Game Theory
A November 3 Wall Street Journal headline asked, “Are video games ready to be taken seriously by media reviewers?” Academics already consider them worthy of sociocultural study: a fall conference on the subject in the Netherlands drew hundreds of scholars. At Stanford, the Humanities Lab project “How They Got Game” explores the history and cultural impact of video and PC games; the science, technology and society program offers a related course.
Now the lab’s research has inspired a Cantor Center exhibition, Fictional Worlds: Storytelling and Computer Games, based on the premise that interactive simulations, computer games and video games will be the dominant narrative form and communication medium of this century. Traditionalists can check out the competition through March 28. An all-day adjunct conference, “Story Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer Games,” takes place at the center’s auditorium on February 6.
Cameron’s Camera
She was an unlikely pioneer: one of Victorian society’s elite, she raised six children amid all the perks accorded colonial officials’ families in India. But for Julia Margaret Cameron, a second life began in 1863, when at age 48 she was given a camera. At a time when photography was largely considered a technological advance, Cameron turned it into an art form, creating soulful portraits and ethereal tableaux. Her subjects were some of England’s best-known figures—Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle—as well as her family (she was Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt). But Cameron also got her household servants to pose for depictions of religious and literary scenes.
A small Cameron exhibit at Stanford’s Cantor Center till February 29 gives a nod to the major show of her work at the Getty in Los Angeles and coincides with a new biography. From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), by Victoria Olsen, PhD ’94, has won wide praise in Britain, particularly for its revelations from a trove of unpublished letters.
