If you’re here for the games, here they are. For my reflections on the GGJ in general and our site in particular, read on.

• Eat or Die: Extinction
• The Child
• The Loneliest Creature

If you want to know what our setup looked like, here are a couple representative pictures (there was a lot of hunching over laptops).

A couple weekends ago, I organized the local Global Game Jam site at UW-Whitewater. This was the first year that UWW participated and I want to share some of the results and reflections of the event. Nine dedicated jammers participated on three teams. We chose team membership based on the distribution of skills; each jammer was either a writer/designer, artist, or implementer, and the teams formed naturally once we found out that we had three of each of these roles. I used “implementer” because we didn’t have any proper programmers; implementers were those who had some prior knowledge with a game creation or programming tool (Flash, Scratch, and Gamemaker).

We all lamented the absence of programmers at our site, a problem that might have been avoided by recruiting participants earlier or working together with a representative of computer science to recruit students (both of which will happen next year). Even without programmers, one participant learned Gamemaker in great depth while one of our writers became immersed in Inform7 about half-way through the jam and ended up working with another team to implement their interactive fiction game (The Child). 

All of this was great for me – I had wanted to play around with Inform7 and Gamemaker, and now have rudimentary experience with both. I’m also hopeful that this group will keep the momentum going – they’ve almost completed the process of forming a student organization dedicated to creating games. There are more competitions and jams coming up, both local (PlayExpo) and not (LudumDare, IndieCade), stay tuned!

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via andymangold.com

Could these be any more beautiful?

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With the recent Mozilla/Metalab shakedown in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about stealing vs. borrowing in terms of web design. Both happen, both can be good, and both are easy to define. Stealing without giving credit is a bad idea. Stealing as a starting point for further exploration gives us new ideas and built-in reference points to compare and assess. Perhaps evolution is a better word.

Case in point: the bookmarklet pages for Tumblr and Posterous. I use and like both services, but prefer Posterous for my main blog because it allows me the freedom to control autoposting to other services. It doesn’t have the visual customization options that Tumblr does, but it has been improving rapidly. I believe that Tumblr did this “look up in your bookmark bar” arrow first, but here’s Posterous stealing and modifying the idea. Tumblr’s design is more successful because it comes off of the page with the drop shadow and actually points up to the bookmark bar. Posterous’s version stays on the page (and even disappears somewhat behind the “Manage” text) and points off to the left somewhere.

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I’m not Smashing Magazine, but as I’ve been doing freelance work with a ceramic artist wanting to revamp her website, I’ve been looking at a lot of websites created with Stacey. It’s a nice, non-database content management system that uses text files and folders to automatically generate text and image gallery content. It’s also very configurable (with css, javascript, etc.) These websites offer my favorite customizations and additions, as well as design flourishes, to the basic Stacey setup.

In order, the list of sites is below. They have a list of sites on their own website, but many of them use a default template and thus aren’t really worth looking at for inspiration.

• http://saviopalmerston.com/
• http://moregood.co.uk/
• http://kristinemorich.com/
• http://1nng.net/
• http://nooneinparticular.co.uk/
• http://ciaron.net/photo/
• http://wheattoast.org/
• http://natalienguyen.org/
• http://reinierkuipers.nl/
• http://www.thereis.co.uk/
• http://ronnywieckardt.net/
• http://getgoodnatured.com/
• http://rahulbotics.com/
• http://caseyagollan.com/
• http://fjordan.com/
• http://www.studiofrontaal.nl/#1
• http://theamericanshotgun.com/
• http://jader.me/
• http://dmk-loves-you.com/
• http://onemagiclab.com/

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Rhizome is featuring Chris Lanier‘s review of the Prospectives.09 exhibition in Reno, which included Gaming the Network Poetic. The exhibit came down last month, but I’ll be submitting GTNP to other venues in the near future. It’s a worthy read; here’s the bit about my piece:

Joshua Fishburn’s Gaming the Network Poetic (2009) links five games in a rosary of G5s, the monitors arranged in a pentagon. The clean vector design of each of the games is very appealing; simple geometric shapes recur throughout the games, serving separate functions. In one game, you click to break a square apart into smaller squares; in another, you try to attach little hinges onto drifting triangles, so that they swing together to form squares. Five people are meant to play the games simultaneously, with the activity of one game influencing the others – I have to confess, some of the connections escaped me. Perhaps this was the one piece in the exhibition that, while it invited participation, didn’t really need it. The five G5s could rest alone in the empty gallery, talking obscurely among themselves about the subtle relations between squares, triangles, and other geometry.

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Friends, especially those in Chicago, please check out Dialogue: Presented by IRUS art (an intercultural collaborative art work between artists in Iran and the U.S.) at Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago from January 29th through February 4th, with an opening reception on January 29th from 7-10 PM. This is an opportunity to see work that has so far only been shown in Denver, Colorado, as well as brand new works from new collaborating artists. Read what the Denver Post had to say about the exhibition in Denver.

For more information about Co-Prosperity Sphere, including location, check out http://coprosperity.org

For more information about Dialogue and IRUS art, check out http://irusart.org/

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I’m very excited to announce the opening of “39˚ 44′ 11″ N x 104˚ 59′ 21″ W“, an interactive installation included in Embrace! at the Denver Art Museum.

I am one of the collaborators on a team led by Timothy Weaver that also includes David Fodel, Brigid McAuliffe, and Nick Meyers. The show officially opened on November 14th, 2009 and our work is installed in the FuseBox Gallery on the 4th floor.

The Embrace! exhibit is all about engaging with the specific space of the Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Liebeskind. The 39N x 104W (for short) interactive installation addresses the challenge by using ecological data (solar wind, terrestrial climate, and biological) specific to the location of the Fusebox space to “paint” the gallery with sound and images. The visitor to the space contributes to this process — a camera tracks his/her location which allows the images to move and temporarily paint the wall.

The exhibition runs through April 4th, 2010, and features the work of 17 artists from around the world. It’s the boldest exhibit yet in this building and definitely worth a visit.

Additional links:

• DU Today Feature Story on 39N x 104 W
• Denver Post Review of Embrace!
• A Denver blogger’s experience of bringing kids to Embrace!
• KCFR’s Ryan Warner interviews curator Christoph Heinrich and artist Rick Dula about Embrace! (Direct link to audio stream)

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