*** MOVED ***

Please see http://gamesstudio.org/yusufpisan/ for any future updates.

Games Everywhere : The Larger Role for Web Platforms and Services for Games & Serious Games

Ben Sawyer recently presented a Google Tech Talk I thought you might
find it interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPaCwjhZ2aY&feature=channel

ABSTRACT

Presented by Ben Sawyer, Co-Founder, President, Digitalmill.

Videogames have always been a business at the edge of technology and
change. Today, however, as games burst beyond the living room, and
traditional forms and platforms of play they are turning up
everywhere. With the rise of serious games which make use of
videogames and videogame technologies in areas beyond entertainment,
there is even larger requirement for videogames to change form and
integrate with platforms and systems that were previously never
considered relevant to game development.

As games move to more pervasive forms, spanning both entertainment and
non-entertainment fields, we need to define and understand this gamut
of activity and the technologies that can support them. What new
models, design, and engineering patterns exist that are, and
increasingly going to be essential to a world where games are
everywhere?

Drawing on experiences with large organizations, non-traditional
videogames forms, and analysis of the commercial videogame industry
this talk not only illuminates the wider gamut of videogame activity
but where there are unique needs and opportunities, especially for
cutting edge Web services and platforms, that until better supported
are, in fact, holding back the larger ascendency of games into
everyday life.

Enjoy

Welcome to Kai Pisan

We are excited to announce the birth of our son Kai Pisan Name: Kai Pisan Date: Sunday, 1 Nov 2009, 6:40am Weight: 2.940kg (6lb 8oz) Height: 51cm (20 inches) City: Downey, California (Los Angeles) GPS: 33.918092,-118.126554 Email: kai.pisan@gmail.com Blog: http://kai.pisan.me/ Meryl & Yusuf

Guidelines for Social Media Use

Companies are starting to develop guidelines for how to use "social media", so it got me thinking.

Background: I have been on the internet before it was born. I used BITNET to send emails on VAX mainframes. I participated on USENET newsgroups, helped create and moderate a couple, followed others closely. I set up mailing lists before there was any software to manage it. One of my websites was chosen by CNN in the "Sites We Relate To" list in 1996 when there were only a handful web sites and no search engines. I joined Facebook in 2006, and later twitter. I tend to tweet an update once a day. I do not strictly differentiate between work and personal tweets.

The background is not to brag about growing up with the internet. OK, maybe it is a bit about that, but it is more about my internet footprint. Google will return over 8,000 web pages if you search for "Yusuf Pisan". That is crumbs of information about me covering 15+ years. There are no doubt pieces of information there that would be news to my friends and certainly my family!

With Facebook, twitter, youtube, blogs etc, we now reveal even more information than before and at times when you look back at all the information that has been revealed, it can be disconcerting. Crumbs of information that was appropriate for the context, crumbs that were harmless to share in one forum does feel threatening when it is all gathered and organized.

A recent article from Google Blog discusses "reputation management at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/managing-your-reputation-through-search.html The advice is simple: Think twice before you post, ask websites to remove information about you that you believe is damaging to your reputation, and proactively publish information to counteract any negative comments.

It is a good start, but does not go far enough. It says nothing about whether you should become friends with your students or your boss on Facebook or whether it is OK to tweet about last nights party publicly.

Here are my set of rules:

- Think thrice before you post. This is a piece of information that is going to be traceable back to you for for decades. I probably don't follow this rule as closely as I should, but I believe it still holds as the first rule.

- What you share is how people see you; it is your reputation, manage it wisely. What you say ultimately reflects on you. Use your own personal email address and not your company's address since you are not the company's official spokesperson. You have every right to speak your mind, but what you say will likely reach your boss or your future potential boss and these people may consciously or unconsciously take this information into account when taking a decision. This might work for you or against you.

- If you do not share, you do not contribute, you do not belong. To become part of a community, you need to share a bit of yourself. Sometimes this sharing can be on a purely intellectual level, but often on social networks it is a combination of personal and private information. Understand that you are making a part of you public, very public. Different people have different levels of privacy needs find a level that suits you and examine it occasionally to confirm that your are still comfortable with the level of privacy you have chosen. My wife, Meryl McQueen, uses twitter only to tweet her poems. Her 120 poems are already public on her web site, so for her twitter is just another way of getting people to read her poems. She has 12 books on Amazon (yes, I am proud :-) and has sample chapters on various web pages, but she prefers not to tweet or write about her personal life. My privacy need is very different. I have over 600 friends on facebook and will accept friendship requests from anybody who I have met in-person, regardless of how briefly we have met. My Twitter, which gets the same status updates as my Facebook page, goes back and forth between being public and protected; somehow I cannot decide. My blog is on a personal web site and is publicly available. My flickr account has some public pictures, but not all.

