The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired a collection of 14 video games of significant historical importance. This move is a recognition of video games as both Art and Interaction Design, and establishes the need to preserve these historical artifacts. Read MOMA’s full article for insightful remarks about its initiative.

From KPCC, a story on how OC video game entrepreneurs are raising money on the popular crowdsourcing site Kickstarter.

Twenty researchers from all over the world participated in the virtual poster session of the 5th Workshop on Massive Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2012). The workshop was held in Munich, Germany, on October 9. The virtual session was hosted by the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds using an OpenSimulator server featuring Vivox for voice and with content from the Universal Campus.

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In November of 2010, more than 30 scholars engaged in research on topics related to Computer Games and Virtual Worlds (CGVWs) participated in a workshop at UC Irvine to identify future research problems and opportunities in this arena. During the past year and a half the workshop continued online, culminating in the production of an extensive report characterizing this dynamic field of study. The report is now freely available!

What follows is the executive summary of this report.

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The June 2012 of the UC Irvine Law Review, entitled “Governing the Magic Circle: Regulation of Virtual Worlds“, features articles of several prominent professors regarding issues of governance in online games and virtual worlds. All articles are available online.

The Center is proud to be hosting the virtual conference for the 5th International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2012), which will take place in real life in Munich, October 9. The virtual conference center, based on the Universal Campus, will host the Poster session, as well as the Town Hall meeting that will include  members of the community who are unable to attend the workshop in Munich.

Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi and two other colleagues have published the book “Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method“. A great read for students, teachers, designers, and scholars interested in using ethnographic methods to study online virtual worlds.

Pierre Baldi and Cristina Videira Lopes have developed an infrastructure called the Universal Campuswhich allows, among other things, the organization and deployment of scientific meeting, conferences, classes, etc in a 3D virtual world. 2011. The work has been published in the ACM ELearn magazine.

OUTRUN Building the Un-simulation of a driving video game – by Garnet Hertz

April 13th, 2011, 7:41 am · 8 Comments · posted by Ian Hamilton

After a week spent building a computer game from scratch, Justin Britch is sitting behind a laptop Monday night just five hours from an 11 p.m. deadline.

“We couldn’t get our levels to work for a very long time,” Britch tells Reza Ghassemi, president of UC Irvine’s Video Game Development Club.

“For how long?” asks Ghassemi.

“Are they working now?” Britch asks his teammates.

No, half the levels still don’t work.

Britch, 19 and a resident of Mission Viejo, is participating in his second “Game Jam,” a week-long marathon competition put on by the university’s gaming club pitting teams of computer science, art and informatics majors working around the clock against one another to build computer games.

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