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Wednesday, June 23, 2004
At the Women in Games conference (held June 10th- 11th, Portsmouth and which I mentioned a while ago) site, you can now find the presentations online and some pics.
The site also mentions the 2005 conference, so it seems there is going to be a next conference :)
Thursday, June 17, 2004
The DiGRA has announced their next (second)game conference. It will take place from June 17 to June 20, 2005 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The 2005 conference is titled 'Changing Views: Worlds in Play'.
From their newsletter:
'The event will bring together the digital games research communities from around the world as well as keynote speakers from Europe, America and Asia and looks set to be the largest academic digital games research conference ever held in North America.
The 2005 conference is the second in the series of world conferences, designed to facilitate dissemination of information from the increasing multidisciplinary research, both theoretical and practical, on digital games, game playing and players, game design, user communities, cultures and contexts.'
More information and the newsletter will soon follow on the DiGRA website and the gamesconference website (which means our beautiful Level Up site will disappear somewhere into the archives... :()
The conference will be exactly a year from now... Time to save some money ;) Don't know what I will be doing around that time (work?) but sure would like to go to the conference (and see Vancouver of course) and really attend some lectures for a change. Would also like to meet all the people I'm linking to, fair chance they will be there... (I could of course go write a paper and try get it accepted....)
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
OMG a friend of mine sent me a link and I finally know what the title of the series was which I used to watch when, well, I probably was in nursery school back then....All I could remember of the series till now was that it was about this little boy who had a magic bag (and believe me, I googled a lot but could never find the title...), he could get anything out of that bag, cars, planes, flowers and so forth. I don't even know where he needed that stuff for, the only thing that captured my imagination was this little magic bag (and a very trendy design I might add, very retro nowadays)
Now I could give you the title now... but I think it's more fun to see if any of you know which series I'm talking about....so let me know! (would be even more fun if my readership was a bit bigger *grin*)
In the wake of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail has decided to upgrade all of their free accounts, now I've got 100MB storage for my email, so now I'm on six percent of my limit while only yesterday I was fourteen percent over it... how wonderful.
Since I have more than one Yahoo! mail account I already noticed a difference in the storage limit... One I have for a couple of years already and there the limit was (up until yesterday) 6MB, the account I created for this blog had only 4MB, so it seems they changed storage space over the years, gave new users less space, but Gmail changed all that... now we just have to wait for Hotmail to upgrade their accounts... Oh well, I am happy with my 1GB storage at Gmail and my 100MB at Yahoo! Mail. :D
By the way, Yahoo! Mail also offers a paid mail account. For only $19.99 a year you can have 2GB of storage space...they're even surpassing storage of Gmail.
Friday, June 11, 2004
weeee! the 'sequel' of the flashgame the Crimson Room which I talked about earlier on this blog has arrived (a while already so it seems)! Just escaped from the room, and put my name on the 'Escapers'list, nice! This time it is called the 'Viridian Room' and just as with the Crimson Room it's a combination of click-work and puzzling to find 'the solution' and your way out of the room. A simple room but fun! Looking forward to the next room :)
At Wired News an article on the new Nintendo console, code-named Revolution. As the code-name suggests Nintendo tries (once again) to take a different path and is not as much concerned with over the top graphics and hardware as it is with new ways of playing games. They try revolutionizing play with the soon- to-be- released handheld DS and in 2006 with the Revolution (hope they won't use that name, not really in the line of their other consolenames, and well, to be honest.. it sounds a bit cheesy...and a bit all too obvious, but as code-name it's quite okay, as indication for what they try to realize). Looking really forward to see more of it, Nintendo has my blessings :D
Thursday, June 10, 2004
there we go again... women do play (online) games, BBC news is reporting and draws upon a report from Screen Digest: "Females make up 65% of the growing market in skill-based games such as cards, solitaire and puzzles", but "hardcore online gaming remains the preserve of young men" ...oh really? *sigh* *grows bored*. Anyway calling them 'bored houswives' doesn't show much of respect for these female 'gamers'. Ian Bogost from Water Cooler Games has a great post on the report.
grumble... I hate this time of the year... My nose is running, itchy, stuffy, have to sneeze all the time, my eyes are itching too... oh yeah, woohoo it's hay fever time! How happy I am. On top of that I always suffer from asthmatic bronchitis when all those grass pollen are happily dancing around in the air. But the sneezing and the running nose are really the 'pain in the ass'. You would think living in the centre of a rather big city, those pollen would stay away (read: die of pollution)...but noooo, also, you would think that staying inside would help lessen the symptoms...but negative, I still get to sneeze all the time, so now I have a sore Rudolph nose (if it was winter, I could help Santa out)...
But actually, the seasonal allergy is not the main reason why I am sitting behind my computer right now, sharing my 'happy' thoughts with you after only four hours of sleep (while I counted on nine), nope that's not why I am here. It's because it's warm outside which cause windows to be open all the time which inevitably leads to freaking mosquito's invading my house, and that my dear readers, is the real nuisance. They seem to have a taste for my blood, those freaky little vampires...So here I am mosquito bites all over (hmm wonder where my skin is..) not knowing if I should go outside/stay inside, close windows/ open windows, lights on/ lights off (I did want to read) and if I should invest energy in getting out my mosquito squasher (read: old newspaper or whatever is nearby) and search for the little pests. The latter is 99.999999% of the time a waste of time anyway, because these nudnick's have a way to disappear whenever you turn on the lights or even try to turn your eyes on them. So I probably have to wait for autumn to have a good night sleep again. Oh yes I sure do like this time of the year...
*smash* Yes!! I got the little hindrance! It just tried to bore her little sting in to my skin and bam, my hands crushed all the life (and some of my vital fluid) out of her. One hurray for me!
If you have not any of these little bores nearby, but want to share in the euphoria of splatting these annoyances: go to the following website I found on the web: squash! (let them be for a while, bigger and bigger, it will be more fulfilling that way :D)
Monday, June 07, 2004
Ian Bogost from Water Cooler Games posted something on Pixelblocks. He even has a picture of his self-made real-life 2D Pac Man Ghost. Those Pixelblocks certainly are very cool. These blocks are translucent blocks and "come in a single shape, featuring a peg-and-hole combination for stacking top-to-bottom, and a unique tooth-and-groove combination on the other four side", by being able to connect blocks from all sides you can make 2D and 3D 'pictures' with them (like Ian did). Look at those kawaii figures!:
I don't think my imagination can handle coming up with my own made characters or figures, and I don't think I would have the patience for making pixel art like thingies (like Ian said..too much work!) with 3/8" cubes... but if someone would make one for me... I would be very happy :D
seems they are in need for female gamers over at Ubisoft (thanks Game girl advance). Don't know what to think of that...
other news on female gamers: In the Sun Times appeared an article titled "Women are players, too". Gewgaw has a post on it and also a scan of the first page of the article and (a slightly corrected) text of the article (where Robin Hunicke from gewgaw gets quoted)
