[-empyre-] Mods I like, games that move me and indy games as hopeful futures

[micha cárdenas]

2010/12/16 micha cárdenas <azdelslade at gmail.com>:
> and Adam Killer by Brody Condon is one of the most elegant and moving
> game mods I've ever seen:
>
> https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/mcm1700n/Game+Mods+-+A+Different+Sort+of+Play
>
> Also, I still think that Simon's comment is very relevant. Personally,
> what's interesting to me is the ways that games reflect larger social
> dynamics, the ease with which people replace the mythopoetic rules
> that govern their daily interactions in society with the new rules of
> video games. I'm also very interested in non-competitive games, such

I also thought as soon as I was done sending this that Brody Condon's
most recent work, Level 5, does an amazing job of making this
connection between LARPing as a gaming subculture and other elaborate
cultures like self-help and certain forms of quasi-spirituality that
are associated with self-improvement and "success", which we could say
are "californian". A friend of mine, ben lotan, who's an MFA candidate
at UCSD, participated in Level 5 at Machine Project and said it was an
incredible, bizarre, intense experience.  http://lvl5.org/

I find these kind of performative experiments that stem from
particular gaming subcultures particularly interesting. In fact, my
own project Becoming Dragon [http://secondloop.wordpress.com], in
which I lived in Second Life as a dragon with an hmd and motion
capture for 15 days continuously, was in part influenced by
experiencing the complex subculture of dragons in Second Life. For
example, to get an adult dragon avatar, you have to go to the Isle of
Wyrm on Summer Solstice of Autumnal Equinox (the actual two says of
the year IRL) and enter into a drawing, which is accompanied by a
celebration of other dragons  large and small, and only a limited
number of each species of dragon eggs are given out. I became very
interested in how people formed strong attachments to these non-human,
non-gendered avatars through complex social processes of
performativity, identity construction and behavioral reinforcement,
and how that affected their perception of their "real" selves. Still,
many people make the distinction between SL and games, saying it is
not a game but an environment...





-- 
micha cárdenas
Associate Director of Art and Technology, Sixth College, UCSD

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Researcher, UCSD School of Medicine
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9