ISR Distinguished Speaker

Les Gasser

Graduate School of Library and Information Science and Computer Science Department
“Ecologies of Games: Organizing Information and Activity in Synthetic Worlds”
Friday, April 21, 2006 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm

This meeting is being held in conjunction with:

MASSIVE: Research Summit on the Future of Networked Multiplayer Games
Thursday, April 20
and
Corporate Opportunities for Multi-Player Games
sponsored by OCTANe@UCI and the Orange County AeA 
Friday, April 21, 10:30 - 1:00 

 

Faculty Host: 
RSVP: 

Email RSVP required to Nancy Myers at nmyers@ics.uci.edu by Monday, April 17.

Location: 
UCI McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (building #311)
Cost: 

No cost to attend.

Directions: 

Click here for directions and parking information.

Abstract: 

Beyond typical analytic categories like play, narrative, learning, and community, let's consider E-games as spheres of information-based activity, and conversely, activity-based information. What information and what activity appears in E-games? How is information and activity organized? How does the unfolding structure of information and activity help constitute space, time, interpretation, and desire in E-games? We'll explore how multiple games, information structures, players and social worlds move and co-exist, we'll look into some general properties and consequences of such "game ecologies," and we'll speculate on connections between game ecologies and other interesting information-activity spaces such as software collaboratories and social information environments.

About the Speaker: 

Les Gasser is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Faculty Director of the GSLIS Information Systems Research Lab. He received his B.A. in English Literature, Magna cum Laude, from the University of Massachusetts in 1976, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 1978 and 1984, respectively. His major scientific interest has been to understand the technical and social aspects of organization-scale information processing, in both theory and practice. This work includes investigations of the nature of social-level knowledge, action, and learning; organization-scale knowledge-processing frameworks such as intelligent multi-agent systems; and concurrent object-based computing. He has published over fifty technical papers and five books in these areas. Gasser has been on the faculties of Computer Science, Systems Management, and Industrial Engineering at the University of Southern California, and has held visiting faculty posts at the University of Paris and the Ecole des Mines de Paris. Les is an ISR Faculty Associate.