doesn’t seem to have font legibility issues but the shareable linked online version does. Perhaps browser-dependent. Oh well. Will try another application.
#CFP I was invited onto the program committee for IEEE International Workshop on “Mixed Reality Implications on Cultural Heritage Experience (MrICHE)”.
The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2021, https://ismar21.org), 4-8 October 2021, Bari, Italy.
Submit: 4-8 page papers by 23 June! IEEE format. https://fcrlab.unime.it/calls/mriche2021 #ismar #culturalheritage #mixedreality #augmentedreality
“Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture” revised chapter, authored with Juan Hiriart, for “Playing Place” (edited by Medina Lasansky and Chad Randl, MIT Press) sent off today. Each chapter has a 1000 word limit, I believe. Took me some time to trim this! Great to work with Juan on a chapter, I think our different strengths blend well. When (or if?) the book appears on MIT Press I will add another post, the list of authors and topics looks really good, possibly essential reading if you are into boardgames, or are not, but want to know why so many people are …
Conveying built heritage values and historical knowledge through boardgame design may seem an odd decision. Communicating space, place, and culture through play is a challenge let alone through a medium inherently incapable of evoking the direct experience of inhabitation and architecture as a spatial art. Boardgames are engaging, social, quick to make, and fast to learn, intuitive or nuanced. From the complex to the spontaneous, boardgames can be effective, visceral tools for cultural immersion, challenging cultural assumptions and preconceptions, encouraging discussion and collaboration between players, provoking insight and enjoyment with simple props or intricate rules.
The following explains our experience hosting participative design workshops with historians, archaeologists, and heritage professionals. In small groups of three to four people, participants determine the design decisions, discussing and solving problems that often arise in an iterative process where historical research, game design, and play-testing both blend and butt heads.
What have I been doing this year? Playing a lot of piano, badly. But also (and I hope to add 2 journal articles and a book project and a serious game design project to this mix):
In this essay, I review key concepts in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard, 1994), their relation to the Matrix film series, and their importance in terms of hacking, especially regards to Virtual Reality (VR)…
Ok, it is a very short abstract but 3,500 words of very condensed text. Probably should expand it back to 5,000 and seek publication. It reviews Baudrillard’s famous book in the light of the move from VR to XR, and the rise in computational creativity, cybercrime and hacking. With references to the Matrix trilogy and the film Possible Worlds.
2 March 1PM (AWST Perth time): Promoting Tourism Sector Recovery Via Smart Virtual Reality, ASEAN Australia Smart Cities Trust Fund – AASCTF AASCTF on ADB.org. Invited speaker for webinar.
23 March 10-4PM NSW time. Virtual heritage and communities. NSW Local Studies Librarians group via zoom.
?? March to Aberdeen [Scotland] Academic Forum.
For the below I have written grants and delivered presentations but some are still to be be completed:
I’m stuck at a new home (for several months, possibly) training a dog from a refuge home, so will be missing intellectual stimulation. I’m examining a PhD thesis application this week but would consider one or more in January or February. I am generally asked to examine theses in architecture, heritage (particularly digital heritage), serious games/game-based learning, machinima, virtual worlds (especially virtual places), museum studies or virtual environments more generally.
On cleaning up my old email I found an old short paper suggestion to a Digital Humanities Conference Workshop, in 2013?! Not even sure they replied, cant remember! I think some of the ideas were used in the Critical Gaming book that Routledge published in 2015.
This paper is a theoretical attempt to outline types of violence in computer games, and develop a short framework for types of interaction in virtual heritage projects. It will then attempt to sketch out both the typical factors leading to violence in digital heritage projects and reasons involving their widespread occurrence. Finally it will suggest alternatives to violent interaction when applied to digital heritage projects.
My presentation slides for virtual The Interactive Pasts Conference Online 2 (TIPC2), (held 5-6 November, notionally, at Leiden) are on slideshare.
The twitch stream for the conference is at https://www.twitch.tv/valuefnd (my talk from yesterday is on there somewhere).
This paper explores Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as a way to explore idyllic historic landscapes and heritage sites with some degree of questing and simulated danger. It applies Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in two ways, as discovery tour option mode and as a metaphor to explore in more general and speculative terms how questing and historical dilemmas and conflicts could be incorporated into both fan tourism and cultural/historical tourism (Politopoulos, Mol, Boom, & Ariese, 2019).
Keza MacDonald views Assassin’s Creed as a virtual museum, Ubisoft regards it as the recovery of lost worlds: “ “We give access to a world that was lost” said Jean Guesdon (MacDonald, 2018). “Discovery Tour will allow a lot of our players to revisit this world with their kids, or even their parents.”
