FORM – a magazine highlighting Swedish form and design – recently wrote a piece on game design and our department, interviewing both captains of the ship that is GAME; Don and Steven.
Jan Eliasson, Former Swedish Foreign Minister
Jan Eliasson is a seasoned diplomat and a former Swedish Foreign Minister. He has been the President of the UN General Assembly, and served as UN:s first Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. During his tenure, he was involved in UN operations in Somalia, Sudan, Mocambique, and the Balkans; undertaking initiatives concerning landmines, conflict prevention and UN reform.
He will make an exposé over the human rights area and the creation of the UN Commission for Human Rights during his tenure as President of the UN General Assembly. The world community’s responsibility to protect civilians in war and other crisis will be highlighted. Eliasson will also tell us about his various missions as UN negotiator, the challenges for the UN to prevent war and conflict and to avoid human catastrophes.
This is the second in a series of public lectures hosted by GAME this autumn, for our course in Human Rights and Diversity in Serious Games. Every Friday, weeks 35 to 44 – we’ll invite interesting and amazingly experienced men and women, to discuss human rights and diversity in the context of modern interactive and ever more social technology. All lectures are free and open to the public!
OBS! The talk has been postponed!
New time: Monday, Oktober 12, 13:00 – 15:00
Time: Friday, September 4, 13:00 – 15:00
Location: HGO, lecture hall E31
Want to take the course? The application date has been extended to 18th of September.
Olle Wästberg, Director for The Swedish Institute
Olle Wästberg is a former member of the parliament and former state secretary for finance and budget. He has been CEO of several companies in the information sector and editor-in-chief for the newspaper Expressen. Olle Wästberg was Consul General of Sweden in New York 1999-2004, and is currently serving as Director-General of The Swedish Institute
Olle will be kicking off our brand new course “Human Rights and Diversity in Serious Games“!
Throughout this course – every friday, weeks 35 to 44 – we will invite some amazingly experienced and influential men and women, to discuss human rights and diversity in the context of modern interactive and ever more social technology. All lectures are free and open to the public!
Time: Friday, August 28, 13:00 – 15:00
Location: HGO, lecture hall E31
Want to take the course? The application date has been extended to 18th of September.
Pure Data – A Teacher-Teaching-Teachers Workshop
It might be summer and all the students are long gone; perhaps at the beach barbecuing and enjoying the so famously supreme weather of this island. But we the staff – ever the diligent and hard working people that we are – obviously stay on board to deal with the summer courses and preparing the autumn semester.
This week we had another superb reason to stay indoors, as Iwona had invited Marco Donnarumma to do a two-day Pure Data workshop with us. Pure Data (Pd) is a language for collaborative real-time graphical programming, with a special focus on hardware interactions and audio / video processing.
Pd is free, platform independent and fundamentally different from anything we’ve ever worked with before; and that includes Blender Gamekit (graphical programing ni Python) and Kismet (graphical UnrealScript). It’s a real-time language, which means that your program is running while you’re building it! And the syntax – the graphical representation of the language – is also your GUI.
Objects like “number”, “dsp”, “slider”, “colorspace”, “toggle” and “checkbox” are both instances used in the logic, and actual GUI-components that you can manipulate! The editor therefore has two modes: one for programming and one where you manipulate your program’s settings and inputs. But everything is running all the time, so the modes are mostly a convenience.
Platform independence was not a joke either; we were five Apple machines, two Ubuntu installs and a mix of Windows XP, Vista and 7 attending the workshop. It took 10 minutes for us all to install and have hardware accelerated rendering (OpenGL), high-precision audio and low-level access to webcams, microphones, network and practically any kind of input you could imagine.
Pd is an incredibly powerful tool, for the right set of problems. Though I’m not an artist like these people it has been extremely interesting and great fun to learn, and the experience left me marginally less envious of my summer-celebrating students. 😀
