Curiosity Cabinets

At Georgia Tech, visiting speakers at the Living Game Worlds III conference were invited to tour the media lab facilities. This included the work of several graduate students. Janet Murray's student Annie Lausier is working on an interactive television project called "Tagging for TV," which was prototyped with the episodic clue-embedded TV show Lost. Conference organizer Celia Pearce showed off her students' work with with Mermaids, a massively multiplayer game in which emergent group behavior takes place in an underwater fantasy world, and Michael Nitsche's and his students demo-ed a space-generating videogame Charbitat. (Grad student Calvin Ashmore worked on both the Nitsche and Pearce projects.) As an example of innovative government rhetoric, I particularly liked the NASA-funded Selene: A Lunar Creation Game, which applies god-like Will Wright-style procedural play to learning about planetary science and is being designed by the students of Ian Bogost.