Dragon Age: Wardens Fall is an original Machinima series that chronicles the final mission of a Grey Warden. This is Episode 5!
Brian tries to stay focused after dealing with a problem.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Using two of the planet’s largest, creative online communities — World of Warcraft gamers and Etsy artists — as their laboratory, two Indiana University Bloomington researchers hope to understand how the inner workings of such massive, networked collaborations could benefit scientists, corporations and the very IT designers who facilitated the success of the two online communities.
“Massive communities of creativity like those represented by World of Warcraft (WoW) and Etsy have a structurally different model from the small teams of professionals working in the environments that major professional creative applications from Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft were designed for,” said IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing Assistant Professor Jeffrey Bardzell.
Bardzell and co-investigator Shaowen Bardzell, also an assistant professor at the school, have received a $686,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems to investigate and construct a history of the two large-scale collaborations and to then try and model how the two online communities successfully created and distributed productivity on a scale involving millions of users.
“Such a model could lead to the design of software tools to support massive creative collaborations in the sciences, as well as help to clarify the organizational and communications environments needed to support them,” Shaowen Bardzell added.
With respect to WoW, a massive online player game with more than 11 million users, the researchers will study a sampling of a creative product called machinima, which are user-created videos that number upwards of a half-million on sites like YouTube, Warcraftmovies.com and machinima.com. Even though any given machinima video may have been made by a small number of people, the researchers will use critical and systematic analysis of major WoW videos to tease out the history of machinima and place that next to their inquiry into the nature of massively amateur creativity.
“When we talk about population-level creativity, we don’t mean in a single video per se, but rather in the visual language out of which the video is made,” Jeffrey Bardzell said. “By analogy, a thriller in theatres today may have influences of Hitchcock and Polanski in it, because these two directors have helped construct today’s cinematic language of the thriller. But we obviously don’t say that the film was directed by Hitchcock and Polanski.”
One WoW machinima on YouTube of a funeral created for an actual WoW gamer who passed away has received 4.5 million views, and another called Craft of War: BLIND, viewable here, has had 4 million views and received more than 17,000 viewer comments on various WoW-related sites.
The second massive creative network to be studied, Etsy, unlike WoW is dominated by women and has hundreds of thousands of individual vendors spread over 150 countries. Each month it accounts for almost one million product sales valued at around $15 million.
“Etsy’s modes of production, folk theories of creativity and what is ‘quality,’ and social understandings may be gendered in a way that differs from that of the male-dominated WoW machinima community,” Shaowen Bardzell noted. “The goal here is to not only understand network-based participatory creativity, but specifically to consider it from the perspective of a female mode of creative knowledge production.”
Examples of how Etsy’s members use the site to explain creative processes and educate shoppers about products can be viewed here and here.
Hoping to bring clarity to the relationships between the creative practices of small professional teams and those of massive collaborations like WoW and Etsy, the Bardzells, who are married, see new opportunities arising for the design of creativity-support software and for an extension of successful, emergent network-based creative practices into the areas of professional innovations and scientific collaboration.
“Our community, the human-computer interaction community, needs to develop an understanding of these new appropriations of creative software,” Jeffrey Bardzell said. “And the science education community also has a stake in this work as most of these networks have home-grown and successful models of teaching and learning as one of their core social activities. In other words, these communities not only innovate in aesthetics, but also in pedagogy.”
Source: I.U. News Room
Brian deals with the new puppy and figures out how to make money with their shows.
It has been a rather depressing and painful few weeks. My neck and spinal problems do not seem to be improving at all, my physical therapy sessions are like traveling back to the Spanish Inquisition, my pit bull can’t get enough attention from me and my country is falling under the influence of the Dark Side. Add to that the fact that I can’t sit long enough to watch a full-length movie without first sucking down vicodin like a kid with a Slurpee. It has not been a good few weeks. I am not a happy camper. This teddy bear has gone grizzly. This… well, you get the idea.
