Conventional Dress is a short documentary about costuming and cosplay at the Dragon*Con fan convention, held each year in Atlanta, Georgia. Made by Celia Pearce and her students in the Emergent Game Group in the Digital Media Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the film explores the cultures, practices and motivations of participants in the 30,000-strong fan community that populates the largest multi-themed fan convention in the U.S. Originally shot and edited in 2007/2008, the film’s release was delayed my music rights issues which were finally resolved by the composition of an original theme for the parade sequence by Bob Rice. An unofficial cut of the film had its debut in the DCTV video show at Dragon*Con 2008, and the final cut premiered at Georgia Tech in September of 2009. An academic paper is currently being written to accompany the video. The {egg} is part of Georgia Tech’s Experimental Game Lab.

To view the video, visit the Conventional Dress web site, or our Vimeo Channel.

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Conventional Dress was an exploration of costuming and cosplay at the Dragon*Con 2007 annual fan convention in Atlanta. The project consists of two components, a paper (still in progrss), and a short documentary video, released on the web in Fall of 2009.

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Pearce, C. and Artemesia. (2009). Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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This is a project in-progress to aggregate all the major research on MMOGs and virtual worlds. We will be expanding this project in the coming months to include other contributors to assist us in keeping our research up-to-date.

http://mgvw.lcc.gatech.edu/

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Mermaids is an experimental massively multiplayer game set in an underwater world in which players take the roles of hatchlings coming to life in the ruins of a long-extinct mermaid culture. The over-arching goal and storyline is to rebuild the lost Mermaid culture and reclaim their various skills and cultural practices (such as magic), while at the same time trying to avoiding the mistakes that caused the extinction of their ancestors. Players will quickly discover that in order to survive, they must also revive the damaged ecosystem, and ultimately learn to work with it in a harmonious fashion.

Mermaids has four primary design credos that the team was given as its “high-level” design constraints:

•Think socially; act procedurally
•Question conventions
•Appeal to diverse players
•It doesn’t have to be complicated to be complex

The game has no combat and no grinding. Instead players must revive dead coral, collect items that they can assemble into wands and other tools, and spawn new fish schools to replenish the ecosystem. Mermaids uses a unique gesture-based interaction system where players draw symbols in the water to cast spells and perform other tasks.

For more information visit:
www.mermaidsgame.net

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Creative Collaboration in Online Worlds is a yearlong study conducted with a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn how players collaborate, teach and learn in virtual worlds. The study focuses on The University of There, a player-run virtual university within the virtual world There.com. We have been participating in classes and other events, attending staff meetings, and interviewing staff, students and faculty. The findings will be released in a series of papers, the first of which was presented at DiGRA 2009 in London in October of 2009. The paper can be found here.

Team:
Celia Pearce, Principal Investigator

Graduate Research Assistants
Pauline Chan (Spring-Summer 2009)
Katherine Mancuso (Summer-Fall 2008)

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Pearce, C. (2009). “Collaboration, Creativity and Learning in a Play Community: A Study of The University of There.” In Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2009, London, October 2009.

Nardi, B., Ellis, J., Pearce, C. (2009). “Productive Play: Beyond Binaries.” In Artifact, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2008: 60-68.

Pearce, C. (2008). “Spatial Literacy: Reading (and Writing) Game Space.” In ProceedingsFuture and Reality of Gaming (FROG), October 17-19, Vienna, Austria.

Morie, J.F. & Pearce, C. (2008). “Uses of Digital Enchantment: Computer Games as the New Fairy Tales.” In Proceedings Future and Reality of Gaming (FROG), October 17-19, Vienna, Austria.

Pearce, C. and Artemesia. (2008). “Identity-as-Place: Trans-Ludic Identities in Mediated Play Communities—
The Case of the Uru Diaspora.” In Proceedings Internet 9.0: Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR), IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Pearce, C. (2008). “The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers.” Games & Culture, Vol 3, Issue 2.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2008). “Getting Girls Into the Game: Towards a Virtuous Cycle.” In Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat. Yasmin Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner and Jen Sun (eds). Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Pearce, C. (2007). “Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft.” In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Friedrich von Borries, Steffan P. Walz, and Matteas Bottger (eds). Basel: Birkhauser.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). “The Hegemony of Play.” In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference,Tokyo, Japan.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). “A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space.” Digital Arts and Culture 2007, Perth, Australia.

Pearce, C., Ashmore, C. (2007). “Principles of Emergent Design in Online Games: Mermaids Phase 1 Prototype.” SIGGRAPH Sandbox, July 2007.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). “Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” (Reprint) Games & Culture, Volume 2, Number 3, July 2007.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). “Playing Dress-Up: Costume, roleplay and imagination.” Philosophy of Computer Games Online Proceedings, January 2007.

Pearce, C. (2006).
Seeing and Being Seen: Presence & Play in Online Games and Virtual Worlds. Position Paper for Online, Offline & the Concept of Presence When Games and VR Collide. October 25-27, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California.

Pearce, C. (2006). “Communities of Play: The Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds.” Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds) Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Pearce, C. (2006). “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play.” in Fluxus and Legacy, special issue of Visible Language. Ken Friedman and Owen Smith, issue eds; Sharon Poggenpohl, series editor and publisher.

Pearce, C. (2006). “Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up.” Games & Culture. Volume 1 Issue 1, Winter 2006.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). “Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age.” Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, C. (2005). “Theory Wars: An Argument Against Arguments in the so-called Ludology/Narratology Debate.” In Changing Views: Worlds in Play (Digital Games Research Association Conference 2005 Proceedings).

Pearce, C. (2005). “The Art of Worldbuilding: A Conversation with Raph Koster.” Game Studies Journal. Volume 5, Issue 1, May 2005.

Pearce, C. (2004). “Towards a Game Theory of Game.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Harrigan, P. (eds). Cambridge, MIT Press.

Pearce, C. (2003). “Game Noir: A Conversation with Tim Shafer.” Game Studies Journal, Volume 3, Issue 3, May 2003.

Pearce, C. (2002). “Story as Play Space: Narrative in Games.” King, L. (ed.) Game On (Exhibition Catalog). London, Lawrence King Publishing Limited.

Pearce, C. (2002). “The Player with Many Faces: A Conversation with Louis Castle.” Game Studies Journal, Volume 2, Issue 2, December 2002.

Pearce, C. (2002). “Emergent Authorship: The Next Interactive Revolution.” Computers & Graphics, Winter 2002.

Pearce, C. (2002). “Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright.” Game Studies Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1, July 2002.

Pearce, C. (1997). “Beyond Shoot Your Friends,” Digital Illusion, ed. Clark Dodsworth. New York, Addison-Wesley.

Pearce, C. (1994). “The Ins & Outs of Nonlinear Storytelling.” ACM Computer Graphics, Volume 28, Number 1, May 1994.

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METANOMICS: Av-Culturation

METANOMICS: Av-Culturation
Host Robert Bloomfield and guests Celia Pearce and Tom Boellstorff
Monday, March 2, Noon to 1 PM Pacific Time
Hear the Podcast
Read the Rebuttals

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An Alternate Reality Game to Help Mitigate Global Climate change

Humans have been having a dramatic impact on the global climate for centuries, but it was not until recently that the true effects of man were realized and documented.”The ‘greenhouse effect’ is not an idea which is new to science. It has merely become more easily detectable in our time as temperatures have risen and scientists have devised more sophisticated ways to measure and forecast atmospheric process” (Johansen, 2002, p.2).Due to the consumption of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas producing activities, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen over the past 250 years, and more rapidly in the past 50 years (Houghton, 1997).

…

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Mermaids Trailer

For more visit www.mermaidsgame.net.

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