truna aka j.turner
2007: Wanderer beyond game worlds [with nic bidwell + david browning], Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Special Issue on Alternative views, embodiment and presence, Vol 15
2007: Mirror, Mirror: Claiming Digital Places of the Mundane Mapping Culture [with nic bidwell], International Workshop on Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies (SIM tech), Melbourne, Nov 26-27 2007 [PDF]
This paper offers a discussion on the “mundane” or quotidian aspects of that software which might at first glance seem to be a fine example of the extraordinary. It looks at game worlds in terms of an ancient human desire to articulate place in the world and pursues a design concept which resonates with this practice in order to enable a more mundane exploitation of such spatial representations: the claiming of place.
2007: Through the looking glass: game worlds as representations and views from elsewhere [with nic bidwell], Interactive Entertainment 2007
This paper describes the rationale and subsequent development stages of a work in progress: a graffiti toolkit for rich spatial 3D environments. The driving concept for the design of the toolkit is the enabling of participants to tell their own stories within the virtual represented landscapes of rich 3D spatial worlds, minimising the autocracy of software conditioning and recognising that such stories belong within a place – context. The use of graffiti as a means of giving voice to those outside the official writing and recording of culture dates back to antiquity. As a practice, making a mark on objects and the world holds the undercurrent of claiming the intangible or otherwise out of reach, a memory, or a voice which has no other platform. This project is informed by the social context of meaning and intangible culture and the manner in which the design of the interface conditions the nature of stories. It takes the reader on a walk which connects the design of spatial worlds with the representation of landscapes through painting and maps in order to find ways to exploit “views from elsewhere” and enable connections between a lived sense of place with the navigable representations constructed within the screen.
2007: Heritage & Habitus: Designing to Support Situated, Living
Knowledge [nic bidwell, truna, Jason Holdsworth, Colin Lemmon and Michael Shay], Mobile HCI, Singapore [pdf]
We refer to an ongoing endeavour aimed to assist Australian Indigenous
communities’ in persisting their personal and cultural
memories linked to temporally dynamic interactions in situ. The
design enables Indigenous users to upload items they collect
themselves (e.g. photographs, audio, video) using mobile phones,`
in their traditional lands into a topographical simulation; and, then
to associate these items with their own hand-drawn markings in
the simulation. The design responds to the rich interconnectedness
of Indigenous culture and the land and the need to converge spatial information technologies with practices that are not, inherently,
conditioned by the geometries of the west. We propose that
the design approach contributes to thinking about ways that mobile guides can respond to multiple realities and corporeal and affective phenomena.
2007: claiming places: game mods and graffiti, Youth Arts Queensland Papers 2007, Youth Arts Queensland [pdf]
Many games now on the market come with a Software Development Kit, or SDK, which allow players to construct their own worlds and mod(ify) the original. One or two of these mods have achieved notoriety in the press, cited as evidence of malicious intent on the part of the modders who often exploit their own known lived experience as a basis for new virtual playgrounds. But most player constructed games are a source of delight and pleasure for the builder and for the community of players. Creating a game is the act of creating a world, of making a place. Places are distinguished by personal, lived experience. They are about memories and familiarity. A place is somewhere you are attached to and belong within . In many ways, creating a game mod resonates with the act of graffiti. It gives the creator a voice that is attached to the site of their experience. As Miguel Sicart says, “design is power, game design more so.”
2007: Wanderer beyond game worlds [with nic bidwell + david browning], PerthDAC 2007 [also published in LEA, Vol 15]
We discuss issues and opportunities for designing experiences with 3D simulations of nature where the landscape and the interactant engage in an equitable dialogue. We consider the way digital representations of the world and design habits tend to detach from corporeal dimensions in experiencing the natural world and perpetuate motifs in games that reflect taming, territorializing or defending ourselves from nature. We reflect on the Digital Songlines project, which translates the schema of indigenous people to construct a natural environment, and the inherent difficulty in cross-culturally representing interconnectedness. This leads us to discuss insights into the use of natural features by western people in cultural transmission and in their experiences in natural places. We propose McCarthy and Wright’s dialogical approach may reconcile conceptions of place and self in design and conclude by considering experiments in which designers digitally reconstruct their own corporeal experience in natural physical landscape.
2007: Redisplacement by design [with nic bidwell + peter radoll], interactions, Volume 14 , Issue 2 (March + April 2007), via ACM portal ISSN:1072-5520]
Recently, researchers have noted that traditional knowledge systems (TKSs) can inspire technology design. They have also noted that the interdependency between Aboriginal culture and “landscape” provides insight into an embodied approach to HCI [1]: People’s experience of place and construction of space does not separate the mind, the body, and the surroundings [2].
