December 02, 2008
Le Sucre contre le FMI
Autant le Sommet du G20 du 15 novembre à Washington, sans déboucher sur quoi que ce soit de concret, a bénéficié d'une énorme couverture médiatique, autant la presse internationale est restée muette sur une réunion qui va pourtant déboucher sur un événement historique : la mise en place d'une struture (...) / Amérique latine, Venezuela, Finance, Fonds monétaire international (FMI), Monnaie - La valise diplomatique
The XAX Poem
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A History of the Social Web
Many of you have linked to this blog essay, which was by all means merely a draft, a beginning. I kept working on it ever since but did not publish my frequent updates because the text got far too long for a blog entry. I'll post a reference to the finished text here.
The Lives of Others
I waited for a long time. There is something uncomfortable about people making films about the country that you grew up in, especially facing the fact that its social formation does not exist anymore. The Lives of Others is a much-hyped film about East Germany, the country where I lived for twenty years. The central character of the film is a fabulous actor and it speaks certainly for the director to depict him as a nuanced human being. But just like with Good Bye Lenin and other films about the ex-GDR, this too cannot avoid but being a deeply ideological film. The type of reality depicted in The Lives of Others was indeed the everyday life of very visible cultural figures. The Eastern European republics took their intellectuals seriously.
These public intellectuals did fall victim to the kind of surveillance described in the film. People like Wolfgang Bierman and others were exposed to the most excruciating Stasi campaigns aimed at destroying their reputation. The Life of Others is perhaps the first film about a Stasi officer. It is problematic that the film narrowly focuses on such a case as many viewers may be led to think that this all-out surveillance was pervasive throughout East German society. It was not.
I was harassed a lot as a youngster in East Berlin. The Stasi did not like my flirt with the evangelical church and they tried hard to cut me loose from that. I had my fair share of Stasi surveillance and face-to-face encounters but I can say with conviction that none of them would have ever worn a leather coat of the SA-variety as portrayed in the film. That is simply a caricature. I met very genuine believers who were not just careerist cynics drunk on power as shown in the film. I got to know people who deeply believed in humanistic values. So, while this stylistically conventional film is not a complete misrepresentation, it selects an example that does not show the quotidian reality of East Germany.
The director shaped the character of the Stasi officer and sought a human balance. The historical example that is given, however, is in and of itself not balanced.
Twitter, info en fragments et «story telling»
L’émergence de Twitter et de la micro-messagerie, comme outil utilisable pour la couverture journalistique d’un événement ne fait plus de doute. Elle va aussi bouleverser la façon dont nous écrivons nos articles et la manière de raconter ce dont nous rendons compte, ce qui va bien plus loin.
L’élection au poste de secrétaire général du Parti socialiste et les attaques contre Mumbai ont donné une preuve époustouflante de la valeur de cet outil, comme le rappelle Benoît Raphaël rédacteur en chef du Post.fr.
Cela ne veut pas dire que le dispositif est parfait, ni même merveilleux. Il remplit des fonctions. Nous allons maintenant devoir apprendre à l’utiliser, à l’améliorer.
Voici ce qu’en dit Benoît:
«L’objectif, ici, n’est pas de produire une information low-cost sans journalistes, mais de travailler intelligemment dans le cadre d’une info en réseau. Produire une info plus pertinente par rapport aux attentes des lecteurs: hyper réactive, moins conventionnelle dans ses choix, plus “live”, plus libre, avec plus de ton, de conversation, beaucoup d’émotion.»
Ces bouleversements mettent en cause le noyau dur du journalisme… la façon dont nous racontons des histoires, dont nous rendons compte de ce que nous voyons, comprenons, analysons.
L’info en réseau est en effet aussi une info en fragments.
L’info n’arrive plus ficelée comme un paquet soigné sous forme d’article avec un début (lead disent les anglo-saxons), un milieu et une fin, ce qui implique un minimum de synthèse et d’organisation. Pauvre Aristote.
L’info arrive comme une pierre jetée à la hâte. Pas nécessairement polie, mais lourde de faits et d’émotions.
Ne nous trompons pas sur la métaphore. Au bout d’un moment ces pierres ne sont plus que des grains de sable coulant en continu. L’info devient flux.
