In case you missed it, a podcast of last week’s lecture by Georgia Tech’s Dr. Celia Pearce is now available at the Comparative Media Studies website. The synopsis of the lecture is as follows:

This talk by Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explored 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 used 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 emigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of “Uru Refugees,” and referring to Uru as their “homeland.”

A few pictures from Dr. Pearce’s lecture are now available in our Flickr pool (one, two, three, four). For more podcasts from the CMS Colloquium Lecture Series (including other GAMBIT guests such as Michael Mateas and Denis Dyack, check out http://cms.mit.edu/news/podcast.A subscribable RSS feed is available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitcms/podcast or via iTunes. To subscribe to the CMS podcast e-mail notification list, click here.