[arg_discuss] another introduction

[Steffen P Walz]

greetings everyone,

i have been having a professional and academic interest in  
entertainment for a bit -

in my professional life, i started off as a writer, producer, and  
format developer for a german nationwide TV satire show; sang in a  
indie band (we toured with green day, but had a tour bus that  
constantly broke down); worked and freelanced as a creative lead for  
a number of german web agencies, serving clients such as  
DaimlerChrysler, BMW, and O2 with cross media guerilla entertainment  
concepts. as a consultant, i co-initiated & projected the first game  
design program at a state university in german speaking countries.  
the program commenced at the university for art media and design in  
zurich, switzerland, in fall 2004.

more lately, i have founded my own music label playbe records,  
experimenting with alternative content distribution - last summer, we  
scored 150K downloads with an ironic election song about  
chancelorette angela merkel. i have also tested the waters with a  
hippiesque game-like distribution concept entitled "careware", where  
customers could order a CD online, have it shipped to their homes for  
free, and then decide what they thought the product was worth by  
either wiring money, or sending back a counter value. this wasn't  
really successful in terms of sales, but we received interesting  
stuff, e.g. buttered bread, fleurop vouchers, weird & outdated  
currency etc..

speaking of experiments:

in my academic life, i am currently pursuing my ph.d. at the swiss  
federal institute of technology in zurich; i am putting together a  
theory / taxonomy of serious pervasive game design, whilst realizing  
prototypes from time to time. basically, i am looking at ways to take  
advantage of, or develop game design principles, and combine them  
with emerging mobile, sensor, interface, positioning, gesture  
recognition technologies for non-entertainment purposes (education,  
marketing, policy making).

one of my games was http://www.madcountdown.com (that's the  
documentation), an alternate reality find-the-bomb-before-it-blows-up  
game from 2001/02 that merged WiFi networked PDAs, multi-player  
action and face2face collaboration, actors, real built game objects -  
e.g. bomb, puzzles, clues on answering machines -, automated phone  
booth calls, and "rescue headquaters" from where i MCed.

currently, and together with colleagues at the RWTH aachen  
university, i am designing a location based spell-casting game for  
cell phones as a permanent service in the city of regensburg in  
germany, see http://www.rex-regensburg.de/im-stadtraum/rexplorer/  
(sorry, only german at the moment). we call this type of mechanic  
"cellcasting";-).

best,
spw

http://wiki.arch.ethz.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/SteffenPWalz
__
Steffen P. Walz
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)    ETH Zurich-Hoenggerberg
Game Design Research                                       Department  
of Architecture
Phone +41 44 633 4025                                       HBT /  
CAAD, HIL E 15.1
walz at arch.ethz.ch                                                 
CH-8093 Zurich