Hackers and Academia panel, HOPE 2006, this Friday through Sunday near Madison Square Garden!
These are pretty much the books which have been most important to my thinking to date.
Current working idea: Set up game playing stations around the EGGPLANT Lab where classmates could play games particular to each group of participants I spoke with. This would mean having a sports-gamer space, a casual-gamer space, and a nongamer space, and having the spaces not meet. Perhaps I could still populate the geek gamer space with my own geek items in an attempt to indicate that a LOT of academic work so far has focused on geek games and geek players, to the detriment of an understanding of the other groups.
The physical conditions of computers and video games don’t care how the hell we’re shaped, how we feel physically, what we can do aside from sit and look and press buttons. They don’t care which odors we find pleasant and unpleasant; a cheese you pick up may be called Stinky Blue Cheese, but you don’t smell it. They don’t care what our favorite foods are; nothing has any taste. The objects afforded your character in a video game don’t support the attention to fine craftsmanship you might enjoy if you collected hand-tooled leather armor from a past era, or the piquant natural irregularities which you might seek out in gemstones. While the leisure objects of meatspace restore to us some of the sensations of which the workplace deprives us, the leisure objects of digital games are as flat, grey, and substanceless as an office cubicle.
Notes from chats with Seymour Papert, and the project of developing a theory of geekdom and conformity.
