Game Tour #1 - The Rome of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - The Game vs Real Photos - Part 1


Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - The Game vs Real Photos - Part 2


In two days I will be traveling to Rome to spend some time wandering around the city with my son. One of the things we are going to do there is seek out the places featured in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is a 2010 action-adventure stealth video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It is the third major installment in the Assassin's Creed series, a direct sequel to 2009's Assassin's Creed II, and the second chapter in the 'Ezio trilogy'. The game was released worldwide for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, beginning in North America on November 16, 2010. It was later released for Microsoft Windows in March 2011, followed by an OS X version in May 2011.

The story is set in a fictional history of real world events set in two time periods, the 16th and 21st centuries. The main portion of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood takes place immediately after the plot of Assassin's Creed II, featuring 16th-century Assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze in Italy and his quest to restore the Assassin order, and destroy his enemies: the Borgia family. Intersecting with these historical events are the modern day activities of series protagonist Desmond Miles, who relives his ancestor Ezio's memories to find a way to fight against the Assassins' enemies, the Templars, and to prevent the 2012 apocalypse.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is set in an open world and presented from the third-person perspective with a primary focus on using Desmond and Ezio's combat and stealth abilities to eliminate targets and explore the environment. Ezio is able to freely explore 16th-century Rome to complete side missions away from the primary storyline. The game introduced a multiplayer component to the series, portrayed as a Templar training program.

Locations in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood include the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Passetto di Borgo, the Castel Sant'Angelo and the Cappella Sistina.

 

Tempio di Saturno – the Temple of Saturn, which is present in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood 

Outside of the Colosseum in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

The Catacombs

Ezio in the Catacombe di Roma

The Pantheon in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

The original pantheon was built to honour the ancient Roman gods. Literally, it means 'temple of all the gods'. It was, however, destroyed by a huge fire and a new one built in its place approximately 50 years later. It is unknown exactly what the new building was used for, but it was converted to a Christian church in medieval times. This probably accounts for why it is so well preserved. Unlike other buildings from this time, the Pantheon was kept up by the church. It has since been used as a tomb, and many famous people were buried there such as Raphael. It continues to be used as a church to this day, with masses still held regularly.

A Follower of Romulus from Assassin's Creed and the Tempio di Romolo (the Temple of Romulus)

The Piazza del Popolo in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Piazza del Popolo

"Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted"

Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4

Expertise and Collaboration in Online Games

View another webinar from Mark Chen

ABSTRACT
Group expertise in socially-situated joint tasks requires successful negotiation and distribution of roles and responsibilities among group members and their material resources such that the group is a network of actors all in alignment on shared tasks. Using ethnographic methods, the author documents the life and death of a player group in the online game World of Warcraft as it engaged in a 40-person activity called raiding, which consisted of highly coordinated battles against difficult game-controlled monsters. The group took 7 months to master an in-game zone known as Molten Core, defeating all of the monsters within, including the last boss monster, Ragnaros. Part of the group’s success depended on its members’ ability to reconfigure their play spaces, enrolling third-party game modifications and external web resources into their activity. Before joining the group, the players had successfully built-up enough social and cultural capital to be recognized as expert players. Once joining the group, however, they had to relearn and adapt their expertise for this new
joint task that required them to specialize, taking on different roles depending on the types of characters they chose to play, and structure themselves for efficient communication and coordination practices. They also needed to align themselves to new group goals and learn to trust each other. Thus, once-expert players became novices or noobs to relearn expert or leet gameplay, yet they were not true novices because they had a good understanding of the game system and ways to configure their individual play spaces to be successful players. Rather, they were “leet noobs” who needed to reconfigure and adapt their expertise for new norms of sociomaterial practice suited for joint venture. After 10 months, the group experienced lulls in performance due to a change in membership, and the group disbanded as members were unable to renegotiate and agree upon shared goals and responsibilities. Their network had been irreparably disrupted. Understanding how group success depends on alignment of goals and responsibilities helps us plan for future collaborative endeavors across both formal and informal settings.

