Week 1: Class Introduction
How does it relate from an anthropological perspective. We investigate the idea of technogenesis or the coevolution of ‘human’ and ‘technology’ Hayles, N. Katherine, 1943-. How We Think : Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago ; London :The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Exploring the material and geological elements that shape the baseline infrastructure for hosting and generating gameworlds from data centers and the cool microclimates necessary for their maintenance and rare earth minerals that build consoles/computers. Benjamin J. Abraham Digital Games After Climate Change Nicole Starosielski Media Hot and Cold (Elements)
This module intends to investigate how gameworlds can be vehicles or virtual laboratories for exploring and testbedding certain properties they try to replicate in ecosystems. We will particularly focus upon the concept of Mesocosms that Chang borrows from biology as also a way to consider how gameworlds are multi-scalar objects not only bound to the biosphere yet also increasingly interdependent on the economy of remote sensing. We will briefly and expand the focus of location-based games that are reliant on GPS technologies. Readings: Chang, Alenda Y.. “Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games.” (2019). Jovanovic Damjan. Games and Worldmaking https://journal.b-pro.org/article/p3-games-and-worldmaking/
Everything Equilinox Eco SimEarth
We will uncover how Games or Game Engines are used as training grounds for Machine Learning. Readings: Rambach, Jason & Lilligreen, geb. Itsova, Gergana & Schäfer, Alexander & Bankanal, Ramya & Wiebel, Alexander & Stricker, Didier. (2020). A survey on applications of augmented, mixed and virtual reality for nature and environment. Huang, Jiawei & Lucash, Melissa & Scheller, Robert & Klippel, Alexander. (2019). Visualizing Ecological Data in Virtual Reality. 10.1109/VR.2019.8797771.