Category Archives: Media Space

Games and tax credits

This found via Gamasutra

The Louisiana Senate Bill 341, an initiative to grant tax credits to companies setting up shop in Louisiana to produce video games and related interactive entertainment, has passed the Senate, according to online reports. The vote was 33-0 in favor of the bill, which means its passage to the House Ways and Means Committee is now clear.

The bill offers a tax credit of 10 percent of state income tax for companies who invest anywhere from $300,000 to $8 million in a Louisiana-based operation. Investments of over $8 million will earn a 15 percent credit. Any credits can be traded or transferred, but a failure to remain in business in the state for one year after credits are granted would result in penalties such as a loss of the credit.

Stoning Field update

As an obsessive, I find that it’s hard to let anything go that’s grabbed my interest, until the next thing comes along. One of the items on the obsession list is Stoning Field in Flash. With this I’m loving the programming. I remember back in the late seventies and early eighties being unable to get into BASIC because I really had nothing to do with it. The use never made sense to me. But the visual programming side of things has really grabbed me because it belies larger interests in spatialand memorial simulation. I work on the fundamental principles and the overall project. Anyway, there are two cells left to go then a whole lot of sweatening and then prep for publication. Then on to MX 2004, Lingo, and the college Composition course being built as a total digital environment.

Architecture and Game Space

David Thomas of Buzzcut will be doing work in the College of Architecture and Planning at UC Denver. He writes

I plan on working in the areas of leisure spaces, virtual places and model building. What connects a playground, Disneyland, an architectural model and a videogame? Well, that’s one way of asking the question I’m working on solving.

I’ll be interested in following along with his conclusions and analyses. But I wonder if the comment by the professor that concludes his post reveals a “new media” issue, one that Malcolm McCullough has a lot to write about in Digital Ground as it pertains to the connections between technology, architecture, and designed space.

Good software, reading, and TV

So, at the moment I’m eating a chocolate cone, watching an old episode of Homicide on the Playstation–tough to get the disk in with the cone in my left hand–and reading Mark Bernstein on food, good software, and weblogs and identity. He leads me in lots of directions. This is what comes.

I wish that I could get Neha and Susan and others to Belgium for Blogwalk 7. Also, I’d like to take a new media crew over to San Francisco for DSF 8.

Additionally, Mark writes (here’s the context link),

If your blog inscribes your calendar — adding speaking engagements and consulting trips — does it inscribe you? If it inscribes your bank account, does it change who you are?

king content

We’ve talked about this a lot but pertaining to the Stoning Field flash project content is king. I’m almost done grabbing all the assets I need: photos, video clips, and other elements such as buttons. Storyspace has provided the space for questions: how it will all be placed, where things will link to and more; and working in that space has provided lots of bangs–“oh, that’s where the still moon shot will go.” Doing all this, evaluating papers, dealing with committee work, and pushing for the new website has been an ordeal, though. That’s the life part.

It could always be that people are asked to conceive abstract spaces. But do we do enough considering the concrete in the abstract, such as an architectural plan. Overall, the sense that the project is a building to live in is the best metaphor that I can think of. Garden is nice though too. What would happen to the college paper if it were conceived as a physical space first, rather than as a set of abstract concepts? The image of a place is concrete after all. Just ask Yeats.

building

I’ll be building what’s called a wordpress theme over the next month or so so this area will run pretty much as usual. The Stoning Field project is pretty much taking over at the moment but certain design features of that Flash project are influencing my thinking, so a lot of that will go into the new great lettuce head area.

Why WordPress? Until Tinderbox for Windows, control over page layout for standard html pages is key because the decision has been made to make the weblog functionality the major node.

Anyway, here I will nest for the moment. Business as usual for now.

And so. Excellent meeting yesterday with the Narratives group. We talked letters, the market, and had a nice workshop.

Thanks everyone.

mathematical space

As I go deeper into actionscript, doing less and less actual work in Flash and more and more work in notebooks and Storyspace, I find that thinking about the spatial elements in terms of x, y, and z (a simulated point) points is critical to my understanding of the space I’m dealing with. In Flash MX/04, the stage can be fairly empty while much of the horsepower goes into Math.cos and array building, to name just a few methods.

But it’s more than just the math and organizing functions; it’s imagining and planning how a movie clip, say a circle or a word, will interact on a frame nested in some other clip and where they all “live” in the file. It’s fun to play with and associates to editing poetry in a lot of ways.

Which reminds me of a recent conversation in Brit Lit about the appeal of science for people like Huxley and Gosse. The immediacy of certain results can be tranformative. Better vision to bigger loads of smelted iron means impressive scales, greater human expansiveness, and mass social and cultural ill, as well as the opposite. The smaller scales that we can control gives the illusion of control on the opposite scale. As the body grows, it also reduces. The body in mathematical space.

more on circles

We know that the circles or bubbles touch and converge, partly, since we can only be in one place at a time; we live in our own space and can’t live outside of it; therefore, existence is a trap.

This is a problem that bothers a persistent character that I’ve been following sometime across several novels and in short stories. The real problem for “him,” he has a lot of names, has to do with living with what is and being able to describe such a “problem” as a problem.

Here’s an example. As a child, character x hates school and feels the approach of the monster while walking through the desert. He may hate school or he may hate that he has to fear it. Or he may hate that he can do nothing about the inevitability of the monster. He wonders why things are as they are and not some other way. Some might say that this is a foolish preoccupation but for character x it leads to interesting questions of place, role, and the choices we have to make concerning friendship and family. He has lots to do and has many journeys to work through, but in his own mind he is also a character to himself.