The decision to not seek a new corporate sponsor for a storied Toronto stage, which will be named instead after the late impresario Ed Mirvish, was announced with an uncommon comment from his son.

"They were good partners and I would work with them again in a minute," said David Mirvish upon news that the Canon signage would be coming down. "But I never felt that sponsorship should drive a theatre. It should be the icing on the cake."

The position is an increasingly radical one, particularly in a town where expenditures for public libraries and other attractions are under unprecedented scrutiny, and the idea of selling names of subway stations has entered the realm of reality. Do dramatic arts benefit from being seen as more sacred?

For the renamed Ed Mirvish Theatre, the shows booked for the 2,200-seat palace depend on the optimum level of commercial marketing clout, primarily achieved through mounting productions of musical movies like the current Mary Poppins. So, a Japanese camera company is just one additional branding layer.

I came across an interesting paper published by Deloitte called Fed Cloud; the idea of which was that the benefits of cloud computing (shared resources, cost effective, dynamically scalable) could also be realized if an organization managed it's human resources like it managed it's IT resources. It sparked a couple of things for me.

For starters the idea makes intuitive sense, but I recognize that it may never seen implementation in my life time (at least in the public sector where I earn my living). The reason it makes sense to me is that I am a gamer, and much of what underpins the idea of FedCloud is the gamification of the Human Resources system. The paper proposes a large pool of candidates to choose from, those candidates are ranked by a set of criteria and have a given set of skills. The idea would be that I would be assigned a project, assemble a team from available resources, execute, evaluate performance, release resources back to the pool and start over again. Managing a project in this way would be no different than managing my franchise in GM Mode in NHL 12 for my Xbox. Want to win the cup? Field a team, tweak it, perform (or don't) and face the consequences.

Last week I was in attendance of the biennial Digital Games Research Association's conference in Hilversum Netherlands. For three days games developers, academics, researchers and artists came together to talk about games, play and culture. One of the many highlights of the conference was the philosopher and mathematician Antanas Mockus' keynote, where he video-called in to talk about play and politics. His discussion was about the playful aspects of his administration while serving as the mayor of Bogota, Colombia.

For me the biggest trend or fad of the last six months is that of gamification, essentially taking a lot of things we love about videogames, and using them for non-gaming exercises. Jane McGonigol's rhetoric has been key in a lot of this – she has termed game designers to be “happiness engineers” - to be those most suited to finding ways to motivate players, and then getting them to have a great time doing so, and hopefully in the process, creating excess social good. Of course marketers have gotten their hands the idea and have run with it – this is gamification, or as Ian Bogost has suggested people put it – exploitationware. It kinda makes everybody uncomfortable, but that's okay. That's the point.

I think that gamification has caught the affection of so many in the corporate world because it holds the same promise that advertising geared to the subconscious desires of humanity did. It attempts – through subtle goals and mechanics, to engineer consumers. By using these methods marketers can once again take the upper hand. I mean, where else is there to go? Sure ads and brands still scramble desperately to appeal to our inner subconscious – to our eternal longing for social acceptance and self-worth – but like over-inoculating entire populations against flu each year leading to stronger viruses immune to contemporary drugs, our overly-self aware, discursive and self-referential advertising culture has bred a generation of jaded, media savvy people, whose very first response to just about everything is often this:

THIS IS FAKE/STAGED/PHOTOSHOPED

During this week's Metaviews teleseminar I was informed about the existence of The National Post's GeoPollster, a foursquare style political Alternate Reality Game whose main goal is to increase voter turnout and interest in Canadian politics. I was immediately interested.

This is because for the most part the political parties, civil society groups and mainstream journalists in Canada seem uninterested, or unable, to use new media effectively. Sure each party uses Twitter and Facebook, but they do so badly. Earlier today Luke described how Micheal Ignatieff's Twitter kept pumping out status updates during this week's debate – effectively undermining the personal nature of social media. Iggy's Twitter was effectively a simulacrum of the real Iggy.

So if the political parties can barely understand how to use Twitter effectively, what hope is there for them to use videogames well? Not much.

This is to their detriment however, because videogames are ideally suited to political tasks. This is because they can engage in procedural rhetoric – something I have discussed at length before. Procedural rhetoric uses what computers do best – run procedures – to engage in arguments about how the world works. It helps that politics is all about ideology, which videogames happen to be excellent at expressing.

Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games says that “Political videogames use procedural rhetorics to expose how political structures operate, or how they fail to operate, or how they could or should operate.”