Synthèses, analyses et reportages sur le terrain seront toujours utiles voir nécessaires, mais force est de reconnaître que les premières interprétations ne sont plus le monopole des «têtes parlantes» qui pullulent sur nos écrans télé.
Nous - lecteurs/utilisateurs - apprenons à faire du sens à partir de ces multitudes de fragments qui défilent sur nos écrans. Barthes, lui, rigole.
Je me demande si les implications de cette évolution radicale n’est pas encore plus profonde que tout ce que nous avons envisagé concernant la communication horizontale et la participation auxquelles elle est intimement liée. Plus profonde parce qu’il s’agit d’une de nos activités essentielles: la façon de conter (story telling), de tirer du sens de ce qui nous arrive et de ce qui nous entoure.
Je suis vraiment curieux de savoir ce que vous en pensez…
PS - Désolé pour ces quelques jours de silence. Je voyage trop et j’avais vraiment besoin de repos.
[Photo Flickr d’Anjan ]
via Transnets
Links for 2008-12-01 [del.icio.us]
- Murakami animation studio coming to L.A. | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times
Murakami already has a studio in New York. But he has decided that Hollywood is the place to expand his filmmaking capabilities. The new studio will operate under the umbrella of Kaikai Kiki, his production and artist-management company. - Nick Cave’s Soundsuits : Bad at Sports
Often, Cave’s Soundsuits are assembled by a multigenerational, multicultural group of volunteers in his Chicago neighborhood. - Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soldiers that 'won't commit war crimes' - Telegraph
By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into "autonomous systems", the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers. - MAKE: Blog: The Culture Jamming gift guide at MAKE - hack, stick, throw, jam and inspire!
gift ideas for that mischief maker in your life! - Artlog / Miami Art Fairs
printable map guide and details on Art Basel Miami Beach and the twenty satellite fairs
Sioc.me: 3D Visualization of Semantic Space
SIOC.ME [sioc.me] is a "real-time interactive visualization of boards.ie semantic data in three-dimensional space". The project was originally submitted for entry to the Boards.ie SIOC Data Competition that, based on over 10 years of online discussion and around 9 million documents, invited submissions to create something which uses the data in an interesting manner.
The visualization allows a user to select a forum from boards.ie and explore it within a 3D space throughout various spatial configurations (i.e. Carousel, Linear, Stacked, Random or Grid). One can either watch a small set of demonstration movies below, or try out the application live at online.
Thnkx Rob.
December 01, 2008
Volume and the JoA&P are out
Two of my favourite mags The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Volume are out:
Volume is an architecture and urbanism magazine. It's neither a highly specialized print that mere mortals like me find hard to approach nor is it one of those glossy Vogue-lookalikes with chichi spreads of fashionably 'sustainable' buildings. It's not 'something in between' either.
This issue presents many trends, people, ideas that might look like they do not directly belong to the world of architecture and urbanism but are perfectly pertinent and relevant to architects and urbanists. And because almost anything architects and urbanists do ends up concerning the hoi polloi (that's you and me, my friend), there's much food for thoughts and heated discussions in Volume 17:
The editors explain: At the close of this era of expansion and surplus Volume speculates on one of the period's emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers inside into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities.
Jesse Seegers and Jeffrey Inaba quizz Ken Goldberg on burning dollar bills and other less trivial matters, Chris Anderson about 'free' culture and PageRanking on business cards. They also get Julien De Smedt to discuss his views on free-wheel experiementation, the proliferation of 'post-OMA offices', why not choosing and mismanaging can be valuable strategies. Benedict Clouette and Forrest Jessee's interview with publisher Lars Müller (whose Face of Human Rights is on my must read list) evokes books as a form of content management.
Volume dives into almost mainstream US culture with an interview of Rachel Maddow (available online) and another one with Arianna Huffington (best enjoyed after having savoured this article about the so-called death of the blogosphere.)
Entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Credit: Mari Tefre / Global Crop Diversity Trust (more images)
Those are only a few of the many interviews of smart people by other smart people.