- Reflect on why you tweet and why you make information public. For me, there are several reasons. A lot of computer science professors and game developers are on facebook. I tweet because I want to be part of that community. It provides a way for me to be connected, to be aware of what they are doing and let them know what I am doing. I tweet my accomplishments and my students' accomplishments. A youtube video from my students says a lot about my teaching and may get a job for my students or get people recommending my subjects. The tweet may be the only way to get people to read my research paper or to let them know about the project I am working on. I tweet to ask for help and comment offering help; it is all part of being connected to a large community. I like having a large group of people I can reach out for advice whether it is what time management software you sue on the Mac or recommendations for a restaurant.

- There is no one way. Not everybody uses social media in the same way. The current technology seems to particularly fit extroverts who prefer to have lots of weak social connections. That may not be your style. Take the time to find what you are comfortable. If reading updates from 200 people leaves you too exhausted to share any time with friends or do any real work, find a different way. Don't let social media rule/dictate your lifestyle.

- You do not have to hide where you work, but depending on how tolerant your employer is you may not want to publicize it too much. You are not the spokesperson of the company (unless you really are). Try to make sure your opinions are not interpreted as official policy.

- What is a friend? "Friend" means very different things on different platforms. On Facebook, I will not request to be friends with students while I am still teaching them, but will accept invitations from students. On twitter, I may decide to follow any public feed, even a student, but will not ask to follow a protected feed of a student while I am teaching them. On linkedin, any professional connection, even connections that I have not met in-person are acceptable. Once in a while, a social media will use my address book and create extra connections, so I occasionally and inadvertently violate this rule.

It is a new world. We are making the rules as we go along. Find a way to contribute, find a way to become part of a community because we are social beings after all. 

JOB: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer for Games at The University of Technology, Sydney

JOB: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer* for Games at The University of Technology, Sydney

http://www.jobs.uts.edu.au/job/job_details.cfm?id=398945&from=direct
Closing Date: 9 October 2009

[ Below information has a lot of my personal comments and
observations, please make sure you read the key selection criteria
from the above web page carefully when  putting together your
application ]

This is a permanent position at the School of Software in the
University of Technology, Sydney**

UTS is based close to Central train station in Sydney and Sydney is
the world's best city***.

The School of Software undertakes pioneering teaching and research
essential for Australia's futures ranging from developing prototype
games for education, training and social issues, to examining and
understanding virtual worlds and how they can be used.

The School is seeking to appoint a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer. You will
join an active, vibrant and friendly School with a track record in
cutting-edge research and teaching at both undergraduate and
postgraduate levels. The School has developed valuable research, built
consulting and commercial links with leading organisations and
industries in Australia and is connected to two major University
Research Centres.

The successful candidate will hold a PhD or equivalent in a relevant
field as well as a strong background in computer games, interactive
entertainment or 3D animation. The successful applicant/s will also be
supervising higher degree research students as well as making a
contribution to the teaching activities of the Faculty.

Essential qualification: PhD in a related field. Since this position
is in the Faculty of Engineering and IT (FEIT), people from technical
fields would be preferred.

Essential Knowledge:

-       Demonstrated knowledge in one or more of the school's disciplines
including computer games, interactive entertainment, animation and
related industries.
-       Demonstrated knowledge of recent advances in one or more of the
school's disciplines
-       An appreciation of computing and software practice
-       Demonstrated depth of knowledge in innovation and in new modes of practice

Relevant Research Groups:

-       Games Studio: http://games.it.uts.edu.au/ -- Yes, the web page needs
updating, email me if you have questions
-       Human Centred Technology Design:
http://www.research.uts.edu.au/strengths/hctd/overview.html
-       Interaction Design and Work Practice Laboratory:
http://research.it.uts.edu.au/idwop/about.html
-       Creativity and Cognition Studios: http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative

Relevant Courses (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Degrees)

-       Bachelor of Science in Games Development:
http://www.handbook.uts.edu.au/it/ug/index.html -- Small number of
students (intentionally!), but the subjects that make up the course
would be most relevant for people who are applying for this position
-       Graphics & Animation Submajor:
http://www.handbook.uts.edu.au/directory/smj02066.html -- This is one
of the specializations for students studying Bachelor of Science in
Information Technology
-       Master of Animation:
http://www.handbook.uts.edu.au/courses/c04212.html and
http://www.dab.uts.edu.au/design/graduate-show/masters.html -- This is
a cross-faculty course (Faculty of Design and Architecture and Built
Environment, Faculty of Engineering and IT, and Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences)

