• Bibliography of game related sources

tags: bibliography, gaming

Artificial life is an interesting research field at the junction of many scientific disciplines. I had the pleasure to read three books that cover this topic from different perspectives.

The first and maybe most complete of them is Mitchell Whitelaw’s “Metacreation. Art and Artificial Life.” It is an introduction into this field as well as a very good reference to the status quo in the scientif community. One of the most interesting pages for newbies are the different tries to explain artificial life as a term and as a discipline. Genetic algorithms, agent-based systems, bottom-up robotics and cellular automata are techniques widely used in A-Life research. But A-Life is seldom science alone: A-Life Art is an established aspect of contemporary electronic art.

The second book, Stefan Helmreich’s “Silicon Second Nature” takes the sociocultural perspective to describe A-Life: How are new notions of life being materialized? Helmreich tries to follow the roots of A-Life definitions through cultural aspects, reminding us of Foucault’s Bio-Power: Bio-Power operates by defining people, by constituting their identities such that the y believe the fit into already extant natural categories. So is life a definition, and A-Life too.

The third book is a philosophical approach to A-Life: The Philosophy of Artificial Life. Margaret A. Boden and other contributors ask the philosophical basics of life and A-Life. Is there a definition of life? How can be A-Life research relevant for other scientific disciplines? This books offers not only a short introduction into A-Life, but also theoretical biology as well as philosophical groundings of A-Life.

There is a new book on the shelves: Augmented Reality. A practical guide.
Augmented Reality is the fusion of real and virtual reality, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real-time. AR creates the illusion that virtual, computer-generated objects exist in the real world. All you need is a computer and a webcam. Learn new ways to interact with your computer. The possibilities are endless: data visualization, immersive environments, and, of course, gaming. This book will show you how, and teach you about game development at the same time. You can run the included demos, or use the ARTag API to customize your own AR applications.

Bibliographical information:

First Edition  January 2008
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pages: 328
ISBN 10: 1-934356-03-4 | ISBN 13:9781934356036

Outspark is a new player in the online game market, offering games for free and getting revenues from virtual goods sale. As reported, this is a model that works very well in Korean and Chinese online gaming markets.
But I have my doubt, that this is going to improve game mobility. See my comments about this in my german blog. What do you think, is this a game industry revolution?

Link: Outspark

From the Gogofrog-Website:

Gogofrog™ takes you into the ultimate 3D world. No downloads just the internet in 3D. Create your own ulimited online space, it’s fast, easy and free. Do things you simply can’t in 2D … See and chat with your site visitors, furnish your environment and change your whole space or yourself to suit your mood, store photos, read a book or share one, write a journal, interact, listen to music…

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When we talk about virtual worlds and avatars, we immediately discuss concepts like second life, virtual life or virtual identity. By common sense, we understand virtual identity as something not real as our physical environment, but real in some sense that what we do in virtual worlds is real to us. As we’re present in a virtual world, we may use a virtual identity, this is an identity different from the identity of the player behind the avatar. But what is identity at all?

Erik Erikson studied and researched lifestyles, personality developments and identities throughout his scientific carreer. One of his well known books is ‘Identity and life cycle’ where he describes the factors and interdependencies of constituting identity. For Erikson, identity is not something given by birth, and it’s not independent from biological processes of the human body either. It’s not the (physical) body itself, and it’s not the Super-Ego or Ideal-Ego alone. Erikson defines identity as a constant reproduction of images of self, experienced and put together by an individuum.

The process of identity creation begins even before birth as one of the first life experiences of the self is the change from inuteral to exuteral life. The newborn will proceded from one identity phase to another, but only if the previous phase is abgeschlossen (or solved, in Erikson’s language). Identity is therefore a continuous work of the self, a work which Erikson describes as a balancing act between different aspects of the self: Super-Ego, Ideal-Ego, the social structure of the environment and the general picture of reality.  Identity is a result of solved identity phases or crisis.

When Erikson talks about identity, he does it from a psychoanalytical perspective. Identity (or better: Ego-identity) is a feeling based on two observations: the observation of a consistency and continuity of the self, and the observation, that others recognize this continuity and consistency too.

Erik H. Erikson: Identity and the Life Cycle. Selected Papers. 1955

As I learned from O’Really Radar, the NASA has some interesting ideas for their next 2020 moon mission. The idea: communication with the homebase via real-time and synchronized avatars. Check out the video here:

Link to the article…

[Technorati Tags: NASA - virtual world - moon]

The next generation of office spaces will be online 3D rooms, fit for collaboration (see also my posts in german about this trend here: “3D auf dem Vormarsch“). One of the providers of such services is Qwaq, an US-based company.

Qwaq gives the user a 3D environment (office) where different document are posted on the wall for interaction. Until now, there is not really a difference to 2D collaboration tools. But: you can immediately see who is working on what document / sheet, so you can approach him or start woking on some other doc.

Chats are possible - so there will be users using this room as a conference hall as well.
[Technorati Tags: 3D - virtual+world]

A nice way to tell a story or to send a message is to design it the 3D way. With SceneCaster, it is pretty easy to do. SceneCaster is a free online-application with many different functions to build your own short movie.

You can store your scenes and also explore others from the website. To make it easy, SceneCaster provides “millions” of 3D objects to be used and modified.

Link: Scencaster

The Metaverse Market Index MMI was shortly launched as a tool to observe the metaverse’ development. Until now, there was little comparison between virtual worlds due to missing indicators and standards. Now, with the new metrics, there is hope we can gain reliable data cross different virtual worlds.

Link: MMI