Just to contradict all the above i should add that many of the issues covered in Volume 17
1. are not interviews. C-LAB explores the World Heritage, the content management system for cultural and natural treasures. Easy happiness is at reach in "Architecture is Merciless", a presentation by Jacques Herzog about Beijing's Bird Nest and in a short series of photos that display how Vogt Landscape Architects transplant nature into a constructed context. "Seeds of Paranoia" gives the lowdown on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This must be one of the rare articles that goes beyond the hype aspect of the project.
2. openly belong to the world of architecture. For example, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Mark Wigley has a short essay on architecture seen under the lens of content management,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the publishers of the book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography.
Among all paper magazines, JoA&P is probably the one most likely to truly and gently give rise to social changes. Smart, wonderfully edited and available for a mere $15, the magazine is heavily centered on the US scene and i wonder if we have anything similar in Europe. And if we don't i wonder what we're waiting for.
The 300 pages of the sixth issue are broken down in three 'conceptual' sections.
1. I Love To We is a call for a new terminology to describe the formations of grassroots cultural resistant practices. These "interventions, strategies and tactics in the territory" explore the war on terror and the global order. A quick selection of the many essays featured in this section: LA-based organization Bicicocina (or Bicycle Kitchen) describes its self-assigned mission to teach people to work on their own bikes. Lisa Anne Auerbach wrote an insightful essay on the new "Don't Do It Yourself" battle triggered by corporations' avid assault and capitalisation of the D.I.Y. culture. Aimee Le Duc analyzes what happens when an old police station in San Francisco is bought and transformed into a home and office by someone like artist and architect Bruce Tomb.
2. Antiwar Survey Respondents has almost 20 activists not only describe their antiwar activities but also answer vital questions such as "How do you measure success for this activity?' and 'In order to continue and be successful with this or other related activities, what would you do or need?' The answers should convince readers that activist actions do have an impact and inspire them to join the movements or start their own.
Center for Tactical Magic collaborating with UC Santa Cruz students on Wells Fargo Embargo
3. Another Theory Section. Under a title which could hardly get any more cloudy and bland are a handful of lessons learnt (sometimes the hard way) by artists and activists: problems encountered when trying to get art in public space, the recent history of the art collective in light of the persecution of the Critcal Art Ensemble, the danger of nostalgia to culture, etc.
three kings
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Sous l'œil myope des caméras
Au Royaume-Uni, un individu peut être filmé par les caméras de vidéosurveillance jusqu'à trois cents fois par jour. Partout célébré, souvent imité, ce « modèle » de lutte contre la délinquance bat néanmoins de l'aile. De l'aveu même de ses promoteurs, il serait un « échec complet ».Pour améliorer de façon (...) / Royaume-Uni, Démocratie, Justice, Police, Technologie, Télésurveillance - 2008/09
Links for 2008-11-30 [del.icio.us]
- How to calm binge drinkers: get them all blowing bubbles | Society | The Observer
Drinkers will be encouraged to play with children's bubble blowers instead of picking fights, in a scheme to start next month in Bolton. Police will hand out the free toys as young people pour out of pubs and clubs in typically boisterous mood.
USSA: 1003
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Beth Coleman, Free Culture, and the Network Effect
About two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at MIT's Zones of Emergency. Like at previous occasions I tremendously enjoyed discussions there; what an inspiring intellectual community.
| View |
There Beth Coleman followed up on my talk:
Media professor Trebor Scholz gave a talk at MIT last week on Free Cooperation, discussing the ways in which we participate freely in data mining platforms (such as Google and Face Book) and what if means to give free labor to giant commercial enterprises.
He showed us network effect graphs that described the ways in which casual use of a site can turn into a de facto commitment to a platform. He also talked about how online labor exploitation is not visible in the manner that historical industrial labor has been. The centralizing effect of the giant media platforms is a phenomenon that causes him real alarm.
I had a few more questions for him and he nicely agreed to continue the conversation here.
1. Is this inevitable? Going from a mass-media distribution model to a distributed media of the Web, what has happened to the ability to choose? There are alternatives to Youtube?? Why does this site dominate? Is it design or social (the aggregating of people).