UTS has over 32,000 students and 2525 staff members (831 academic,
1163 support and 530 designated as research/support/academic staff).
Additional facts can be found at http://www.uts.edu.au/about/vcw.html

Some facts about Faculty of Engineering and IT (based on march 2008 figures)

Total Faculty Budget: $40M
Full time and fractional academic staff: 157.5 FTE (Full Time Equivalent)
Part time casual academic staff: 40 FTE
Support Staff: 107 FTE

2007 Undergraduate Students: 4146
2007 Postgraduate Students: 2258

Research Income: 6.6M

The official job announcement is located at
http://www.jobs.uts.edu.au/job/job_details.cfm?id=398945&from=direct
Please contact Richard Raban Richard.Raban@uts.edu.au for official
enquiries and me (yusuf.pisan@uts.edu.au) for unofficial enquiries
about this position.

(*)How does Lecturer/Senior Lecturer translate to the titles in USA?
In USA, the usual titles are Assistant Professor is used for people
that are pre-tenure, Associate Professor for people who have tenure
and Professor for people who have been around, and contributed, for a
long time. In Australia (and UK and some other countries), the titles
are slightly different. The titles are not related to tenure since
there is no tenure. The number of full-professors is much smaller than
USA and there is often a quota on how many full-professors there can
be at the university or faculty level. People who join university
post-Phd are usually appointed as a lecturer. There are 6 steps in
lecturer and you usually go up a step each year although occasionally
it is possible to skip steps. Once you reach step-5 or step-6, you are
expected to apply for the next position. Senior lecturer similarly has
6 steps which is followed by associate professor position. From
associate professor to professor is only 4 steps, but is expected to
take a longer time and is dependent on university levels quotas and
such. The salary scales for UTS is available at
http://www.hru.uts.edu.au/manual/2ea/academic/schedule1.html Faculties
will occasionally have "salary loading" schemes to attract and keep
exceptionally qualified academics. In most cases, all academics who
are at Lecturer B step-2 across the university will get the same
salary. Faculty of Engineering and IT (the faculty where this job is
located) currently does not have a salary loading scheme. Going back
to how titles translate. Lecturer is usually equivalent to Assistant
Professor. Early years of Senior Lecturer correspond better to
Assistant Professor while later stages correspond better to Associate
Professor in USA.


(**)What does "permanent position" mean? In USA, after 7 years, you
get tenure which confirms that the university wants to keep you
forever and provides a high degree of job security. In Australia (and
UK and some other countries), there is no tenure. Instead, you are
hired into a permanent position. You are on probation for the first
2-3 years and in 99% of the cases, you become "permanent staff" at the
end of that period. While it is not called tenure, being permanent
staff does provide the similar  high degree of job security. Once you
are permanent staff, you remain permanent staff and do not have any
further probationary periods as you get promoted from lecturer to
senior lecturer to associate professor to professor.

(***) Sydney is the world's best city. This is more than my personal
opinion, see http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/07/12/australia.bestcity/index.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23306132-2702,00.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE55G0RM20090617
http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/best-city-sydney-loses-out-to-melbourne-20090609-c16x.html
http://www.askdeb.com/personal-finance/world/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Most_Livable_Cities

A Fool's Ranking

[ I do not represent any university, I just work in one. All my comments are as a private citizen, not as a representative of any university. ]

Which university does better research, Princeton, Harvard, Yale or Cambridge? How do you choose between MIT, Stanford and CalTech?

These are top-10 universities. Their rankings may differ from year to year, one might be much better in a  particular area than other, but these are top-10 universities. Ranking them from 1 to 10 and making a decision based on the ranking alone does not make any sense.

This is exactly what the Australian Research Council is trying to do. They want to rank all universities in Australia. In fact, not just universities, they want to rank all research groups in all disciplines against each other. Once they have a ranking, the bureaucrats can easily allocate the money. Since Australian universities are heavily dependent on government, almost 40% of their funding comes from the government, these rankings matter a lot to the universities in question. Get ranked low and your budget is cut which will result in increased staff loads, inability to upgrade infrastructure and even firing people. Get ranked high and you can poach the good researchers from other universities, improving your ranking and lowering theirs in one swoop.

