“ln this project-based research degree, you will investigate and design learning kits for museums and communities and small classes to create escape rooms (physical or hybrid or via a game engine) to help students develop their own learning by designing escape rooms for others. “
*Sorry, there are no degree fees for locals but there is also no scholarship funding attached to this one.
This book explores ways in which screen-based storyworlds transfix, transform, and transport us imaginatively, physically, and virtually to the places they depict or film. Topics include fantasy quests in computer games, celebrity walking tours, dark tourism sites, Hobbiton as theme park, surf movies, and social gangs of Disneyland.
How physical, virtual, and imagined locations create a sense of place through their immediate experience or visitation is undergoing a revolution in technology, travel modes, and tourism behaviour. This edited collection explores the rapidly evolving field of screen tourism and the affective impact of landscape, with provocative questions and investigations of social groups, fan culture, new technology, and the wider changing trends in screen tourism. We provide critical examples of affective landscapes across a wide range of mediums (from the big screen to the small screen) and locations.
This book will appeal to students and scholars in film and tourism, as well as geography, design, media and communication studies, game studies, and digital humanities.
*Webpage says 2023 but routledge told me 2022 but routledge said 2022.
Since the turn of this century (and even earlier), a plethora of projects have arisen to promise us bold new interactive adventures and immersive travel into the past with digital environments (using mixed, virtual or augmented reality, as well as computer games). In Playing with the Past: Into the Future Erik Champion surveys past attempts to communicate history and heritage through virtual environments and suggests new technology and creative ideas for more engaging and educational games and virtual learning environments.
This second edition builds on and updates the first edition with new game discussions, surveys, design frameworks, and theories on how cultural heritage could be experienced in digital worlds, via museums, mobile phones, or the Metaverse. Recent games and learning environments are reviewed, with provocative discussion of new and emerging promises and challenges.
I have received an invitation from the ERC Advanced Project “An-iconology. Theory, History, and Practices of Environmental Images” (AN-ICON) hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” (https://an-icon.unimi.it/) to speak at the “AN-ICON” International Workshop in MILAN June 2023. An honour to be invited.
We are now organising the workshop “Real Space-Virtual Space. Aesthetics, Architecture and Immersive Environments,” scheduled on 19th-21st June 2023, dedicated to the dialogue between virtual spaces, architecture and urban planning. We will investigate this intertwining which is more and more relevant at both practical and academic level by adopting a transdisciplinary and multimethodological approach – including aesthetics, phenomenology, media studies, architectural design, urban planning, cultural heritage studies.
The workshop will be held at the University of Milan and Milano Triennale (https://triennale.org/), the renowned Italian institution dedicated to design and architecture.
“Over the years, the CIPA Symposium has been an important international crossroad for a wide community of researchers, professionals, and site managers interested in documenting, understanding, and preserving cultural heritage. CIPA was jointly founded in 1968 by ICOMOS (International Council of Monuments and Sites) and ISPRS (International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) to facilitate the transfer of technology from the measurement sciences into the heritage documentation and recording disciplines. Since then, the biennial symposia have enabled an ever-growing community to meet, debate, network, and get up-to-date. After the very sad and long period that forced us to stay separated, we will meet again in person during CIPA2023 in Florence, from 25-30 June 2023.”
Authors of selected papers will have the opportunity to present their work during the Symposium as long or short presentations.
Proceedings will collect all the papers that have passed a peer-review process in the ISPRS Archives and Annals.
Selected contributors will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers to Special Issues of Journals linked to the Conference (e.g. Applied Geomatics, Ananke, Sensors, Virtual Archaeology Review – list to be updated).
Champion, E., & Hiriart, J. (2023: In press). Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture. In C. Randl & D. M. Lasansky (Eds.), Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space. MIT Press. 08/2023.
Champion, E. M. (2023: In press). Digital Heritage Ethics. In A. Pantazatos, T. Ireland, J. Schofield, & R. Zhang (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Ethics. Routledge.
Champion, E., & Emery, S. (2023: Pending). Gamification of Cultural Heritage as a resource for the GLAM sector. In J. Nichols & B. Mehra (Eds.), Data Curation and Information Systems Design from Australasia: Implications for Cataloguing of Indigenous Knowledge in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Routledge.
Champion, E. (2022: In press). Not Quite Virtual: Techné between Text and World. In B. Mauer & A. Salter (Eds.), Reimagining the Humanities. Parlor Press.
Conference paper
Champion, E., & McCallum, S. (2022, 20-23 November 2022). Game Design Prototyping Workshop: Brainstorming and Designing Collaborative and Creative Game Prototypes with Immersive SurfacesACM ISS 2022, Wellington, New Zealand. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532104.3571472
In this chapter I will examine difficult and dark heritage. Others have articulated the overlap and potential different connotations and spheres of influence of dark heritage and difficult heritage (Thomas et al. 2019). For the sake of expediency, I will not attempt to distinguish between difficult heritage and dark heritage (a term imported from dark tourism) as I am particularly interested in the difficult interaction aspects of communicating dark heritage due to the technical challenges of virtual heritage, gaps or immaturity in virtual heritage as a distinct scholarly field, and the still to be fully explored role and impact of virtual heritage as an immersive and interactive medium capable of coaxing, encouraging and affording reflectivity.
I’m seeing if I can move my @nzerik twitter feed and friends to Mastodon (there my handle is @ErikC@ausglam.space). Mastodon is interesting as people can choose a themed server but still follow others on different servers (note: their email address reflects the server they choose).
It is a little confusing and doesn’t have the immediate impact and convenience of Twitter but it is an interesting project. I joined years ago but didn’t see anything happening. Recent Twitter developments and announcements encouraged me to vacate Twitter and there are tools that can cross-post tweets and (Mastodon) toots.