2. There is no precedent for participatory networks at this scale. So the rules of ownership in regard to what one makes or even of one's personal information are not clear. The eula [end users agreement] for most sites say that the user give up all rights to content. If we are seeing a centralizing movement that reflects in effect our own use habits, how do we reverse this momentum?
3. This free work is the opposite of what was meant by free software and open source initiatives a decade ago. Do user’s rights need to be mandated at the level of law to prevent our herding instincts from helping to create de facto media monopoly? Does this destroy the progressive and innovative aspects of Web agency that someone like Y. Benkler has applauded in Wealth of Networks?
Trebor Scholz:
Why do people congregate in very large numbers in very few places? People want to be where other people are. I learn from my friends on Facebook (FB) through the newsfeed and from my network on Del.icio.us. Knowledge is created among us, laterally. D. Weinberger calls it the Daily We. I can see what my FB friends (people whom I met at conferences or with whom I am otherwise acquainted) bookmark, read, which events they put on, and which groups they associate themselves with. I'm certainly not alone-- these reasons motivate many of the 70 million people who are on Facebook.
Business plans for startups are based on a very low threshold for participation, uploading is made very easy. People contribute videos, blog entries, wall posts, bookmarks, status updates, and photos but none of this material can be exported. An active user becomes more valuable over time, not unlike a bottle of wine in the wine cellar. All those “friends” with whom we reconnect, sometimes after quite some time, and all those media and texts are literally locked up. Try to delete Flickr photos (you’ll have to go one by one; try that with the 2 GB that you just uploaded). Or, try deleting your Facebook (FB) account. You can't. Attempt to export blog entries on MySpace or photos on Facebook. Not accidentally, the export option does not exist. Groups are locked up in these social milieus. Weak-tie-communities are entrapped; it's a corporate confiscation of attention, creativity, and time. Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube understands how much he owes the "community" when he thanks Youtube users shortly after being acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. Chen: “Thanks to everyone of you guys that have been contributing to YouTube, to the community. We would not be anywhere close to where we are without the help of this community.” Within three years the site had achieved popularity and that user community directly translated into Google stocks.
Users who "flirt" with a given site are attracted by the wealth of user-submitted content. Bigger is better. It's the network effect: the more people use a technology, the more valuable it becomes. Fax machines don’t get you very far if only 5 people use them. Equally, you'll not reconnect with your high school sweetheart on an obscure startup social networking site. You will also not find many photos with an uncommon tag on a photo site other than Flickr. User-submitted content makes these sites so attractive. The top ten site of the Web share 40% of all web traffic (sina.com, baidu.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com, youtube.com, myspace.com, live.com, orkut.com, qq.com). These sites disproportionally control the networked public sphere because of the user-submitted content, which makes their social milieus so intensely engaging. Yochai Benkler refers to this mass-media-like constellation of media monopoly as the "Berlusconi Effect." The democratizing effects that Benkler described in Wealth of Networks in 1995 have little to do with user-generated content. He focuses on the remaining 60% web traffic made up in part of blogs that spread reports showing the shortcoming of Diebold's voting machines.
I think that Benkler's sometimes criticized utopian enthusiasm for peer production is justified when it comes to initiatives like Wikipedia or even Google Adsense that allows individuals to supplement their income.
Sure, there are endless alternatives to the MyTubes and YouSpaces of the World Wide Computer. But good luck trying to migrate your data and friend lists with you. YouTube is attractive because of those 70,000 uploads a day (and counting). It's very difficult to migrate data to another site. Interoperability is largely an illusion. Users can reconnect with high school friends and those dozens of people would not all move with the potential migrating users. The loss would be significant. My hope is that exportability will become a competitive advantage for Social Web companies.
The American site Orkut dominates Brazil and India completely. Canada hearts Facebook. MySpace and FB reign supreme in the United States. How do these sites become the default? Some researchers suggest that it has to do with the colors of the interface or with a celebrity joining the site. (This is not so different to a real estate agency that spreads the news that the R&B singer and songwriter Beyoncé will buy a duplex in a newly erected building.) But then, soon, once a solid number of users is established, the wealth of social life will be the attraction. Good design cannot have much to with it: just look at MySpace and its disastrous interface.
