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The trouble with poetry is what you think of it,
Not a manly art, not a practical art,
Not a good use of a grown man’s time,
Especially in times of overcommission,
Debts of money and time and promises
Stacking up against you,
Barking while you sleep,
Squatting outside the bathroom door
Demanding justification for time on the crapper.
In times like this, you write?
In times like these, you write those?
Yes, I reply, I write these.
In times of chaos, reflection is needed,
A cool head in the midst of the destroyer’s storm,
And poetry is a manly art, not just when deployed
As oratory from a President soothing savage fears
Or caged up on stages or in undersold volumes,
But as therapy, but as strategy,
But as coping mechanisms and respites,
To gather the courage to step back into oneself
Throw obscene fingers at the wolves at the bedroom door,
To say fuck off, I’m busy.
Would it be different if I were Bono? Stipe? Byrne?
If these lines weren’t presented in pixels or ink
But accompanied by growling guitar chords or ambient noise?
If they were performed live, before screaming crowds,
Or crooned from tiny earbud speakers straight into the ears
Of adolescents rocking back and forth in bedroom corners
Struggling to come to terms with teenaged revelations?
Would it be different if it had a chorus?
If I repeated myself every other line, would that be fine,
Would it be different if it had a chorus?
It could be worse, I think, and shrug,
I could be doing lines off a hooker’s back,
I could be shacked up with a fourteen-year-old runaway,
I could be a derivatives trader.
Instead, I do this,
Yes, I write those at times like these.
Considering submitting something to Indiecade, but worried about the April 30 deadline? Good news - the deadline has been extended until May 15th, 2009 at Midnight PST.
For more information, visit www.indiecade.com or check out our earlier post. Good luck!
A few months ago, our lab opened its doors to Boston University journalism student Andrea Peterson, who was doing a piece on the process of making video games. Lo and behold, this morning we got an email from one of our alumni who had just spotted the resulting video on the Tech page of CNN.com!
Peterson’s video was uploaded to iReport.com, the user-generated subsite from CNN, and has apparently been vetted for airing on CNN. The video features GAMBIT’s Clara Fernández-Vara, Matthew Weise and Marleigh Norton speaking about a wide range of topics.
“What is it that we want to do? We have a world, what has happened in this world? And from that, what does the player have to do in order to discover that story?” notes Fernández-Vara. “The imagination has no limit. The limit that we have is time.”
“I actually joke about how the game industry doesn’t like to talk about the ‘F’ word, which is ‘fun’,” says Norton. “We all agree that everyone plays games for fun, but it’s hard to quantify what that means.”
(Note: if the video above isn’t appearing, you can check it out on iReport.com or on YouTube.)
The hotel ghost wanders from floor to floor,
Rustling starched sheets, rattling loose windowpanes,
Scaring the bejeebus out of an occasional tourist,
But she gets no joy from this.
A man who saw her claims she’s a lost woman,
A murdered prostitute or a forbidden abortion gone wrong;
Another declares with absolute certainty
She’s the specter of a wife who took her own life here
After following her wayward husband to some illicit tryst,
but neither of these wishful dramatists come close.
A woman who saw her one alarming June night strikes nearer,
She guesses the phantom is an innkeeper herself,
A former owner dissatisfied with the current corporation,
But even this isn’t quite right.
In fact, it’s only one young girl who nails it,
Solves the mystery of the lady in black,
And only because she’s the only one to hear as well as see,
To catch the faintest strain of the ghost’s frail singsong rhythms,
Humming softly to herself an old cheerful Cuban folk melody,
As she keeps on performing the same routines
That brought her such comfort after she fled her mournful life,
Changing soiled sheets and
Cleaning smudged windows
Of the fingerprints from a million curious wandering children
Pressing their noses against the glass to gaze at the sea,
As her own once did,
And asking their madres what lay on the other side.
Forty miles an hour up old route 1A,
Wending rolling weaving its asphalt path from Boston to Portland,
Salem Ipswich Rowley Newbury Freeport Camden
Charting our progress less by the miles rolling up the odometer
Than by the years proudly proclaimed on tiny little plaques –
1739, 1692, 1891, 1775, 1835, 1831,
Mounted to the sides of hotels and houses and homes
Clad in shingles and brick and siding
In a thousand shades of pastels and browns
And another shades of disrepair.
The sky is gray and sheathed in clouds,
Promising rain in cool, chill whispers,
Not yet, we plead. Not yet.
I dream of barns,
Great vast structures a century or so old,
Weathered boards painted a noble red or deep blue,
Trimmed in white edging and rough stones,
Lit from within by the warm, flickering glow
Of tableside lamps with stained-glass shades,
Coaxing me to linger a while on cracked leather couches,
Curled up with one of ten thousand escapes
Bound up in paper and bordered by clothboard.
I dream of trees,
Of wind whistling through wild Ohio woods,
Streams winding between their roots
And around mossy boulders, giants’ marbles
No sound of traffic or neighbors fighting,
Just the cracks and crumbles of squirrels and deer
Setting about their business
Of timeless, of natural, of life.