But before we can have rankings, we need indicators of what we can measure. Indicators are all the things academics produce as part of their work and all the official recognitions they receive: journals, conference papers, grant dollars, awards, prizes, plenary addresses, patents, etc. Once you have the indicators, you can attach weights to how important each one is with respect to each other, say a conference paper is worth two plenary addresses and a patent is worth three journal papers. After a bit of multiplication and addition, you end up with a number for each researcher, bundle up the researchers and you end up with a number for the research group, bundle them up and you have a number for the university. You can then rank universities and distribute the small pot of money among them. Starving them all, but starving them all fairly.

That is what it essentially comes down to. Funding from the Australian government to universities has been steadily going down for the last 15 year. Australian PhDs produce only 7.8 PhDs per 100 workers  compared to Germany's 21.1. The funding to universities does not need to be doubled, it needs to be quadrupled if we want to catch up. We have all kinds of nice data showing that Australia is producing more research papers even with the declining funding, but that does not mean you can feed universities less and less forever. Plus, the increased in publications activity comes at the cost of quality and impact. If a researcher writes 5 extra papers, but nobody reads them, does that still count as increased research activity?

These indicators are supposed to cover all research output in all disciplines, but disciplines differ from each other. For one discipline, design exhibits is the most prestigious, for another defining international standards. Deciding on these indicators is no easy task. ARC released a consultation paper last year, the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative. It list over 100 disciplines, groups into 8 discipline clusters. Each disciple has a list of indicators which can apply to it. The consultation paper from 2008 is 29 pages long. The 2009 version is better, it is 52 pages long! It lists all approved research disciplines and their indicators. I suspect the 2010 version will add individual weightings for the 100 plus disciplines and we can then start adding them up to get our university rankings.

There are 39 universities in Australia. It is not a big list. When we find that University of Sydney is ranked higher than University of Western Sydney is anybody going to be surprised at that. Is it really meaningful if there are 7 universities in the ranking list between these two universities or 15? Does anybody calculate the cost of thsi exercise, not just writing these long reports, but each academic entering all of their data into a centralised system in the hopes it will get their university some additional points, each discipline trying to influence the indicators and weightings in hopes that they would come up ahead. All this activity, all this time spent so we can get a list of universities from 1 to 39, so we can distribute the small pot of government handout fairly and starve them all slowly and equally at the same time.

Nobody wants to tackle the big issue. Australian universities are suffering under the current funding model. They either need to be better funded or released from government red tape so that they can find their own path. The Australian government dictates what universities can teach, how much they can charge, how many students they can take and even whether they are allowed to close a department or not. We need to get away from the government knows best approach and let the universities free. Let them experiment, let them fail or succeed in their own terms. The government should setup multiple funding agencies, each with their own priorities, each with their own unique way of doing things, so we can discover which ones work. This monolithic approach of developing indicators for all disciplines, adding up the numbers is not going to move us forward. We need leadership, we need strategic decisions. We do not need more bureaucracy!

* The curious reader can read the "Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative" published by ARC in June 2008 from http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/ERA_ConsultationPaper.pdf

CFP: FDG 2010: The 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

The Call for papers for FDG 2010 is now out at http://fdg2010.org/

FDG 2010: The 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
19-21 June 2010, at Asilomar Conference Grounds, Monterey, California.
http://fdg2010.org/

*** Important Dates ***
Workshop Proposals:              18 Sep 2009
Paper and Poster Submission:      5 Feb 2010
Doctoral Consortium Submission:  12 Feb 2010
Conference:                   19-21 Jun 2010

FDG 2010, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital
Games, is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research
and education involving games, game technologies, gameplay and game
design. The goal of the conference is the advancement of the study of
digital games, including new game technologies, capabilities, designs,
applications, educational uses, and modes of play.

FDG 2010 will include presentations of peer-reviewed papers, invited
talks by high-profile industry and academic leaders, hands-on
tutorials and topical panels on a range of subjects related to games
research and education. We invite researchers and educators to share
insights and cutting-edge results relating to game technologies and
their use.

....

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
======================

Please see http://fdg2010.org/ for this year's conference and
http://foundationsofdigitalgames.org/ for past years.

To get the latest news on FDG, subscribe to the FDG-announce mailing
http://groups.google.com/group/fdg-announce/subscribe

The New Professor

What is the role of a Professor? Mostly paperwork.


Something sad is happening at universities. Teaching and Research is no longer the two primary goals of university. Universities, whether they are for-profit or non-profit, are turning into organizations that need to make money so they can sustain themselves, so they can continue to grow. High quality teaching and good research are two of the many things they might be advertise to attract more money.

How does this happen? First, you bring in a CEO as the president of the university. CEO is good at managing large organizations, so they start compartmentalizing parts and activities to separate what parts are making money and what parts are losing money.