Yochai Benkler correctly suggests that "peer production is as efficient and significant for the 21 century as the assembly line was for the 20th century." I also agree with Benkler when he suggests that through peer production "people can do more by and for themselves" but I add that the pleasures of online sociality are exploited. Communities are often deceived and commodified. They are unfairly used as a resource, often without their consent and knowledge. It's a bit like Mark Twain's "Whitewashing the Fence" in Tom Sawyer.
Tom tries to motivate the neighborhood boys to paint the fence for him. His friend Ben rejects the offer to paint the fence without pay. Tom responds “What do you call work?” and resumes his whitewashing:“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”
The brush continued to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple:
“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”
Online the promise of the free service is subtler than Tom Sawyer's boyish box of manipulating tricks.
The surplus attention of people, diverted from television to the Internet, translates into many hours every day spent on social networking sites. (For Myspace that meant an increase in value from $ 583 million in 2005 to $15 billion in 2008.)
I disagree with Benkler when he proposes social peace: "The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker." How can big businesses like NewsCorp can get away with exploiting communities. From a business perspective, the question is how you a company can find people to make a living with. How can they harvest the labor and presence of those millions on Myspace, for example, without making them feel bad? This is also an underlying question for Don Tapscott in Wikinomics when he celebrates that "In Second Life, the consumer actually co–innovates and coproduces the products they consume." (Tapscott and Williams, 2007. Wikinomics, p. 126).
Companies like LindenLab, while granting users IP-rights to their creations in the virtual world SecondLife, make profits without providing anything but the technical backbone, the real estate for all this creativity and flying around. The ownership issues of submitted content are handled in favor of the user here. But perhaps that simply shows that the content does not matter so much. Since Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, companies have learned have learned that user-submitted content is very rarely what makes money. Today, the platform zars realize that it's about attention; it's about time spent in an environment and about the data that can be sucked out of the user clicks.
Benkler, Lessig, Sunstein and others are looking at these issues as lawyers. Their contributions are important but they respond to questions that are relevant to the legal community. I approach the issues from the cultural activist perspective.
Is centralization avoidable? Is it a new phenomenon? User-submitted or generated content such as book reviews are not new (very much in opposition to what Web 2.0 ideologues wants you to believe). Benkler argues for the Web as a place where ordinary people can find a voice but it is not a novel trend. Personal email was a sneaky and by all means unplanned use of ARPANET. Amazon.com's review submission feature started in 1995 as an early form of self-publishing. The Indian social networking site Sulekha kicked off in 1999. The participatory turn, the shock of the social, and groundswell of sociality online-- whatever you want to call this quantitative leap of participation in web-based social milieus-- it is new.
Is the "Berlusconi Effect" avoidable on the Social Web? The history of radio would be a discouraging precedent. From a plethora of individual radio operators, airwave politics made sure that only the highest-paying stations would survive. Debates about net neutrality immediately enter my mind. A two-tiered Internet would be the kiss goodnight for decentralization. But recent news made me hopeful. As it stands now, bloggers like Dailykoz or curated sites like Boingboing still exist and they are A-list sites in terms of traffic. They get a good share of the remaining 60% of traffic and that is worth defending.
Tiltfactor Open House This Week
Dear GTxA readers, come one, come all to the inaugural open house at the new Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College!
Student researchers, lab staff, affiliated faculty, and I will be hosting our open house and holiday festival: TUESDAY the 2nd of December, 2008, from 3-7.
We will be showing games we’ve made (RAPUNSEL project’s PEEPS game, Profit Seed, Massively Multiplayer Soba, prototypes of Skoolin (codename) and Layoff) and games we like to study (too many to list here!). Hear the students talk about their projects, including a study being conducted in Aden Evens’ course on immersion with the game Warhammer, which I have heard will culminate in a performative game action on the college green this week.
We are also announcing our new lecture series, courses, and salon. The new lecture series, called the Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series 2009, will be underway as of January. Invited speakers include Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Nick Montfort, and more.
Stay tuned for the schedule and all in the area are invited to attend. There is regular transit from Hanover NH to Boston, for example.
