Subject: PARC Forum, April 28, 4 pm, Jane McGonigal, Supergaming!

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 13:25:19 PDT

PARC Forum: Thursday April 28, 2005 at 4:00 PM, George E. Pake Auditorium, 
Palo Alto, CA

        "Supergaming!  Design for Massively Collaborative Public Play"

        By Jane McGonigal, UC - Berkeley

This forum is OPEN to the public.

ABSTRACT:
This talk examines four experiments in supergaming, an emerging
constellation of mobile-social network practices that are both ludic, or
game-like, and spectacular - that is, intended to generate an audience. I
focus on a flash mob, an urban superhero game, a flashmob supercomputer, and
the award-winning alternate reality game I Love Bees to identify and analyze
four key attributes of supergaming.  I propose that it is 1) massively
scaled, as in supersized gaming; 2) embedded in and projected onto everyday
public environments, as in superimposed gaming; 3) able to heighten the
perceived power and imagined capabilities of its players, as in superhero
gaming, and 4) able to harness the play of distributed individuals into a
high-performance problem-solving unit, as in supercomputing gaming. Using
performance theory, cognitive psychology and my own experience as a
supergames designer, I argue that supergames are capable of producing shared
ludic frameworks, or gameworks, that can be extended to everyday life,
making public spaces, public utilities and public information more open for
persistent, playful engagement.	

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
          Jane McGonigal is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at the 
University
of California at Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Alpha Lab for
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. Her research focuses on
networked play and performance in public spaces, and the design &
development of systems and software for massively-scaled collaboration.
Outside of academia, she is an active pervasive game designer, currently
with 42 Entertainment.  She has worked on numerous award-winning projects,
including most recently the massively multiplayer alternate reality game I
Love Bees, which won the 2005 Innovation Award from the International Game
Developers Association and was honored by the New York Times' 2004 Year in
Review, and the mobile phone Go Game, which was named "Best Way to
Rediscover Your City" in 2002.) She has collaborated on art-game
installations for the Whitney Museum's digital artport and the Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, and has consulted recently for Intel, Microsoft,
Nokia and the Macarthur Foundation.

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UPCOMING FORUMS

May 5:   Jeff Boore, Joint Genome Institute, on Molecular Phylogeny.

May 12:   Albert Haldemann, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on Mars Rovers.

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