Religion Dispatches compares Bonaroo to Burning Man:

Like revivals and camp meetings from the nineteenth century forward, the festivals allow participants to suspend their everyday lives to engage in something that is both theatrical and ecstatic. Events like Burning Man, an eight-day annual event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, have attracted ( Read more... )

The Anangu people of Australia seem to think so.

(It’s clearly been a little too long since I visited The Revealer...)

I've been meaning for a couple of months now to post a link to a Ron's new blog--Virtual Cultures, the topic of which is exactly what it sounds like, and which is a collaborative effort between himself and his colleague Celia Pearce, who teaches game design and media arts at Georgia Tech ( Read more... )

Trudged downtown yesterday to the GDC to see my good friends Ron Meiners, Dan Terdiman, and Mike Steele (along with two other fellows--Daniel James and Lorne Lanning) give a panel on Burning Man: Takeaways for Game Developers. For a nerd of my particular stripes, this was must see tv. Plus, you know, my husband was one of the panelists, so ( Read more... )

Popping up ever so briefly to note (admit?) that I found this while surfing Manolo's Shoe Blog late last night:

http://noodle.commarts.wisc.edu/346/syllabus.htm

Mostly just reporting this for now--Mike Sellers has brought up the issue of religion in MMOG's on Terranova. Not just the usual wizardy mythical content, but as a specifically included game feature, in both "real world" and "made up" versions.

In light of the recent GLBT foofarah in WoW (Blizzard finally recanted, btw, and online moderators ( Read more... )

This is old news by now, but there's been a controversy brewing over in WoW-landia about the company's ill-conceived decision to invoke their own sexual harassment policy to ban a guild calling itself "GLBT-friendly," saying that the name was liable to encourage anti-GLBT name calling. I mean puh-lease--a lamer version of the old don't-ask-don't- ( Read more... )

Discovered via the Stop Shopping Monitor: Improv Everywhere: "We Cause Scenes." Instigator of such delightful recent events as Monday's NoPant's 2k6, suicide jumper, and the mp3 experiment 2.0.

My main question is why? Why have all these culture pirates sprung up of late? Smells like Cacophony? Or Kesey? Like Kaprow? But what in the last ( Read more... )

I finally completed a task I've been both needing and dreading to do for months-- adding tags to all of my posts here. Only took about an hour and a half to go through them all (a fascinating sojourn in itself--interesting to see how my "voice" here as evolved), so not too bad after all. And it only took16 tags to get almost a year's worth of ( Read more... )

Just when I was beginning to think I might cheese out on this particular long-threatened research area myself, Edward Castronova over on TerraNova says this about the ethics of character selection in World of Warcrack:

"these worlds are not mere play-spaces, nor mere extensions of the real world. They are a place where we can hear a faint echo of ( Read more... )