Today on Gawker's videogames omnibus blog Kotaku, Brian Crecente wrote an editorial lamenting the path that PC gaming has gone down as of late. He focuses specifically on the career of Brian Reynolds – one of the big names behind the popular Civilization series, and his recent involvement with developing games for Zynga. Crecente sees this as a betrayal of sorts for the PC gaming industry – one that was built on the back of hardcore games and gamers. PC games have, due to the cultural sensitivities of those programming them, the nature of the platform and the built-in audience have historically been intricate, complex and strategic. Yet the industry is changing, as the President of Blizzard stresses, one should look to the success of World of Warcraft and facebook if one wants to show that PC gaming is not dead. Both exemplify the “casualification” of videogames.

The enthusiast press has spilled a lot of ink of the supposed conflict between hardcore and casual games, often lamenting that it seems like the people who built the industry – men ages 18-40 – are being systematically ignored. No doubt, the PC gaming market has fundamentally changed, with hardcore games still in existence, but in seriously smaller numbers than the heyday of the industry in the mid to late 90s. Often I get the sense from the gaming community that they are being ignored for reasons of taste or as is often suggested by the publishers and developers, the changing nature of piracy on the PC.

So I've been reading a lot. Specifically Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky and The Master Switch by Tim Wu. Both I believe exemplify the tension that is ever present in our communications media – the push and pull between our creative output and the exercise of power by centralized organizations who have a vested interest in controlling flows of information. I've been trying to keep these books in mind in reference to my last post on gamification and the growth of videogames whose success has been predicated on successfully leveraging creativity and aggregation.

It is important to note that overall I am not Shirky's biggest fan – and at times I know I don't share his optimism about the power of technology, but Cognitive Surplus has done a good job in shifting me more into his camp in terms of the possibilities of contemporary networked communications. Cognitive Surplus, for the uninitiated, makes the case that due to the advent of the Internet and the various technologies enabled on it, we have finally entered into the age of “post-Gutenberg” economics. This means that now due to barriers to creating information being so low, the implicit value we once placed on the act of creating mass-media has shown itself to be an accident of history, not universal truth. Once the means of production were in the hands of those who could afford them, and the creation of content was always in tension with economic realities of overproduction and underconsumption. As we know now, our society has had a hard time coming to terms with the now obvious conclusion that we no longer have a scarcity of voices, information and media.

“One plays only if and when one wishes to. In this sense, play is free activity. It is also uncertain activity. Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon the denouncement. In a card game, when outcome is no longer in doubt, play stops and the players lay down their hands. In a lottery or in roulette, money is placed on a number which may or may not win. In a sports contest, the powers of contestants must be equated, so that each may have a chance until the end. Every game of skill, by definition, involves the risk for the player of missing his stroke, and the threat of defeat, without which the game would no longer be pleasing. In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly.”

This was written in 1932 by the Dutch historian and Orientalist Johan Huizinga, in his work Homo Ludens. In it he lays out his project as one that endeavours to make sense of the concept of play, and the massive historical role that it has played in the rise of human civilization. Huizinga makes the case that play makes up the most creative and exciting parts of culture – an oddly pre-human activity that we engage with in fluid, structured and complex ways. This work has gone on to influence a large number of videogame scholars, due to his typology of what makes a game. Certainly since he published Homo Ludens many have elaborated on the work, but his book is nonetheless an entertaining theoretical look at what makes play so damn exciting.

Hey there digital friends! My name is Daniel Joseph and you might have read about me already. My colleague and friend Luke wrote a post about some of my ideas a little while ago and I've been asked to help out with blogging here on Metaviews. Metaviews is an organization with its eyes set on the digital issues that we are dealing with right now. To me the problems and questions concerning democracy, digital citizenship and the continued role of civil society are immensely important, and I believe that videogames need the attention that we more readily give to other forms of media and technology.

Some (even in the world of academia) are often surprised to find out that there is a growing field known as Game Studies, where people like myself labour away at trying to understand more about the form. While only existing for around 10 years the amount of scholarship produced has been quite extensive. Yet a lot of this work has been focused on defining and understanding the form of the videogame. Think of English and Film departments in Universities – they focus on defining what is/isn't a poem/prose etc.

I instead am more interested in discovering how videogames interact and impact us as a public – that means investigating the links between the production of videogames in corporate campuses, state-sponsored development grant programs, and their consumption through our home consoles, computers and cell phones. That means understanding why videogames are not just consumer objects driving the economies of the developed (programmers, artists, commercial outlets, massive marketing budgets) and developing world (the mining of minerals for computer components and the assembly of hardware), but also as places where identity, value and power come together.