Full Thesis Available Here

Games for Change

Gas Zappers is a short animation about climate change. The main character, the ironically overappropriated and fuzzy polar bear, abruptly finds itself in a position to save its home living environment through dextrous maneuvers in an Al-e Gore-ical world. The idiom of the video game is exploited to challenge and illuminate the simplistic notion of quick fixes to environmental issues. Aesthetically, graphical and musical styles from the glory days of video games conjure the triumph and delight of virtual success.

As the bear progresses with celebrity companions through different climate change scenarios such as Venice underwater, confrontations with bulldozers, and anthropomorphized killer oil derricks, it narrowly succeeds each time thanks to its renewable energy defenses. A narrative unfolds that, like the artists’ previous works, waggishly interrogates the spectacular mode of ecological policy.

"The narrative of the game criticizes quick-fix attempts and suggests real strategies for cutting down on carbon emissions. The project manages to be entertaining and educational, at the same time--a balance which is its own art". Marisa Olson

Free Culture Game

Italian artists Molleindustria promise "radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art. A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games).

Culture and computer games: Studying online activities

Today in HUMlab there begins a symposium on video gaming. I am at home not feeling the best - cold snap has wrought havoc with my body (I am a tropical being). Anyway, I am saving my strength and will crawl to HUMlab tomorrow if I have to as there are some excellent seminars being offered as well as a two part workshop on machinima. The time table is online as well there are presentations that will be streamed live online (from a very funky new interface), beginning today at 13:15:

Wednesday the 26th of March
13.15 From social games to social systems, Lecture by Luca Rossi, University of Urbino, Italy

16.15-16.45 Leadership in World of Warcraft, Lecture by Peter Zackariasson, Gothenburg Research Institute, Sweden


Thursday the 27th of March
9.15 Following the White Rabbit: A Comparative Analysis of Identification mechanisms in American McGee’s Alice, Lecture by Jan Van Looy, Umeå University, Sweden

11.00 Identity formation, Lecture by Jessica Langer, Royal Holloway, University of London, England

12.30 Audio as support for gameplay, Lecture by Kristine Jørgensen, University of Bergen, Norway

13.45 Character advancement, game progression and learning, Lecture by Jonas Linderoth, University of Gothenburg, Sweden


Friday the 28th of March
10.15 The Cultural Practices of Cheating in Digital Games, Lecture with Mia Consalvo, the School of Media Arts & Studies, Ohio University, USA

Time Commanders

Time Commanders is a series of programmes made by Lion TV for BBC Two that ran for two seasons from 2003 to 2005. The programmes, originally hosted by Eddie Mair and more recently by Richard Hammond, features an edited version of the game engine behind the real-time strategy game Rome: Total War to recreate famous battles of the ancient world. The battles are replayed by 4-player teams from diverse backgrounds. The teams are unfamiliar with computer games, to make sure their gaming skills do not influence their success. After a brief introduction of the battle, including an overview of military units, terrain and available forces, the players have to develop a strategy and then deploy their forces. Two of the players are selected as generals, who will direct the battle and have access to a strategic map. The other two players are designated lieutenants in the first series, and captains in the second. The units are indirectly controlled by the lieutenants, who issue commands to program assistants, who in turn use the game interface to control the units. Troop deployment and battle follows, although in the second series, there is a small skirmish conducted as a separate event, to acquaint the players with the game mechanics and their units. In the second series the team also get strategic pauses where they can refine their strategies.

During each game, a pair of military specialists analyse the performance of the players and explain how the real historical battle unfolded. One of these observers is often Dr. Aryeh Nusbacher and others have included Mike Loades (in the earliest episodes), Saul David, Mark Urban or Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, the series' historical advisor.

Notably, the series as televised contained no reference to the origin of the software powering the 3D visuals of ancient battlefields that were the show's mainstay. This is due to the BBC's rules against product placement. Wikipedia