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"The therapeutic role of digital media is to allow an instrumental view of social relations to be propagated, in which the instrument somehow suspends any sense of moral causality or responsibility. Between the 'input' and the 'output' is a machine that we are blissfully unable or unwilling to understand. Hence, the possibility that clicking "send" might stop a stoning in Iran." This is very good.
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"I’m a web developer at heart, and a scripting language user by preference. Coding for the iPhone doesn’t feel as fluid in text handling or HTTP access as the environments I’m used to. Fortunately I’ve been able to find some fantastic open-source libraries and wrappers that make up the difference. Here are my favourites so far:" A useful – and interesting – set of links from Matt B.
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"Oh words, words, words." Beautiful. Thanks, Simon.
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"The Wii has captured the imagination of millions of people who didn't consider themselves gamers at all. Why are we so surprised? All this has happened before." And, no doubt, all of it will happen again. Some good insight and quotation from Mitch Krpata on a history of Nintendo's console marketing and sales strategies.
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War reporting from a virtual world; Jim Rossignol documents the first skirmishes in the Offworld/RPS/Escapist conflict. Looking forward to more of this.
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"It is from the era when people were all 'we will not know if acid is dangerous until we test it on THE FOXIEST GIRLS IN ENGLAND.'" Too right.
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If you can see it, it exists. If you can't, it doesn't. Lovely, tough, fun.
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"We were delighted to have George Oates, ex of Flickr who started and managed the Commons, come to visit us at the National Maritime Museum in November 2008. When she was here she curated some Commons content for us. This set is the first of this content." Some wonderful selections; the full archive must be remarkable.
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"Perhaps more charities should project a less glamorous image, and remind us that they still have to do all the boring stuff that everyone does at work. And perhaps then we wouldn’t have such unreasonable expectations. Sponsor a filing cabinet, sir?" The thing I like most about this is being told exactly where your contribution goes; you get a real connection with a real thing. I'd rather buy charities a shelving unit than £25 of vague platitudes.
Surplus
12 November 2008
From this Eurogamer news article:
Microsoft has boasted selling over 2 million copies of Gears of War 2 during its opening weekend.
Furthermore, more than 1.5 million Xbox Live account holders played the game, according to Major Nelson – clocking up a record 15 million gameplay hours between them.
15 million hours is a lot of CPU time on the triple-core Xenon that runs a 360; a lot of processor power.
There might not be a cognitive surplus, but here’s a thought: what happens if, as a kind of “CPU-tax”, you require manufacturers to include an “extra” CPU or core in certain kinds of products – entertainment products, set-top boxes, consoles, PVRs, that kind of thing. That CPU is self-contained – processor memory, the lot – and devoted to running something like Folding@Home in the background, or whatever the next massive philanthropic grid-computing project the world needs to run is. Maybe you specify specific charity interests you have, so you can contribute to projects you care more about.
And then you have 15 million hours of 3 cores running Gears of War 2, and 15 million hours of protein-folding. Seems like a good trade-off to me.
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"PROBLEM: There is no way I can justify to myself spending that much money on plastic cows. Really, there is no way. WIN-WIN: I could however justify giving that same amount of money, or more, to a worthwhile charity. That would be an easy thing." Matt wants cows, in return for giving money to charity.
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Oh wow; it's like a developer network for LittleBigPlanet. Smashing.
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"On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…" Lovely.
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'"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of, over time, becoming $100 million-plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us," Kotick said.' Kotick is very serious about his use of the word 'exploit'.
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""The ability to offer these songs on a subscription basis may very well result in the newest subscription opportunity in our portfolio," he said." Kotick wants you to pay Activision to subscribe to UGC. Oh dear.
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Beautiful.
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"As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop– not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others– will be huge." Lots of good reflections from "Tinkering As A Mode Of Knowledge".
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Visualising the heights of people's towers by importing their savegame. Lovely.
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"By understanding the way bees respond to all the different aspects of the natural world, the beekeeper is able to recover his own relationship to the natural world through bees."
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"Every time Bobby Kotick opens his mouth, I see a giant cow with "GUITAR HERO" branded on its side, and Bobby Kotick is squeezing two teats as fast as he can."