2006: To explore strange new worlds: experience design in 3 dimensional immersive environments - role and place in a world as object of interaction, OZCHI 2006, Sydney [PDF]
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before. (Roddenberry 1966)
This discussion paper is about constructing rich graphical immersive worlds where the world within the screen becomes both the object and the site of interaction. The discussion centres on two aspects of game world design: the manner in which the interactivity in these environments depends on the user - or player rather, recognizing their role within the constructed world, and the extraordinary ways that this space is usually envisioned as either 'fifth business' or occasionally an antagonist but rarely given credit as participant or recognized as a context laden object of interaction. The discussion unpacks these issues in the light of a project which undertakes the construction of a non western cultural experience of specific place using a game engine to create a rich immersive graphical environment. Place is not the same as space, as Yi-Fu Tuan observes: Place is about memories, familiarity, it is something you are attached to and belong within. Many of our design tenets for virtual worlds emphasise the idea of space as a very western notion of freedom. In a design area where aesthetics is the interface it is important to recognize the extent of cultural habits and some of the ways that they construct the (digital) world as an artifact. This paper is written for a workshop and ends with more questions than answers.
2006: digital songlines environment, December 2006, Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Game research and development CyberGames '06 [pdf] [via ACM portal ISBN:86905-901-7]
This is a demonstration of a designed world where the emphasis is on a cultural experience and a non western perspective of landscape. The project is conducted within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design, which is established and supported under the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centres Programme. A vital aspect of the project is the collaboration of CyberDreaming, an Indigenous owned multi-media company, as part of the management and design team and the members of the Indigenous communities whose stories and experiences are represented. In essence, the project tries to avoid cultural voyeurism in favour of the enabling of a digital space where community participants can tell their own stories.
The Digital Songlines Environment (DSE) uses the Torque Game Engine in order to represent the landscape of Australia and in an attempt to incorporate Australian Indigenous Culture within its setting. This ancient Culture is not homogenous; rather there are 600 tribal groups across Australia with over 250 different languages spoken. It is not only the languages that are different, the tribal stories vary across the continent with common themes, morals and knowledge, yet each tribal group is very careful that their stories and their knowledge should not be mixed or conflated with other tribal groups. Critically, the stories told by the Indigenous communities actually belong to the landscape; they are the feeling and nuance of the landscape itself as the community interrelates with it. This is the meaning of Songlines, no one community possesses a complete Songline, they are tracks, spatial stories across the land that extend in all directions across the entire continent of Australia, giving the pattern and meaning to the connections between Indigenous groups. Traditionally this rich oral heritage was transferred from generation to generation over millennia by rituals and storytellers through dance, stories and artworks.
The design goal of this project is to reconstruct the Indigenous experience from an Indigenous perspective rather than the usual cultural archiving which tends to prioritise the needs of the database structure and meta-data tags and fields. The insight is simple and direct: if the culture sees its knowledges as embedded in the land, recreate the land in order to provide a more appropriate cultural storehouse and place to tell their own stories. In Indigenous perspectives, landscapes are not the parcels and lots of the Western view; the country is like a living breathing entity:
"People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like 'spending a day in the country' or 'going up the country'. Rather, country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life." [1]
The demonstration presented is the first iteration of the DSE: a representation of the country north of Dalby, Queensland where the Gunggari community are traditional custodians
The rich potential of visualization made possible by game world generative solutions here is extraordinary. The team have reconstructed accurate topological maps and populated them with appropriate flora and fauna which exhibit naturalistic behaviours. This representation of landscape has received encouraging feedback from the Elders of the local Indigenous community whose tribal area has been the focus of one iteration ("I can almost feel the dust between my toes" one lady said).
Songlines is an exploration of experiential spatiality in game -- or game-less world design. It explores the design question of how we can re-construct space as a protagonist, imbuing the terrain with a consciousness and a will towards life.
Digital Songlines Environment Website [ACID] http://songlines.interactiondesign.com.au/
2006: Destination Space: Experiential Spatiality and Stories, Cybergames & Interactive Entertainment 06, Perth [PDF] [via ACM portal ISBN:86905-901-7]
Because stories are important. People think stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. [Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad 1991]
The z-axis is you seeing something from a different point of view without moving [Jack Turner]
This paper is about game and virtual world conceptualisations of space and some rich challenges that arise when we undertake the design of such environments for immersive experiences beyond the specificity of game-play. It sets out to explore two facets of this space in particular: the manner in which the space exhibits a designed condition for the forms of experiences which take place within it; and some explorations into ways in which these interactions can be understood in order to design 'different' experiences. The discussion is based on three case studies of projects which have explored the stories, engagement and experiences within (and without) game world spaces.
[realtime 77 feb-march 2007 report by christy dena]
2005: Alternate Reality Environments: Why Play in 3D when you can play in 3.5?, paper submitted and accepted for special session on web-based 3 dimensional environments, IASTED International Conference on Web-based Education (WBE 2006), Mexico
Preamble
My 13 year-old son has an enormous gripe about an ad that runs on free to air television here in Brisbane. The ad is for a new attraction at one of our local theme parks. It invites the audience to come and experience the 4D marvels of a famous computer animated film which has been especially versioned to be viewed wearing those red - green 3D glasses. Our kid gets outraged at this; everyone knows the fourth dimension is time!
I consider the whole labeling of the attraction to be rather interesting. We are quite content to accept the illusion of 3D space rendered on a screen where the imagined z axis is given depth and perspective but are at a fair loss for a new description for the intrusion of this same illusion into the exposed z-axis of real space.