We have also started the variable_d salon, which runs every Tuesday at 4pm at Tiltfactor, when no lecture is scheduled. Topics vary but include critical issues in software studies and game studies with a focus on ontological and epistemological issues, logic systems, and other conceptual concerns. In addition, we are now able to announce two new Dartmouth courses: Games + Playculture– a critical studies course exploring the historical considerations and anthropological and sociological importance of play and games (WINTER 2009) and the Media Design Laboratory: Game Design Studio– a theory+practice course exploring the process of making games while developing game ideas, prototyping, playtesting, and producing a game per week (SPRING 2009).
via Grand Text Auto
November 30, 2008
Three 1K Story Generators
To follow up on the 1K story generator I posted ten days ago, here is a slightly revised version of that generator and two new ones.
- story1.py - Story generation by elision. This is a slightly modified version of the November 20 “original.” It uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed and the remaining text is presented as the story.
- story2.py - Story generation by segments. This chooses a beginning, middle, and end. A sentence is chosen from a pool of beginnings. A middle is generated by joining “He” or “She” to a verb or other middle section and concluding that with “he” or “she.” Then, an ending is chosen from a pool of endings. This was inspired by some of Nanette Wylde’s minimal and clever programs, such as Storyland and about so many things.
- story3.py - Story generation by elision & addition. This, like story1.py, uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-8 sentences are removed. These sentences were written by Beth Cardier. After each of these 5-8 sentences is printed, an “atmospheric” text is, with 50% probability, removed from an unordered pool and printed.
On a Mac or Linux system, you can run one of these, for instance, story2.py, by downloading it to the Desktop, opening a terminal Window, typing “cd Desktop”, and typing “python story2.py”. These run on Windows, too, but you will need to have Python installed, either by having already installed it or by installing it (e.g., version 2.6) yourself
via Grand Text Auto
Rap domestiqué, rap révolté
Le rap, à l'origine, est surtout un « coup de gueule », l'expression d'une rage, la voix de ceux qui n'en ont pas. Il dérange. Pendant cinq années, et malgré deux relaxes, le ministère français de l'intérieur a poursuivi le groupe La Rumeur pour un texte qui met en cause les violences policières. (...) / France, État, Justice, Musique, Police, Racisme, Banlieues - 2008/09
EndNote Sends Thugs to Bust Inkwells
Thomson Reuters, which vends EndNote, has leveled a $10 million lawsuit at the makers of open-source citation management software Zotero, alleging that the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University violated a license agreement by making their software interoperable. This dispute has some interesting nuances, as MacKenzie Smith describes:
An interesting twist to the case is that Thomson had previously encouraged EndNote users (primarily scholars) to create their own citation format style sheets for use in the software, and to share them with each other via donation back to Thomson or by posting on public web sites. But now Thomson is enforcing sole ownership of those style sheets regardless of who created them or where they’re located. In other words, unbeknownst to them EndNote users have been creating and sharing proprietary EndNote style sheets for years, but only at Thomson Reuters’ discretion …
Even the ivory tower isn’t free from rot. I wonder if EndNote users will be prompted to switch by this move, or if practicality and familiarity will outweigh any more remote questions?
via Grand Text Auto
Computer Space 2008
I’m sitting in a conference room in Bulgaria at the 20th annual Computer Space Conference in Sophia Bulgaria, listening to Peter Molyneux’s cousin who is a UK apple rep talk about Apple products (and the retelling of how indie developer Steve Demeter developed the $5 iPod game Trism for 250K profit) — all with the hum of simultaneous translation in the back.
This conference is Eastern Europe’s version of SIGGRAPH, I’m told, and I met many an interesting emerging game developer. I spoke on the Values at Play project in “Whose Computer Space? Human Values and the Design of Computational Worlds,” especially focusing on games made with our game tools.