Next, for costly parts, such as technical services, you outsource them or centralize them and bind them with a SLA (Service Level Agreement). When anything is needed, people should fill a form, get a ticket which is guaranteed to be attended in 6 hours or less. Of course, part of these SLA's is that new software takes 30 days to install in teaching labs, 4 months notice is required for installing any new software at public access labs. Well, you justify it saying that standardization is important and pople should plan ahead.

Next, you look at the cost of teaching. Turns out that if we can have bigger classes, it is cheaper per student. Go ahead, rationalize the small subjects, create much larger set of subjects. As long as all other universities are doing more or less the same thing, what choice do people have anyway. This bites most in places like Australia where universities tend to be already 20-40 thousand people and mainly funded by government (or government controlled tuitions and places). Cut costs and increase student numbers.

Permanent academics (or tenured porfessors) cost quiet a bit of money. If we can introduce casual staff (sessional staff) to come and teach subjects, we can seriously cut down costs. After all, any professor worth their weight should have great lecture notes that they would be able to hand over to an industry trained professional (i.e. anybody willing to do it and has a job outside the university) to do the teaching. The professors can then supervise 4-5 different subjects and as a bonus they get to teach a small subject of their own choosing. You have nowturned people with PhDs, people who are mostly trained in research, doing administrative tasks and managing casual staff.

Of course, all this is not possible without increasing the number of people in Human Resources to put together KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and creating a system where a piece of paper has to be signed for each employee twice a year by their supervisor and gets filed away. We can collate these results to compare faculties, schools, departments and identify the "weak" spots. Everybody is acting as a supervisor to some people and being supervised. Paper flows up the chain to fill the cabinets in Human Resources.

Still, the lazy professor can get away with a lot. Nothing really happens if you stop filling out the paperwork as a colleague once pointed out to me. He ignored all paperwork for the 5 years and then retired. Now, he comes back and teaches exactly the same subject he used to teach when he was a permanent employee, but gets paid 10% of the amount. He is officially retired. He is not working for money, so he does not need to care. It is the other adjuncts and casuals that are teaching either out of their own interest or becasue they hope to get a permanent position one day that suffer.

The percentage of tenured or tenure track professors is decreasing, the number of administrators and general staff in universities is increasing.

Not sure how this trend can be turned.

X|Media|Lab on Serious Games

X|Media|Lab on Serious Games is on

Friday June 12, Sydney

http://www.xmedialab.com/?q=node%2F273

So many outstanding people speaking at the conference:

Hear from the world's leading "Serious Games" and "Documentary" experts:

•    Noah Falstein - President, The Inspiracy (San Francisco)
•    Ondi Timoner - Director of Multiple Internationally Award Winning Documentaries DIG! and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC Director/Producer, Interloper Films (Los Angeles)
•    Ian Bogost - Founding Partner, Persuasive Games; Associate Professor at Georgia Tech (Atlanta)
•    Lee Sheldon - Video Game Writer & Designer; Professor at Indiana University (Indianapolis)
•    Michel Mol - Director of Innovation and New Media, Netherlands Public Broadcasting (Amsterdam)
•    Joshua Harris - Internet Pioneer, Artist (Los Angeles, Sidamo)
•    Courtney Gibson - Executive Head of Content Creation, ABC TV (Sydney)
•    Dr. Yusuf Pisan- Assoc. Professor and Director of Games Studio, University of Technology (Sydney)
•    Mandy Salomon - Senior Researcher, Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (Melbourne)
•    Stephen Sewell - Multi-award winning Writer (The Boys, The Blind Giant is Dancing); Director (Sydney)
•    David Hewitt - Creative Director, Tantalus Interactive (Melbourne)
•    Alana Valentine - Multi-award winning Writer (Parramatta Girls, Run Rabbit Run) (Sydney)
•    Keren Flavell - Co-Founder, Treet TV (Melbourne)
•    David S Vadiveloo - Director, Writer, Producer, Community Prophets (Melbourne)
•    Morgan Jaffit - Head, The Impossible Changing Brain Foundation (Brisbane)
•    Cath Godfrey - General Manager, Higher Education and Media Divisions, McGraw-Hill Australia/New Zealand (Sydney)
•    Robert J. Spencer - Founder, Interzone (Perth)

I am on one of the panels, towards the end of the day.

If you are in Sydney, don't miss this event!

Art Gallery NSW

Art Gallery NSW, originally uploaded by ypmm.

"Artworks . . . describe how they describe . . . . What art shows in
such a manifestation is,
indeed, how it functions." Joseph Kosuth, “Intention(s),” Art Bulletin, 1996

More information about the artist at www.skny.com/artists/joseph-kosuth/