IT University of Copenhagen offers a course for PhD students Game Analysis Methodology. Looks like the basic subject is game aesthetics, also course would be focused on research methodology. More info here: www.itu.dk

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"Tibetan Buddhists believe that saying the mantra (prayer) Om Mani Padme Hum, invites the blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. They also believe you can produce the same effect by spinning the written form of the mantra around in a prayer wheel (called 'Mani wheels' by the Tibetans). The effect is said to be multiplied when more copies of the mantra are included, and spinning the Mani wheels faster increases the benefit as well."

But because your hard drive spins, it becomes a Digital Prayer Wheel: "Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra 'Om Mani Padme Hum' on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser." Via Interconnected

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Long before the movie Blair Witch Project was to be seen in the cinemas, strange hints to the incidents later to be seen in this documentary-style-horror-thriller-flick appeared scattered around the internet. A bit later german private TV-station Sat1 tried to redo the hype to promote their mini series Aeon. But, as it happens so often to copycats, they hadn't understood the tiniest bit of the original concept and greatly offended the taste and intellect of the cyberians out there ... so the officially set up forums were spammed and flamed as they deserved it and finally went straight to hell, where to they righteously belonged from the beginning. Later the guys in the vicinity of Steven Spielberg staged"an elaborate game-cum-marketing conspiracy for the very lame movie A.I. This game positioned a rich, interlinked, and often sneaky series of texts, clues within other documents, Web sites, and even voicemail messages, which were pieced together and developed into a narrative by thousands of curious netizens around the world. I've been describing this as collaborative, distributive, interactive, mystery storytelling, and consider it a new form of writing; others use the pithier and delightfully-abbreviated term Alternate Reality Game." ... says Bryan Alexander. Now an equivalent game pointing to the upcoming "Matrix Revolutions" has appeared. Read the social-software perspective and everything about the Matrix Game at infocult. via many-to-many and infocult

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Munich's ethnological museum, Filmstadt München and the Institute Francais again organize the "Days of the ethnological movie", this time the motto is "Crossing frontiers". The event will take place from 14. Nov through 23. Nov. 2003 at the Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich, Germany. All in all 15 movies will be shown, in german, french and english, including german subtitles. Luminaries like french ethnographer and movie-director Jean Rouch will be present. For more information write an e-mail to the staff of the movie-days.

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The swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung is writing about the traditional indian music and argues that it's the only "art music" besides classic western music.

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By accident (if you want to know: I just was searching for the meaning of the spanish word zaramagullon, which is the Great Crested Grebe, in german "Haubentaucher), well; and doing this I stumbled over a interesting organisation: FAMSI. They describe theirself: "The Foundation (FAMSI) was created in 1993 to foster increased understanding of ancient Mesoamerican cultures. The Foundation aims to assist and promote qualified scholars who might otherwise be unable to undertake or complete their programs of research and synthesis. Projects in the following disciplines are urged to apply: anthropology, archaeology, art history, epigraphy, ethnography, ethnohistory, linguistics, and related fields. The Granting Department provides funds on an annual basis to support research projects that promise to make significant contributions to the understanding of ancient Mesoamerican cultures. Grant recipients are determined through an annual grant application competition."

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TAMS is a qualitative text encoding tool for ethnographic studies. Runs on Mac OS X and, as a command line version, on Linux.

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"Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org. Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games. Our mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming." Via supatyp

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Renate Barl, lecturer at the institute of American Studies (Amerikanistik) in Munich would like to announce her course about Native American Studies which she will held this semester, and which will surely be of high interest for anthropologists also. Visit her homepage for a detailed course description (in german). And further, learn a lesson about how every lecturer could and should have page informing about a course.

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It is my innermost conviction -- at least for now -- that the metaphorical and symbolical web which we call 'culture' is constituted, built and rebuilt by ever-changing, interlocking feedback loops of the associative kind. Never will we be able to draw a complete picture of those, but sometimes the cultural anthropologist will have the chance to have an indepth glance on some of them loops. In respect to cyberculture, I guess I just stumbled over one. Does anybody remember the 1980s' movie "Wargames" -- starring a then youthful Matthew Broderick? The movie's story was about some hacker-d00d (Broderick) who hacked himself beyond the firewall of some eerie system. The system proposed a game (mind!) to him which looked like some strategical nuclear-world-war simulation. The d00d took up the game ... what he didn't know was that the system was an AI which controlled the US-military's complete defence-system, including the nukes, of course. So the drama began to unfold. "Wargames" hit the silverscreen in an era when the first personal computers affordable for the broader public hit the shelves. Well, you all know the development of computers from the times of the Commodore 64 till today. What you might not be aware of is, that the essential force of economical thrust which pushes the development of computers forward is the gaming-industry, as games are the only end-user applications which really need a P4 or a Radeon 9800. For comparatively primitive tasks like text-processing a 486 is enough. And for the sake of illustrating the magnitude of this business: The turnover of the gaming-industry exceeded the turnover of the movie-industry in the fiscal year 2002 both in the US and in Europe -- and we're talking software only, that means the sales of computer-hardware like graphic-cards, game-consoles and the like are not included. This year the US Department of Defence announced that they won't go on developing their IT-equipment from scratch themselves, as they wouldn't be able to keep pace with the development of commercially developed comps. Instead in the future they will buy their components from the industry! And here's where the dog somewhat catches its tail ...

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In the wake of the globalization-discourse (what else?) the University of Munich stages a lecture series, which is open to everyone, on the future of Europe. Munich-based professors and invited guests will deliver the speeches; some of them (the speeches ;-) will be in English, and some have topics close to cultural anthropology. Read everything about the Ringvorlesung (in German).

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Today (14. October 2003) at 18:00h Bayern2Radio airs a 30-minute special by our doctoral candidate Bettina Weitz which is called "Research by all senses: Methods of cultural science". In Munich you can receive Bayern2Radio on UKW 89,5 MHz. The special is broadcasted via the internet, too. At the webpage you can also find all other terrestrial frequencies. Critique is welcomed and may be sent by e-mail.

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