Authors:

 Nideffer, Robert.

Title:

 Games agents play

Keywords:

 Art, Culture, Games, Science, Theory

Abstract:

 Games are one of the fastest growing export industries in a rapidly expanding (in terms of selling points) and collapsing (in terms of spatio-temporal access) global marketplace. The computer gaming industry generates roughly $20 billion dollars in revenue in the US alone. Happy Puppy (happypuppy.com), a leader in the new genre of Multiple Player Online Games (MPOG), gets over 120,000 hits per day to download games made available through their network. In 1998, over one in four American youngsters reported playing games between seven and 30 hours a week. Games have been at the forefront of major hardware and software advances in institutions as diverse (yet connected) as education, entertainment, government and the military. As artists, cultural critics, and educators we have yet to adequately grapple with what this economic shift, and the cultural literacy it affords, might mean in terms of informing creative practice and pedagogy. A more comprehensive and theoretically informed approach to the production, dissemination and consumption of gaming needs to be taken, particularly if we wish to effectively engage, as the call for proposals so elegantly puts it, 'the epistemological structures informing our subjectivity and engendering new processes of perception, communication, and cognition'. As a small step toward this goal, I have been designing a gaming studies curricula for an interdepartmental program I am organizing at the University of California, Irvine campus. As part of that process, I've begun conducting fieldwork with a software gaming company that produces some of the most popular online and offline titles currently on the market. This fieldwork is happening in conjunction with my own research and development project engineering online public spaces utilizing a Java-based mobile agent management system, a project capitalizing on notions of 'gaming' and 'play' as part of the creative process. What I would like to present at Invencao are some results from that research (which has only recently begun), and issues those results raise for people struggling to work, and to educate others to work, as critically informed producers and consumers in a transnational entertainment economy that operates at the nexus of art, science, and technology.
Nideffer, Robert. nideffer@an174.arts.uci.edu School of the Arts, UC Irvine Robert F. Nideffer researches, teaches, and publishes in the areas of virtual environments and behavior, interface theory and design, technology and culture, and contemporary social theory. He holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology, an MFA in Computer Arts, and a Ph.D. in Sociology. In 1997-98 Robert had an academic research appointment in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, working with the Alexandria Digital Library where he was Director of User Interface Design and Implementation; he also taught advanced digital arts courses through the Department of Art Studio. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UC Irvine, where he directs the digital media area. He serves as Co-Principal Investigator for OPS:MEME (Online Public Spaces: Multidisciplinary Explorations in Multiuser Environments), a Research Across Disciplines initiative funded through the UCSB Office of Research, and Principal Investigator of "Meaningful Traces," an online exhibition/event sponsored by InterCampus Arts debuting in Spring 1999. He has participated in a number of national and international online and offline exhibitions, and organized and presented at a variety of conferences, including: the College Art Association; Consciousness Reframed; International Symposium on Electronic Art; SIGGRAPH; Technography; Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts; The Berkeley Symposium on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Visual Representation; The Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery; The International Association for Philosophy and Literature; and The American and Pacific Sociological Associations.