The University of Tampere has put the videos of their lecture series on Games and Storytelling online. Speakers include Jessica Mulligan, Henry Jenkins, Katie Salen, Ernest Adams, Aki Järvinen and Frans Mayra.

Flux Factory in NY has tried out a quite intriguing art project, a so-called "living installation", Novel: lock up 3 authors in a box for a month and make them promise that after this month, they will have written the manuscript for a novel. The experiement recently finished and apparently all 3 authors completed the mission. From my pov, the really interesting part of this project is that all 3 authors were also asked to weblog during their writing imprisonment - and blog they did! You can find the blogs on a related project website.

The movie "War of the Worlds" has launched a survival game on the movie website. The designers have studied what works and doesn't work in online games. Hence, you can play several "maps" with each their objectives, you can team up with other players to play more efficiently...and of course you can try and make it to the high score list. A interesting game design feature for this kind of thing is also that you have to pick up survivors who will follow you around, so you have to take not only of your own character but also theirs (basically you get blown up pretty quickly if you don't watch out). The War of the Worlds marketing people are also the first (that I know of) to specifically launch a "game teaser", solely advertising the game and using mostly graphics from the game itself, not film footage.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 07:53