Exploration: Interfacing Complexity via Worlds and Identities
November 10, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Paul Wallace. Do you live in one world, or many? Do you have one identity, or do you contain multitudes? Grappling with such questions will lead us into the heart of contemporary video games, whose gameworlds can be thought of as “explorable conceptual models”.
Immersive Virtual Reality and 3D Interaction for Task Performance and Embodiment
November 3, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Bireswar Laha. Virtual Reality leverages immersive hardware components to create an alternate environment for the viewer. This alternate world has 'avatars', and can produce feedback (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and haptic) to all the five senses, often with a fidelity closely matching that of the real world.
Play Ethics: Values, Virtues, and Videogames
October 27, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Miguel Sicart. What is the moral purpose of playing? What roles do playthings, from games to other forms of interactive entertainment, play in shaping our culture? Are games, and play, in realms beyond morality, or is play an intrinsically moral activity?
The Power of Interactive World-Building to Illuminate Reality
October 20, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, David Sarno. Over the last 40 years, the videogame industry has gone from Pong to huge beautiful, living worlds that can manifest just about any fantasy. Now we can takes these powerful storytelling tools and aim them at reality.
Thinking Big About Learning
October 18, 2015
On October 18th, "Thinking Big About Learning" will bring together some of the greatest minds in education to discuss their current research and discoveries.
Literature and Gaming: Exploring the Role of Story in Interactive Media
October 13, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Tain Lee Barzso. Exploring the ways in which story defines the difference between intellectual puzzles and immersive games, discussing the role of literature and narrative play in creating the identification and interest that connect us to interactive media experiences.
Artificial Intelligence for General Game Playing
October 6, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Michael Genesereth. Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, general game players do not rely on algorithms designed in advance by their programmers for a specific game; instead, they utilize general technologies appropriate to any (discrete) game.
Learning English by Speaking English in an Immersive Online Roleplaying Game
September 29, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Dylan Arena. This presentation has two goals: to describe a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game intended to help elementary-aged children in Korea learn to speak English, and to offer a behind-the-scenes look at how an academic-minded educational-technology startup researches and designs improvements to an extant ed-tech product.
Copyright Law for Video Games
September 22, 2015
Interactive Media & Games Seminar. Speaker, Todd Smithline. The rules and mechanics of a game have historically not been protected by copyright. A recent spate of cases involving clones of mobile video games, however, is challenging that understanding with consequences already being felt well beyond the phone.