My son has opted for calling the phenomena 3.5D.
2005: Suit Keen Renovator - Alternate Reality Design [with ann morrison] Interactive Entertainment 2005, Sydney [PDF] [via ACM portal ISBN:0-9751533-2-3]
Virtual territories and their theme parks are more akin to the physical world of real estate than they might at first appear. The trick in triggering the designer's imagination, is to find a 'nice renovator' (cottage/ house) at a low price, with loads of potential, and by doing it on the cheap to add character, and engage the imagination. Here the designer can construct changes from an imagined space. Vision is more important than how the actual place presents.
This work describes a case study involving undergraduate students in the Creative Industries who needed a place to explore, so as to create their own visions and projects. The place had to inspire, trigger engagement, and their imaginations. At the same time it was important that the place did not coerce activity, or distract from the task by confusing tools with task, or architectural navigation with conceptual skills.
The solution was an alternate reality.
2005: When Worlds Collide - Exploring the relationship between the actual, the dramatic and the virtual. [with julie dunn and john o'toole] [PDF], League of Worlds Conference, Melbourne, 2005
This paper presents research and illuminations for discussion from a study which explores the intuitive resonances between drama education, game play and rich immersive environments. In particular, it seeks to illuminate and clarify whether the affordances of virtual game worlds and those of dramatic worlds created through the structures and strategies of drama education can work together to inspire new world views.
In drama education, the concept of playing and learning is exploited through development of dramatic worlds where participants draw on their actual world knowledge to create unique experiences. Virtual environments temptingly offer a third world where playing to learn might be deepened.
2005 - : [forthcoming] Gaming Cultures Reader, Who is Playing Who? - A story of Software Culture and Game Design
"Darling, you are not alone when you sit at your computer playing System Shock. It's a ménage a trois … you, the game and the designer in the night! That's why that creaky sound is so frightening, it has been designed to be so."
Key Words: Game Design, Software Culture, Immersion Design, Games in Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interaction, Affordances, Foucault
This work offers an interpretive strategy for the analysis of games in virtual environments as cultural texts by taking the reader on a narrative adventure through the histories and epistemologies of the commercially produced games we play today. It looks to the futures of game design as we go mobile and the interface - or text - disappears and merges with the world. [abstract]
2005: Video Games AS education and Literacies: What we have to understand about video and computer games and technology environments to accomplish learning and literacies, The Twelth International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference on Learning, Granada, Spain, June 2005
this paper discusses the potential of some game interfaces as educational environments. the title is a play on the work of james paul gee [what video games can teach us about learning and literacy] in which he articulates the forms of learning that can take place within a video game once the software is seen as providing more than content. this paper / workshop takes the participants one step further into the potential of some game environments to offer themselves to subversion and the powerful constructive learning that is subsequently enabled. much of this work is based on the lost cities project - a collaborative game design course. [abstract]
2003: To Boldly Go, Conference Proceedings: Digital Arts and Culture, 2003, Melbourne May 2003 [CD Rom Papers, RMIT Press] also published in fine art forum 17-8, special issue on MelbourneDAC [ISSN No. 1442 4894]
a play on the star trek narrative of colonising recognisable space, this work offers insights into the epistemologies of multi-user world interfaces and the manner in which the design concept mediates the potential experience of the user. [download pdf]
2001 : Worlds of Words: Tales for Language Teachers in Beyond Babel : Language Learning On-Line , Felix, U. (ed) 2001, Language Australia . [ISBN: 1876768258]
this chapter was written for language educators as practitioners. It combines a narrative of the experiences gained from earlier research work in the use of game format environments for constructive educational purposes with principles of use. [download pdf]
1998 : A Walk on the ICE, 1998, On-CALL Journal, Vol 12, No. 3, 1998, Paper presented at the Inaugural World CALL Conference, Melbourne [ISSN 1034 - 571X]
the walk on the ICE is an intertextual narrative of a research / teaching project which exploited the subversive potential of a Multi-User text-based environment. the walk project invited participants into the underlying conceptual design of the interface and gave it to them to explore and construct with. the walk itself was inhabited by language students at tertiary level and late primary students from local schools. in form and logic, the walk on the ICE is a forerunner of the more specifically game design oriented project: the lost cities. [download pdf]
1996 : A Virtual Treasure Hunt: Exploring the 3 Dimensional Aspect of MOOs, 1996 in Warschauer, M. ed (1996) Virtual Connections, Hawaii University Press. [ISBN: 0824817931]
virtual connections is an early work on the potential of using the internet in teaching. it offers a collection of pieces from a wide variety of practitioners around the world. the virtual treasure hunt establishes a number of themes of exploitation of conceptual design of the interface as opposed to prima facie affordances.
fine art forum review [2003] vol 17, no 3 review of New Media: an introduction by terry flew [ISSN No. 1442 4894]
fine art forum review [2002] vol 16, no 2 review of Unlocking the clubhouse: women in computing by jane margolis and allan fisher [ISSN No. 1442 4894]
| truna 2007 |