Some of the memorable presentations included, first, “Uncanny space – the unconscious becomes playable reality” by Rene Bauer and Beat Suter of the University of Arts Zurich. They showed several networked art projects and discussed how artworks that are game related could contribute to innovation in commercial game production. Second, “Playing Music” by Fares Kayali (who partners with Martin Pichlmair in this research), from the Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology Austria. This presentation focused on the principles of design in music-based games in two distinct classes of games: rhythm-action
games and musical instrument games. In what they call Rhythm-action games, the authors pay attention to a strict game structure. Musical instrument games offer free-form play and simulate instruments, but their gameplay is strongly abstracted from playing an actual instrument. But the most interesting part of the presentation was to watch how the authors track the games as they lie among these categories, balancing between freedom of expression and the constraints necessary for clever gameplay. Kayali examined, among other games, Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton (2005) and Tenori-On, his musical instrument.
Finally, right before the corporate talks, Margarita Koehl from the University of Vienna Department of Communication Science spoke about her longitudinal study of online gamers, “Ten years after – Online Gamers’ Social Networks, Integration and Lifestyles in Austria: A Follow up Study.” This study looked at how a group of gamers from 1998-1999 were re-contacted to provide insight on how gamers later in life integrate games into their lives, and if their play patterns change. It appeared to be a quality study with rigorous social science methods.
There is enormous potential for independent game development and open source tool development in Eastern Europe, and I was delighted to meet all of the warm game dev folks and artists in Sophia.
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Links for 2008-11-29 [del.icio.us]
- Paris's booksellers under threat | World news | The Guardian
Bouquinistes' sales have dived as their carefully collected stocks of rare and out-of-print books face competition from online dealers and a change in Parisians' reading and shopping habits. Many now sell tourist trinkets to stay afloat, cramming their stalls with souvenirs.
November 29, 2008
Three More Animated Infographics Videos
Three more animated infographic video that have not yet appeared on infosthetics. They seem to be particularly noteworthy, as they avoid using the now pervasive slick "animated infographic" style originally introduced by Google Master Plan, Iraq War Conspiracy, Electronic Surveillance Critique and Hidden Cost of Iraq War.
The three movies illustrate the relationship between nature and sugar, explain the sports football, and introduce the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator concept.
You can all watch them below. Via biofusiondesign.com
Droit d'ingérence, où en est-on ?
Venir en aide aux populations en détresse sans le consentement de l'Etat est une idée ancienne. Déjà Hugo Grotius, en 1625 dans De jure belli ac pacis, évoquait une telle possibilité. Mais l'article 2, paragraphe 7, de la Charte de l'Organisation des Nations unies (ONU) pose le principe de (...) / Aide humanitaire, État, Justice, Organisation non gouvernementale (ONG), Nations unies (ONU) - 2008/09
i’m an ngmofo
I’ve been an absentee blogger, and I apologize. The last time I posted, in July, I mentioned I had started a new game studio Stumptown Game Machine here in Portland, that has been consuming my time. I had said we were working on a game for a reality-TV show, and in fact it was coming along swimmingly — until the publisher ran out of cash a few weeks before the game was complete. And, they still owe us money. Ah, the fun life of indie game development.
But then, we signed a deal to make an iPhone game with ngmoco, the upstart founded by ex-EA honchos Neil Young and Alan Yu. It’s top secret for the moment, but I can say we’re having a great, stressed-out time making what we hope will be a fresh, compelling game for this new platform. More when I’m allowed to tell you more…
A few other tidbits: I gave a talk at Austin GDC in September in the Future of Interactive Storytelling track. I went out a limb a bit with it, it was a difficult talk to pull off. I think it went alright; it generated a small amount of heated discussion, and at least one blog post reacting to it (thanks Rubes, for the writeup). I was working heavily on the iPhone game while I was at the conference, so didn’t get a chance to liveblog or see more than a few other talks.
Also, I will be giving a keynote next month at the 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in Erfurt, Germany. ICIDS is the offspring of the recent mating of TIDSE and ICVS. Maybe I’ll see some of you there.
I was sad to have missed AIIDE last week. I did find some live blogging here (1 2 3).
via Grand Text Auto
Links for 2008-11-28 [del.icio.us]
- Lucha libre - ¡Viva México, cabrones! - ¿Wrestling? No chingues - ADN.es
En su versión mexicana, la lucha libre cuenta con una tradición centenaria. Se trata del segundo espectáculo más visto en su país natal tras el fútbol. Tan sólo en ciudad de México se puede asistir a un evento cualquier día de la semana en al menos diez lugares.
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