PHD project in Adelaide, no scholarship but no fees, with cool museum partner (https://mod.org.au):
The successful candidate will investigate and design learning kits for museums, communities and small classes to create escape rooms either physical or hybrid, or via a game engine. The kit will provide resources and interaction strategies to help budding escape room designers plan escape rooms for their compatriots, and in doing so learn for themselves how to create tricky interactive puzzles, quizzes and physical riddles based on principles in science, mathematics or history. The instructions will be either via virtual examples through a game engine or game engine exporting to VR, or via online instruction videos using the latest instructional video expertise.
Successful completion of the project will provide you with experience in boardgame, physical escape room, digital game or VR escape room design including scripting, prototyping, digital modelling, and potentially animation experience. As well as a background in human-computer interaction and education. Thus, you will be provided with the skills for a successful and exciting research or industry career in a diverse range of areas.
What you’ll do
In this project-based research degree, you will review, design and evaluate design resources (physical and digital) for the creation of escape rooms by design students.
You will engage and partner with MOD. staff and deploy IVE, VR and AR equipment, as well as run and evaluate escape room design workshops.
Where you’ll be based
You will be based at UniSA Creative, incorporating the South Australian School of Art, which brings together the disciplines of architecture, planning, art and design, journalism, communication and media, film and television and the creative industries to produce flexible graduates with multidisciplinary capabilities. Our research explores the complexities of the world around us. We engage in future-focused, cross-disciplinary research and consultancy to produce inspired solutions that are human-centred and sustainable.
I have been invited to speak at NTNU Trondheim in April 2023 (tentatively, Tuesday and Wednesday 18 and 19 April) and run a related workshop in Greece a week or so later (to be confirmed). The project, for which I have been an external advisor, is Echoing “recovery of cultural heritage through higher education-driven open innovation” (EU/ERASMUS).
I may be able to visit a virtual heritage colleague and his students in Munich during that time, and, hopefully, Iceland.
I may aim for one of these conferences but ah, scheduling may be tricky (and Easter Friday is 7 April, at least in Australia, next teaching day is, maybe, Wednesday 26 April due to Anzac Day).
3 April 23 (abstracts due 31/10/22) CAA023 CAA 50 Years of Synergy in Amsterdam Netherlands
11 April 23 (abstracts due 21/10/22) FDG Foundations of Digital Games (workshops 21/10) in New Beginnings Lisbon Portugal
23 April 23 (abstracts due 19/01/23) CHI2023 CHI2023 late-breaking in work Hamburg Germany
I have been involved in UniSA joining MEGACRC CRC for Mega-Event Innovations and the University has agreed, in principle, to joining the bid. I will be busy over the next few weeks helping with potential Australian and South Australian industry partners but also planning some events and at least one trip in 2023. More on that in the next post.
I am hosting the Workshop on Game Design Prototyping at ACM ISS (Interactive Surfaces and Spaces) conference, 20 November 2022, with Simon McCallum, Wellington, NZ.
This workshop will take place over half a day and focus on tools and example projects that break down necessary and sufficient elements of effective game design, tips to create and encourage small group design ideas, and potential environmental challenges that can be overcome or at least approached with low-cost and accessible tools and platforms. We will focus on physical prototypes but can also examine games using game engines or specific XR formats but we don’t expect to have HMDs available.
Call for Participation
This workshop will take place over half a day and focus on tools and example projects that break down necessary and sufficient elements of effective game design, tips to create and encourage small group design ideas, and potential environmental challenges that can be overcome or at least approached with low-cost and accessible tools and platforms. We will focus on physical prototypes but can also examine games using game engines or specific XR formats but we don’t expect to have HMDs available.
We will work in groups of 3 and 4 on provided game challenges, ideas developed by individual groups or we can (with enough notice) work on improving and game-testing ideas and prototypes provided by attendees.
The proposed schedule will be:
Section
Minutes
1. Introductions for all
20
2. Overview: games, gamification
20
3. Discussion of technologies, methods + prototyping
10
4. Group suggests ideas.
10
5. Short break/questions.
20
6. Selection of teams
10
7. Work on game ideas as prototypes, and playtest solutions.
Ideally, by the end of the workshop, the participants will:
Provide (at some stage of the experience), a framework in which the player (or perhaps, here, participant is a better word) gains an overview of what has been documented, simulated, or construed.
Convey a sense of the historical context, and the way in which that shaped the actions of the inhabitants.
Affordances to help participants understand and explain the information in a way that suits them rather than the designer and to allow for different pathways, actions and goal selection.
Encourage the participants to seek out more information for themselves beyond the immediate simulation.
Enterprise Fellow Erik Champion, has organized game design workshops in Australia, Italy, Poland, Qatar, Finland, and USA. He specializes in virtual heritage and serious games for history and heritage.
Simon McCallum is a games expert and has over 25 years experience having taught games in New Zealand and Norway. Simon has also spent some time working for games companies in Norway. Simon helped setup the NZ Games Development Conference in the early – mid 2000s.
This workshop will be physical but the first 45 minutes (introductions and background to tools and techniques) could be accessible online if required. Ideally, the workshop will be 12 to 20 people.
Sorry I have been distracted by a Cooperative Research Centre application (plus two books in press and one book proposal under review) but normal service will resume shortly.
Speaking of which, these should be out relatively shortly:
Champion, E., Nurmikko-Fuller, T., & Grant, K. (2022: invited). Chapter 12 Alchemy and Archives, Swords, Spells, and Castles: Medieval-modding Skyrim. In R. Houghton (Ed.), Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games, UK: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/9783110712032. To be published 24 October 2022. (Some content seems available online already or via academic institutions).
Erik Champion 