Podcasts about mit comparative media studies

While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? In this episode, Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks and who teaches engineering and computational media respectively at MIT and Wesleyan, explores these important issues in a lecture entitled “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”. Prof. Weaver discusses how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine. Christopher Weaver is Research Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies, Visiting Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Microphotonics Center and Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan University. Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks, and developed a physics-based, realtime sports engine used to create the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts. Bethesda is well known for The Elder Scrolls role-playing series of which Skyrim was the latest major installment. An adviser to both government and industry, Weaver holds patents in interactive media, security, and telecommunications engineering.

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today’s unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a director who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age – a curator of digital artifacts. Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise. Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section of the event. Ingrid Kopp, Tribeca Film Institute Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history and a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians. Moderated by MIT Comparative Media Studies co-director William Uricchio.

Over the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed the ocean from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1990′s and kicked off this new era in board gaming. These modern board games, or Eurogames, are more engaging experiences and based less on luck than the typical roll-and-move board game design prevalent in the 20th century. Attendees will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games, so attendees will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work. Dr. Scott Nicholson is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade. He is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where he has focused on games in libraries and game design as a pedagogical tool. He was the host of Board Games with Scott from 2005-2010 and is the designer of Tulipmania 1637, a board game published in 2009. In addition, he is the author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages, published in 2010 by Information Today.

Ian Condry, Associate Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the prevalence of giant robots in anime (Japanese animated films and TV shows). From the sixties to the present, robot or “mecha” anime has evolved in ways that reflect changing business models and maturing audiences, as can be seen in titles like Astro Boy, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion. How can we better understand the emergence of anime as a global media phenomenon through the example of robot anime? What does this suggest about our transmedia future? Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and founder/director of the Lab’s Personal Robots Group, will discuss how science fiction has influenced the development of real robotic systems, both in research laboratories and corporations all over the world. She will explore of how science fiction has shaped ideas of the relationship and role of robots in human society, how the existence of such robots is feeding back into science fiction narratives, and how we might experience transmedia properties in the future using robotic technologies.

This podcast (MP3, 33.1 MB) is a recording of a panel discussion held during the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC). Based on the content of the Summer 2008 edition of Cable in the Classroom’s Threshold, Helen Soulé of Soulé Consulting Services moderated this discussion on innovative approaches to build interest and demand in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields among young women and minorities. Panelists included Erin Reilly from the Project New Media Literacies, MIT Comparative Media Studies and Karen Peterson, from the National Girls Collaborative Project and the Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Douglas Levin, from Cable in the Classroom, and Marina Leight, from the Center for Digital Education, also offered insights as part of the panel.

"Media Literacy - Who Needs It?!!" by Henry Jenkins III, the DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies.

"Spoilers, Bloggers, Moders, and Thieves: Empowering Consumption in an Age of Media Convergence," by Henry Jenkins III, the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies.