I think the oddest experience I had this conference was being part of this panel. But I guess the mix of male and female, European, American and Australian Ph D students did represent a rather wide selection of "types". The main advice from the experienced Doctorate Candidates:
Three men in the session I watched before the Ph.D panel: Thomas A. Porter, Nitzan Ben-Shaul and Patrick Crogan.
Porter introduced an alternative or an expansion of Espen Aarseth's typologies, as he had found them hard to apply to the kind of analysis they were intended for. He suggested some new terms: "These individual web pages are scriptons, units of presented script, and the larger series of web pages can be discussed as authorial, editorial or otherwise determined content spaces, depending upon the perspective from which one wishes to explore the system." There is a distinct need for terms for analyzing computer mediated texts, as I have argued elsewhere - although much less elegantly.
Ben-Shaul out of Tel Aviv writes on cognitive psychology analyzing the cinema, but in this panel he writes on human perception. The main problem is: why can't we focus on the hypertext? Answer - or hypothesis - is that in general people cannot deal with the requiered split attention. Interaction and the split attention between input and activity leads to a different writing mode with less identification, more incoherence and non-closure.
Patrick Crogan went immediately into the discussion with Espen's terms aporia and epiphani in first-person shooters, and as Espen was hosting the session, the long-and-complicated word count got high, and the mood even before the first round. The energetic presentation was however not easy to summarize, so I guess the best thing to do is to wait until the paper is published, and then download! The papers is somewhat more comprehensive.
Adrian is not just a great organizer (he must be a very fuzzy father, the way he cares for his baby, the DAC 2003), but also a really fun guide to Australian wildlife. No need to read the labels in the zoo, because Adrian had made sure we were well informed before we reached the careful selection of dangerous or cuddly animals the ones trotting along behind him had requested. But the high-light of Wednesday was the much advertised wine tasting. I even learned something new, surprising and interesting, as I poured out a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon that was just too bitter: Women have more tastebuds than men, and therefore more sensitive particularly to the bitterness of certain grapes. Neat!
Jill says, in her presentation, and suddenly the room is indeed buzzing, the noise-level raising in a well-orchestrated crescendo, words like ontology and action surfacing at random intervals from this sea of noise. To stop it takes a little more time though...
Before lunch I went to the presentations of Caroline McCaw and Darshana Jayemanne. I can't really say much about that though.
Their presentations were almost illegible to me, which is sad, because according to their papers they ought to be talking about things I am really interested in - which of course is why I attended their presentations in the first case. But you see, I happen to have English as my second language, and I sat to the far back of a crowded room. With presenters who speak in a low voice, in their own dialects and with a bit of a mumble or too much of a drawl, I am lost. Actually, the questions of the people with their backs to me cleared up a lot of my confusion about what the presenters were really talking about. A large part of the audience knew when to laugh, when to nod and when to shake their heads and mutter though, so I guess I missed something there...
I hear it over and over: "The ludologists think of game in this and this manner. They analyze this but exclude that. They do, they say, they focus on, they argue, they exclude..."
I think it's that last statement, the one about the exclusion, that makes me ask the question: who are the ludologists?
Cornering one of the presenters who argued against the ludologists, after some rather active pressure during the Monday reception, the ludologists were pinpointed as the Game Studies people. I guess I suspected that. In the effort to argue the right to study games as its own object, and not a genre of some other medium, our identities as literature or media scholars have become overwhelmed by the online presence through Game Studies.
That is nice, because it means the journal reaches a large audience, and that it really makes a statement about games as an area of research. But in a conference like this it makes for a rather schizophrenic experience, as the me who studies communication theory, Public Information and Journalism becomes submerged in the popular image of some mysterious and almost mythic group - the ludologists.
The session this morning is on a wide mix of topics. Keith Armstrong speaks of New media design and ecosophical praxis, Dan Fleming presents the paper Hypertext and Empire, and Nick Montford is presenting a work he did with Stuart Moulthrop, Face it, Tiger on interactive fiction.
Jill is charing this session, which jumps between modes as energetically as any hypertext. It skips from Armstrongs installations by way of Flemings elegant arguments of multitude and singularity to Nick Montfords presentation of Cadre's game Varicella.
