Past Events

"Exploring the Fringes: Interactive Entertainment for the 21st Century"

Lecture by Ernest Adams

Abstract:

This lecture is a survey of the various activities taking place on the fringes of the commercial video game industry. Many are experimental, and could lead the way to new forms of interactive entertainment that will be significant in the new century. Among the areas examined are the formal art world; the machinima movement; the demo scene; the interactive fiction movement; text MUDs and MUSHes; and the use of computer games for particular ends other than entertainment: religious, health education, subversion, political propaganda, and so on. Illustrated with numerous slides.

Biography:

Ernest Adams is a freelance game designer currently based in England, and a member of the International Hobo game design consortium. He was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions, and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line. In a much earlier life he was a software engineer. He has developed on-line, computer, and console games for everything from the IBM 360 mainframe to the Playstation 2. He was a founder of the International Game Developer's Association, and is a frequent lecturer at the Game Developer's Conference.

"Games and Media Revolution: Where the Computer Science and the Humanities Meet" and "Games Development: The Future of the Field"

Lectures by Henry Jenkins

Director, Comparative Media Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Co-director: Media in Transition project

Henry Jenkins is John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities, Professor of Literature and Comparative Media Studies at MIT who teaches courses in Theories of Media and Narrative; Film and Media Studies; Children's Literature; Science Fiction and others. He recently co-edited (with David Thorburn) Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition and Democracy and New Media (2003), and published numerous articles on media convergence, media consumption, media and democracy, and different genres of entertainment. He is the Principle Investigator in The-Games-to-Teach Project, which is a partnership between MIT and Microsoft formed with the goal to develop conceptual prototypes for the next generation of interactive educational environment. He has been the leader on the national level of the important discussions about the role of games in the children's culture; the complex relationship between games and violence; gender roles and media; the design of educational games; and the future of the games field in general.

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Last modified: Mar 22, 2005, 10:33 EST