Origins’ Discovery Tour mode “promises” educational enlightenment (Thier, 2018; Walker, 2018); Odyssey’s additional Story Creator Mode (Zagalo, 2020) adds personalized quests. Beyond the polaroid fun of sharing landscape selfies with other players and ancient history voyeurs across the Internet, there is also the prospect of “Video game–induced tourism: a new frontier for destination marketers” (Dubois & Gibbs, 2018). Plus physical location VR games. Game company Ubisoft created escape game VR and virtual tours inside physical exhibitions such as Assassin’s Creed VR – Temple of Anubis (Gamasutra Staff, 2019). Is there a market for historical playgrounds as virtual tourism?
The paper “Time-Layered Gamic Interaction with a Virtual Museum Template” by Erik Champion, Rebecca Kerr, Hafizur Rahaman and David McMeekin will be presented virtually at EuroMed 2020 Conference next week. The project is part of the ARC funded project Time Layered Culture Map (tlc). Registration is free.
Abstract. This paper discusses a simplified workflow and interactive learning opportunities for exporting map and location data using a free tool, Recogito into a Unity game environment with a simple virtual museum room template. The aim was to create simple interactive virtual museums for humanities scholars and students with a minimum of programming or gaming experience, while still allowing for interesting time-related tasks. The virtual environment template was created for the Oculus Quest and controllers but can be easily adapted to other head-mounted displays or run on a normal desktop computer. Although this is an experimental design, it is part of a project to increase the use of time-layered cultural data and related mapping technology by humanities researchers.
My publisher, Indiana University Press, has asked me to name academics who would like to be alerted when my next book, Rethinking Virtual Places, is out in case they might consider it for course reading lists. Let me know! (it will be in the IUP Spatial Humanties series).
| 1-A Potted History of Virtual Reality |
| 2-Dead, Dying, Failed Worlds |
| 3-Architecture: Places Without People |
| 4-Theories of Place & Cyberspace |
| 5-Rats & Goosebumps-Mind, Body & Embodiment |
| 6-Games are not Interactive Places |
| 7-Do Serious Gamers Learn From Place? |
| 8-Cultural Places |
| 9-Evaluating Sense of Place, Virtual Places & Virtual Worlds |
| 10-Place-Making Interfaces & Platforms |
| 11-Conclusion |
Just hypothetically, of course, say I had a “friend” interested in editing or co-editing a book on (insert famous game series name here) and..
.. if this “friend" was in talks with a consultant historian on the series, (by one of the biggest game companies in the world, who are famous for this series), set in historical periods, and was interested in editing a book on..
Which publisher would you recommend?
I have some experience with Springer, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Indiana University Press, ETC Press, less with OUP, MIT Press, ..
With Dr. Juan Hiriart, wrote a very short chapter for
Champion, E., & Hiriart, J. (2023: in press). Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture. In C. Randl & M. Lasansky (Eds.), Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space.
NB, the draft of the current chapters looks great so far!
To convey built heritage values and historical knowledge through boardgame design may seem an odd decision. Communicating space, place and culture thorough play is a challenge let alone through a medium inherently incapable of evoking the direct experience of inhabitation and three-dimensional insideness-outsideness. Engaging, social, quick to make and fast to learn or complex and nuanced, we argue the wider milieu of boardgames, played, performed, and experienced, along with imaginative reconsiderations (to be discussed), can also evoke spatial experiences.
Boardgames such as Star Wars: The Interactive Video Board Game (Parker Brothers 1996), The Princes of Florence (Ravensburger, 2000), Cleopatra and the Society of Architects (Days of Wonder, 2006), Arkadia (Ravensburger, 2006), The Modern Architecture Game (NEXT Architects, 2012), Blueprints (Competo, 2013), Katsuyama water (EmperorS4, 2013), IMHOTEP (Kosmos, 2016), The Architects of the Colosseum (Tasty Minstrel Games, 2016), and Architects of the West Kingdom (Garphill Games, 2018), demonstrate that boardgames can evoke some sense of spatiality and spatial relationships. Tokens or even gameboards can also be architectural elements or models. Architectural expositions are also increasingly featuring boardgames (Fulcher 2019).
A second challenge, of direct interest to architects, is how the interactivity of experiencing place can be simulated and appreciated through game design, the creation and maintenance of platial relationships by social and even political actors is not trivial (Galloway 2008). A third challenge inspires our research: how to convey historical information and cultural heritage via (board) game design. From the complex to the spontaneous, boardgames can be effective, visceral tools for cultural immersion, challenging cultural assumptions and preconceptions, encouraging discussion and collaboration between players, provoking insight and enjoyment with simple props or intricate rules (Figure 1).
Ear Zow Digital