Personally, I was won over by Nick Montford the moment he showed how Varicella quotes Spiderman - anyone who has read enough comics that they can pick out a short quote from a really old magazine has me convinced.
I've noticed that sometimes I recognise people at conferences by their websites rather than their names or faces. Danny Butt's t-shirt is as vibrant a blue as his website is yellow.
I should of course have been upstairs listening to Bernadette Flynn, Mark McGuire and Stefan Greuter, but instead I am here, feeling guilty but already overwhelmed. The first three long papers this morning were directly relevant to my work, particularly those of Mikael Jakobsson and T.L. Taylor and Lisbeth Klastrup, who all spoke of their experiences in EverQuest.
Jakobsson and Taylor spoke of the socialisation processes in the games and compared that to Sopranos, where the guilds were "The Family". I agree, it's comparable, but I think there is an even better and more obvious comparison simply by comparing game guilds and real guilds. Historically, guilds have functioned exactly as Jakobsson and Taylor describe, sponsorship, specialisation, socialisation and all.
Lisbeth Klastrup spoke of a poetics of Virtual Worlds, and hurried through her presentation quicker than I could take notes. She had some interesting points on online games, but her final statement, that her methodology can be used on any other type of computer-mediated texts, such as hypertext literature, was not really convincingly founded in her presentation. After the way she dwelled on the aspects of EverQuest that were social, game-related and motivated by the need to interact with others, the leap to include hypertext literature was quite sudden.
Anyway - change of sessions, and I don't want to miss Mary Flanagan's presentation... I didn't recognize her right way earlier today, and I am still embarassed with my bad face-recognition skills.
Something we did before the conference, and something others may like to do during or after, was to bolster our not always so well-armoured egos with the heal-all: shopping!
I will not go into details, as the actual purchases are a lot more fun to see than to hear about, but I'll do some shameless plugging. If you are male, female or not entirely convinced about either, you may want to have a look at the shop where Jill, Hanne Lovise and I spent two hours trying on clothes and dreaming of places to wear the stuff they sell. The store is Anton's, Level 3 Shop 368, Melbourne Central, 300 Lonsdale Street - that's upstairs in a big department store not far from the conference venue. Not cheap - but even if you are not in desperate need of a new corset or a suit in the style of Greta Garbo, the need just may arise once you are there.
Ok, it is now 10:00am on day one, gone through the the first opening official speeches (I live in dread of such formal moments, convinced that I will misprounce someone's name, leave them off the list of thank you's, stammer, knock over the water over an important person's notes, my list of possible disasters is endless).
Mikkael Jakobsson and TL Taylor are discussing trust and guilds in Everquest and have joined it to trust and honour in the mafia with The Soprano's providing the model. Really nice mix of popular culture, game theory, and social theory.
So, survived the opening, did not do the managing of the VIP guests as well as I ought (did I mention how hard I find this to do), but everyone seemed to be happy. Plenty of coffee to go around, and we got the first session underway, not as late as I had expected.
The palms are still sweaty, another round of formal things this evening at the ACMI reception and then I can relax. Some.
Jeremy Yuille, Melbourne sound artist, Flash whiz, member of the DAC Academic Board and one of my mates in the School of Applied Communication has put together the DAC performance night out.
Free entry for delegates (bring your name tag to flash the door if needed), $5 entry for others. Cash bar.
Being held at:
bourgie
397 Little Latrobe St
Melbourne
The lineup:
9:00 Robert Kendall
Faith
9:15 boo chapple
untitled
9:45 Christina McPhee
NAXSMASH/Memoires of a cyborg
10:00 Jeremy plays ceedees - maybe Daniel will come down too
10:15 jayne fenton keane
untitled
10:30 Roger Dean
ProseThetic Memories, by Anne Brewster, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean
10:45 ceedees again...
11:15 Adam Nash
Chromacy-Yellow2
11:40 choons till we all go home
So this is Melbourne. Foggy, grey, rather cool - very familiar actually, jacket and keep-your-umbrella-close weather. I hope that most of the chill comes from the cold I picked up on the plane (if you still haven't left home, remember to wear something warm on the plane!). The Hotel I am at is really close to RMIT - tested that out yesterday - there's an internet cafe at Elisabeth street where I am connected for au$ 3.30 a minute, and Australians are easy to be around, nice, comfortable people for a Norwegian.