So, when I turned on the tele today and flipped over to my Roku set top box and discovered there were new “channels,” I figured it would be an easy way to waste a few seconds. Lo and behold! There it was! Smilin’ back at me! Vimeo! A Vimeo channel! A friggin’ Vimeo channel! The clouds parted, the sun shone, my pit bull stopped nosing my crotch and all was right with the world… for a few seconds. Seriously, I am thrilled. I watch a lot of my favorite iClone, Moviestorm and other machinima films on Vimeo and now I can watch them on my television… in the comfort of my comfy chair. So what was my very first selection from Vimeo? What film blazed the path for all those to follow? Of all the films on Vimeo to debut on my television, what one was knighted by me to be my champion? “She Hasn’t Touched Her Soup” by Phil Rice. Why? I haven’t the foggiest idea. It just popped into my head and there I was bringing it up. That was quickly followed by “Male Restroom Etiquette,” “Clear Skies,” “The Nobbit” teaser, an episode of “Odyssey” and on and on and on.
I have a relatively small computer screen. 20″ measured diagonally. There honestly is not any room for a larger one since I have to use two monitors and they have to sit side by side. So, it was rather nice to see these films on a much larger screen. Very nice. And, since I am not permitted to lift or carry anything heavier than a can of beans, it was also easy and convenient. I like convenient… and easy.
Okay, so it was not a big news headline item or some genre breaking release. It was the highlight of my day. And after another trip to the Spanish Inquisition, I needed it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear a vicodin calling my name. And then it is off to watch “Clear Skies 2″… again.
An expedition unearths Ancient ruins on the unexplored world of Calypso; Ryan meets an old flame, Frost has an unpleasant encounter with something unknown, and the Odyssey crew discovers the first inklings that something dangerous is lurking out amongst the stars…
Webcomic publisher DarkBrain, LLC announced this past weekend that effective immediately, all content on their website (http://darkbrain.com) – including over 240 pages of comics – will now be available to readers at no charge. Each comic includes graphic novel quality art, original music, and voice-over narration. Stars with voicework in DarkBrain comics include adult film actresses Tabitha Stevens and Raylene, as well as rock star Tony Campos (Prong, Ministry, Asesino, Static-X).
DarkBrain produces edgy content designed specifically for PG-13 and R+-rated audiences. At its inception, the site utilized a state of the art preferences system where readers control how intense they wish their viewing experience to be. With the restructure, readers will now have free access to 12 original series on the site with preset PG-13 content. In addition, DarkBrain.com will now offer advertising space.
To reach readers who prefer R+-rated content, DarkBrain.com now offers monthly memberships. For $4.99 a month, members have access to the preference system that allows them to choose the intensity of their content, as well as access to Members-Only and pre-released content and an ad-free environment. Members may also purchase a 6-month membership for $24.95.
To improve visibility and revenue to the site, site publisher Andrew Zar found this recent change timely and appropriate. Since the change, DarkBrain.com has had over 40,000 page views per day. As an added feature, DarkBrain is also asking all registered users to vote on the titles they wish to see continue, in an attempt to streamline their product line to the trends of its readers. In addition to the survey, the stories on DarkBrain.com have been organized by genre, aiding readers in finding the content that most appeals to them.
Source: Darkbrain.com
The group goes out for a heavenly night on the town.
The story is based on an extract from the my novel “Memories of Eternity”, which is still a work in progress.
Remember when I stated that the new longer time limits for YouTube would allow more ambitious and, in many instances, better quality films to be presented? This is one of those films I was thinking of. It was done with iClone v3.2. I found myself viewing this several times just to pick up on little details that many filmmakers might have overlooked or simply left out. Even if you’re not into this genre of film, it is well worth watching to see what can be done with iClone and to understand what goes into the visual composition of a scene.
Codex gets some computer help while the Guild struggles with how to build a Guild Hall.
