Welcome to Netgames 2006 >". . . it is the speed of electric involvement that creates the integral whole of both private and public awareness. We live today in the Age of Information and of Communication because electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate", Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 248.Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in computing and communication. Machines that once occupied whole rooms have moved to the desktop, the lap and palmand into clothing itself. Standalone systems are now network with each other and a wide range of different devices across vast distances. One of the consequences this revolution is an explosion in New Media technologies. New media is one of the main developments that emerged as a product of the technological, intellectual, and cultural innovations of the late 20th century. >New Media means much more than the convergence of telecommunications, traditional media, and computing. Using Marshall McLuhan's definition of media as an 'extension of man', new media includes all the various forms in which we as humans can extend our senses and brains into the world. It includes new technologies that allow us to facilitate this new communications, and to create natural and humanistic ways of interfacing with machines, as well as other people remotely over large distances using the full range of human gestures such as touch, sight, sound, and even smell. Thus, new media includes newways of communication between people, between cultures and races, between humans andmachines, and between machines and media is that it will bring about radical developments in every aspect of human lives in the form of new kinds of symbioses between humans and computers, new ways of communicationbetween people, and new forms of social organization and interaction. It will drive a revolution in finance, communications, manufacturing, business, government administration, societalinfrastructure, entertainment, training and education. >In order for countries to flourish commercially and culturally in the new millennium it is necessary for them to understand and foster growth of New Media technologies, and open-minded creative experimentations. One of these is networked computer entertainment. Electronic gaming, a curiosity twenty years ago, is now one of the most popular forms of entertainment and a pervasive component of global culture. The ubiquity and growth of games requires that we understand them not just as commercial products, but that we appreciate them from many points of view. Games are aesthetic objects, learning contexts, technical constructs and cultural phenomena, among many other things. In this workshop we aim to promote deep research discussions about network game technology and link researchers from around the world. We hope there will be fruitful discussion on the interactive network game technologies for the benefit of freer exploration and interdisciplinarycollaboration.
展开▼