Most of the time yesterday was spent nursing my cold - something it seems like most of Melbourne should have been doing. Well, not my cold, theirs. Perhaps I am hyper-sensitive because of the SARS scare, but I have never heard as many people sniff, cough, sneeze and blow their noses in public as on this trip. So that's an other thing you may want to do - pick up a pack of paper handkerchiefs, seems like this is cold and flu-season here. Logical, though, since it's winter.
And I should have skimmed through and downloaded the conference papers before I left my broadband in Norway. But Adrian promises that we'll get it all on CD, so I guess Monday it will be all right. I haven't seen Adrian yet, but judging from the amount of blogging here, he's busy finding volunteers to test out Melbourne bars for us. Well, it's a rough job, and I am glad somebody is doing it for us. Not even my native Scandinavian stamina would have endured for long enough to bring you all this list.
I wanted to address Adrian's rash list of things he would do differently the next time, and Elizabeth Lane Lawley's harsh statement that she is very glad she did not submit a paper. I will however not touch this issue beyond stating that even before the conference is opened things heat up, lines of potential conflict are drawn, the dramatic curve is climbing upwards, and the temperature in Melbourne may not indicate winter. (That it does not anyway, to a frozen Norwegian.) Stay tuned, in 6 days I will be blogging the drama of the 6th DAC conference straight from the center of events.
I was there for the planning of the first of the DAC conferences, in Bergen 1998. Jill needed a hand in finding a restaurant for the conferences dinner, it was in the autumn in Norway, and the restaurants were almost all booked for the pre-Christmas parties. I don't know how many Bergen restaurants I called, until I remembered about Gamle Bergen Tracteursted, a restaurant within the museum Gamle Bergen.
We just managed to squeeze everybody into the restaurant, with its lovely late 1800, early 1900 furnishings. The dinner was marinated salmon, reindeer and cloudberry cream, a very norwegian menu. Somehow this has always accentuated the DAC conferences for me - the intimacy of rooms which are barely large enough for the attendees, the crowded social events, the food, ranging in quality from pre-packed lunch sandwiches to lavish dinners - and the play and banter encountering the meals. And laughter. Memories of DAC are memories of an almost euphoric feeling of being understood. Finally, everybody around me knows what I am talking about, and I get their stuff too!
This is what I expect to find again, and nothing less. Euphoric intellectual experiences, and meals to annoy and delight the senses, interlaced with the buzz of people, people, people - some of whom I have missed for a long time now.
Everything happens for the first time. It is not the first time I go to Australia for a conference, even if it is too rarely. The first time for that was one of the IAMCR conferences in 1996. But it is the first time I blog the conference, and it's the first time I do so in movable type.
I am leaving early for Melbourne. I will leave safe, clean, quiet Volda Tuesday 13, and I'll be waiting in Melbourne when the others arrive. Travelling alone gives me a sensation of freedom, that anything and everything can happen. What can happen in Melbourne? Hopefully it will happen somewhere within reach of an internet connection, and I just may share it...
Who I am? Some of the people who read this blog already know me, both from four of the five earlier DAC conferences and my weblog. I am Torill Mortensen, I write thinking with my fingers, I am an assistant professor at Volda College in Norway, and I know I will meet friends from the flesh- and the digital life.
The conference is being held on the city campus of RMIT which is in Melbourne's Central Business District. This is an easy walk from any of the accommodation venues we have suggested, and any other accommodation that is within the CBD.
RMIT is on Swanston and Latrobe Streets in Melbourne, and Swanston Street is one of the major tram routes in the city and is easily accessible by public transport.
The conference also has an event at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which is more or less located at the other end of Swanston Street. This is a 10 minute walk from RMIT, or a 5 minute tram ride.
Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria is hosting the +PlayEngines+ exhibition which is a part of DAC, and the artists day we are hosting on Friday, May 23. The State Library is next door (well, over the road) from RMIT.
The DAC DayOut being held on the Wednesday involves the entire conference moving to the Yarra Valley for an informal day of networking, recovery, and reinvigoration. This is included in the registration cost for all delegates who register for the full conference and we provide the buses (and food, and wine tasting). You just have to be able to get to RMIT to get the bus on the Wednesday morning.