I dream of family,
Wife, two kids, a couple of cats,
Bickering over simplicities like homework and chores,
Football games and band concerts and trips to the grandparents’,
Celebrating tiny achievements in the local papers,
Remembering the places we used to go and live
When we were younger and still fighting
Tooth and claw, body and soul,
To gather the materials needed
To forge this, our little world.
This evening (Monday, April 13th 2009), the MIT Museum and the Comparative Media Studies program will be hosting a special colloquium panel discussion to examine the WOW Pod, a new collaborative project from artists Cati Vaucelle and Shada/Jahn. Here are the details:
On the WOW Pod:
A Design for Extimacy and Fantasy-Fulfillment for the World of Warcraft Addict
Panel Discussion Monday, April 13, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
MIT Museum
265 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as World of Warcraft (WOW) in conjunction with the exhibition SHADA/JAHN/VAUCELLE, “Hollowed,” which includes the WOW Pod, a collaborative project by Cati Vaucelle & Shada/Jahn.
 World of Warcraft (WOW) is a massive online multi-player game that attracts millions of players. A typical scenario for teenagers addicted to the game is to settle down in front of the monitor on Friday night and collapse on Sunday night. Sleep deprivation as well as high saturated fat diet is the pride of these players who barely take any breaks, and when they do they sign the typical “AFK” (“Away from Keyboard”) that pops up on top of their avatar. The average AFK is two minutes, time to run to the fridge, to open a bag of potato chips, to replenish the glass of milk, or go to the bathroom. A model for an immersive architectural solution that anticipates all life needs, WOW Pod by Vaucelle/Shada/Jahn responds to these conditions.
Panelists include:
- Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Postdoctoral Associate at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab
- Raimundas Malasauskas, Curator, Artists Space (NYC)
- Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program
- Marisa Jahn, Artist in Residence, MIT Media Lab
- Steve Shada, artist collaborator
- Cati Vaucelle, artist collaborator and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab
- Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum
This event is presented by the MIT Museum in collaboration with the Visual Arts Program, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, and the Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
One of the greatest high points of an academic’s career is when they are awarded a chair in recognition of their work. Today Ian Bogost brought it to our attention that our own Jesper Juul already has a chair – at IKEA.
As Ian notes in his blog:
On first blush it looks like those ill-fated ergonomic chairs of the 1980s, but it’s really just a bench at two heights. The user is meant to straddle the lower height and use the upper to rest his arms while holding a videogame controller, avoiding the strenuous and annoying work of holding up his own arms.
Even more remarkable is the seat’s name: Jesper. No matter the commonality of this forename, surely we can only conclude that this product represents the Swedish company’s attempt to take advantage of fellow scandinavian and well-known games researcher Jesper Juul.
The difference between him and his namesake bench? Juul can hold his own arms up while playing videogames.
We’re going to have to pick up a couple for the lab. One can never have too many Jespers, after all. Anyone interested in their very own signed Jesper (the bench, not the ludologist) can ping the good Dr. Juul via his blog or his website.
(Thanks to Clara Fernandez-Vara and Ian Bogost for the story and the image!)
Boston-area indie developers, take note – GAMBIT’s US Executive Director Philip Tan and recent GAMBIT graduate (and Firehose Games Founder and Creative Director) Eitan Glinert have both been added to the speakers lineup for the 2009 Independent Game Conference East conference happening May 7-8 at Northeastern University.
Philip and Eitan’s talks are as follows:
Steal This Idea!
Philip Tan, US Executive Director, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
Are you wrestling with pipelines? Managing multiple projects? Designing emotional games? Or just looking for a different way to play? Games developed by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab challenge assumptions about how games “should” be designed, developed, and played. We’ll demonstrate a few of them and describe opportunities for intrepid teams that want to rethink their game development processes and methodologies.
Rapid and Iterative Prototyping, or How to Rip Off Dinosaur Comics
Eitan Glinert, Founder and Creative Director, Fire Hose Games
Ethan Fenn, Programmer, Fire Hose Games
You want to make a game, but you’re missing an artist, you don’t have the design nailed down, you need to find funding, and you don’t know what platform you’re going to develop for. How do you even start? With prototyping! In this energetic talk we’ll walk through the iterative rapid prototyping process we went through making our first title, and we’ll demo builds created along the way to highlight key points. The lessons we’ll cover are geared towards new developers figuring out how to get off the ground, but we’ll have plenty of tips for more seasoned industry vets.
Other speakers currently scheduled to appear at the conference include:
- Dallas Snell, Co-Founder of Origin Systems Austin
- Vladimir Starzhevsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Creat Studios, Inc.
- Brett Close, President and CEO of 38Studios
- Norma Crippen, VP of Executive Recruiting and Client Services at the Mary-Margaret Network
- Darius Kazemi from Orbus Gameworks
- Steve Meretzky, VP of Game Design at Playdom
- Judy Tyrer, Networking Engineer at Red Storm Entertainment
- Duncan Watt, Founder and Creative Director of Fastestmanintheworld
See you there!
Bits to teraflops
Twenty-first century art
Still something missing
(Okay, the haiku schtick is starting to fail me – but this afternoon I was wandering around GameStop and was struck yet again by how much still-untapped potential there seems to be with video games as a medium.)
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