[-empyre-] Videogames of the oppressed / oppressive games

[James Morgan]

Second Life is a Virtual Environment in which it is possible (though not  
practical) to layer a game over. Some of the things built in there are  
astonishing and beautiful. I am particularly drawn to the things that are  
native to the space, coded objects and video textures.

The time I spent working in SL was wonderful, I have moved on to an actual  
game space (Minecraft) because it is more controllable, more open and has  
an actual game built in. The net result is that the game creates a common  
language that all players share including frustration and achievement.  I  
hope it is not inappropriate by I thought I would also mention that I am  
running a residency on our minecraft server:  
http://rhizome.org/announce/jobs/opportunities/59362/



On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:24:28 -0700, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was the moderator of a discussion in -empyre last year about the
> resilience in the city and the discussion branched out in so many  
> wonderful
> discussions, Benjamins Passagenwerk, tango texts, skin patterns, urban
> tribes, nomads and flaneurs.
> When Second Life come out it was very promissing, an endless landscape  
> you
> could do what you wanted in
> The landscape was soon habitated by copies of Venice and Rome, Le
> Corbusier's buildings and empty shopping malls offering rendered objects
> made in sweatshops where people worked in often the same bad conditions  
> of
> a maquila in the border Mexico-US.
> Universities builded campus, big enterprises outsourced marketing and  
> sales
> to SL, countries etablished ambassades (Sweden, where I lived at that  
> time,
> was one of the first (if not the first at all) to have a real virtual
> embassy.
> But SL was so boring, so perfect, so lifeless, so full of perfection, so
> sterile...
> I dream about games where the cities and the screen are the same when you
> can play when you go when you work when you go to meet friends and where
> the realms of the real and of the dream became the same, I wish imperfect
> games, full of flaws as life is.
> I dream about games when you act in, when you are a part of the decor, of
> the plot, when your friends and foes merge and interact.
> Ana
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:49 PM, paolo - molleindustria <
> paolo at molleindustria.it> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> On 3/6/13 3:17 PM, Claudia Pederson wrote:
>>
>>> I am just back from a talk on videogame interventions at Haverford,  
>>> where
>>> I spoke about game interventions online like forms of nomadism (as  
>>> advanced
>>> by Hakim Bey, and Deleuze and Guattari). The questions were, what is  
>>> next?
>>> what frameworks are of relevance to the development of videogames with  
>>> a
>>> activist agenda beyond the "public sphere"? how does the anti-industry
>>> stance of videogame activists intersect with other movements in the  
>>> awake
>>> of Occupy and the Arab Spring? (I am posing this question to all
>>> discussants)
>>>
>>
>> ______________________________**_________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>


-- 

james


Anything that can be made, can be made black.