Virtual Worlds and Higher Ed in the UK

Interesting new snapshot report on the use of Virtual Worlds in Higher Education available at: http://virtualworldwatch.net/2009/10/19/choosing-virtual-worlds-for-use-in-teaching-and-learning-in-uk-higher-education/

Second Life and OpenSim appear to be the most widely used systems.

OAIS Reference Model Revisions

Proposed revisions to the OAIS reference model have now been released in draft form and are available at http://cwe.ccsds.org/moims/docs/MOIMS-DAI/Draft%20Documents/OAIS-candidate-V2-markup.pdf.  A lot to digest in here, but the more substantive changes seem to include access rights information as a new and separate class of information to be supported in an information package,  a heightened emphasis on notions of authenticity and what provenance information needs to be maintained to support that, and further explication of the relationship between representation information and the designated community, including a recognition that the necessary amounts of representation information needed by a designated community might change over time (as designated communities do not necessarily have a completely static knowledge base).  Representation Information has also now been opened up to include subtypes of information other than semantic and syntactic; this seems to be to allow people who want to include software needed to work with data in the representation information category, which strikes me as a singularly poor idea and one likely to lead to loss of information in the long-run.  The original OAIS spoke critically of relying on software as representation information for good reason (and interestingly, those criticisms appear to be maintained in the new version).  There is also a move towards allowing representation information to be maintained in a distributed fashion (i.e., for it to be held by an institution other than the one holding an information package that requires it).  While financially a good move, logistically it strikes me as problematic (you better have good alert services in place to let you know when the other institution decides to de-accession certain representation information), and logically out of keeping with the idea that representation information needs to be aligned with a designated community.  That last issue isn’t *necessarily* a bad thing; in the digital library context, the whole notion of the designated community has been problematic to say the least, as it assumes a homogeneity of technical knowledge among a community of users that does not seem to me to translate well from a physical science data curation context into a multi-disciplinary digital library context.

Which I think points to the big change going on here.  A lot of the revisions to OAIS being contemplated here seem to me to represent the intrusion of the larger digital library/digital preservation community into the OAIS space.  While that might be useful for the larger digital preservation community in terms of having a standard which addresses their needs, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing for the CCSDS and the astronomical data community they’re actually trying to serve.

Ian Bogost has an article up describing work done by some of his students at Georgia Tech to try to modify Stella, an emulator for the Atari 2600 platform, so that it would accurately reproduce the visual appearance of a game being played on a CRT when the game is in fact being displayed on a modern LCD screen.  They actually did a remarkably good job of reproducing after image effects, color blurring and noise.  This provides yet another case where hardware can have a subtle but profound impact on how someone might interpret the game.

Determining Copyright Status

Following on the all intellectual property/all the time Play Machinima Law conference, here’s an excellent article by Waheedan Jariwalla (via Peter Brantley) on determining the copyright status of works in the United States.  Kind of frightening in its implications for the amount of work involved in determining exactly when something goes out of copyright and when it doesn’t, but it is nice to know that works published before 1978 (within the precise legal definition of published) without a copyright notice fall into the public domain.  So, early games which were made available to the public without restriction and without a copyright notice attached qualify as public domain.

This chart by the eminent Peter Hirtle at Cornell provides a useful summary of the same information.

Play Machinima Law Conference

What better way to advertise a conference on machinima and intellectual property law than with machinima?  Kudos to Joshua Diltz for creating this ad for the upcoming Play Machinima Law conference.

More details on the conference can be found at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society website

Games as Transformative Works

The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures has a new issue out devoted entirely to games as tranformative works.  One particularly interesting article, “The everyday lives of video game developers: experimentally understanding underlying systems/structures,” is based on three years of ethnographic study of game developers in both the U.S. and India.  Another looks at games as examples of participatory culture.  Worth a read.

When preservation fails

Apparently, the United States government failed to keep detailed records on the manufacture of a critical component of the nuclear warheads on Trident missles.  They are now spending large sums of money trying to figure out how to manufacture it again.  While this is obviously a rather horrifying slip up, there may be a small bright spot for those of us interested in digital preservation.  We will doubtless see more and more situations of this kind as both government and industry discover that critical electronic records that they need to sustain various activities are vanishing without a trace.  The expense involved in trying to figure out how to recreate something like the Fogbank substance used in a Trident warhead should be a strong motivating force to fund preservation and records management work at a more appropriate level.

Retro Games destined for PSP?

Short article over at MTV Multiplayer, with a quote from a Sony exec indicating that they are interested in making retro games, including ones for non-Sony platforms available over the PSN network for use on the PSP.  I’m trying to think of a way to do this in a manageable fashion from Sony’s perspective that does not employ virtualization, and I’m coming up empty.  A question for our project is whether freelance efforts to develop emulators might begin to fade if the commercial players start providing their own emulators for earlier platforms.  It will also be interesting to see whether the game  companies care to share their emulator code.

Using the Source engine from Half-Life 2, researchers in the CS department at Durham University modeled their own building to use for virtual fire drills, to familiarize people with exit paths and look for problems in the building design.  BBC has the details.  I think it’s fairly clear at this point that game engines are going to end up being the primary platform for the majority of 3D modeling and simulation activity.

iPRES 2009

The iPRES 2009 Conference will be hosted by the California Digital Library at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA on Oct. 5-6, 2009.  Preliminary announcement is available here.

Next Page »