Project Update: IC2010

Today was a long anticipated day: Two of my friends whom work with me on the IC2010 project -Barış Parlan (graphic artist) and Cengiz Önkal (programmer)- returned from their military service and it was the first time for almost a year that we could hold a design meeting together! But as you might have guessed already, it was in first line a celebration of freedom! After a long year spent in green uniforms and grey buildings, my friends could finally enjoy a lax afternoon surrounded with computers, game consoles, books and other fun stuff! :) 

It was almost one and a half year ago when we first decided to get together and start with the IC2010 project, but soon after our project launch, my friends were set for their military service (I had mine already behind me) and the project was for most of its parts laid on ice. I continued to work on the game design aspect in my spare time of course, but often I felt that I cannot continue without their input, advice and consent. Now that they are back, the project will gain pace and I have no doubt that our demo will be ready for June 2010, exactly as we were planning it.

We had a lot of fun today and our “design meeting” served as a nice warm-up to the game issues at hand. Not to forget to mention the PES and Tekken sessions we held afterwards! :)

Since Barış will be away for another three weeks, we will mainly work with Cengiz and our focus will probably shift on the technical design side of things, but when Barış is fully back, we will also spend  time on figuring the visual aspects.

I’m so glad and excited!

New article on Game Auteurship at Kafaayarı

Kerem Demirbaş over at the turkish game studies clog Kafaayarı put up an article on game auteurship today. The article is based on his M.A thesis which he wrote during his time at the IT Kopenhagen. There was just recently a design conference in Istanbul where Kerem made a presentation on the topic and it’s great that we now have a comprehensive article about the issue online.

Give it a try!

I’m back!

Since a few months, I was waiting for an amnesty for ex-PhD students.  Yesterday the law regarding the amnesty passed through the turkish parliament. This means that I’ll be allowed to return to my old PhD program… after a break of almost 10 years!

A lot of things changed meanwhile. Back in 1998 I prepared myself to write a thesis on film. I had an advisor at that time that was an expert on turkish cinema. She wanted me to write a dissertation that revolves around the concept “turkish film” and “democracy”. But that was not exactly what I wanted. I wanted to write a thesis on the “political horizon” that was depicted in popular turkish films of the 1990s and what their discourse tells us about the future of turkish society. I wanted to make a “projective” analyses of contemporary turkish film based on approaches taken from Sigfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler and D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel. My position would have been somewhere between Marxism, Anarchism and Deconstruction. I planned to build each chapter around a binary opposition: folk-intellectuals, civilian-soldier, man-woman, west-southeast, anatolia-metropolis, decadence-substance etc and wanted to look at films in regard to how they use these binary oppositions to describe the ideal society they envision… from here I wanted to re-draw the general picture of society that popular turkish films idealized and ask myself which social classes and groups are ignored in this picture (or rendered obsolete)? Who were the ones that should fear about their future if our society doesn’t get away from this “hate culture” that marked it so dangerously?

My advisor didn’t like this subject. She found it too complex and wanted me to stick to the topic “the concept of democracy in turkish film”. This her wish, however, took away my last bits of motivation. A year later or so, I resigned from my former position at the Ankara University and did not follow any longer my interest into the PhD program I was part of. Instead I moved to Cyprus and started to work as an instructor. A year later I devoted myself completely to the dream topic of my childhood: video games! I entered a completely new and different learning process. I wrote my last article on turkish film in 2003. After that, I never ever got back to the topic.

Now I’m back!… But not to cinema. I’m back in order to write a PhD on video games! I wanted to do this under an architecture department… but now, after the amnesty, I’ll do it under a communication studies department. But it will not really matter. I’m more than ready to write it. I can’t wait to get it finished!

Oh, and I’ll have a new advisor ;)

My latest feature…

My latest feature, an article on the design process of my game Poseidon’s Wrath is out. Please check the article out here.