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"As the population of the system grows, everyone's personal horizons begin to shrink. With enough people, eventually you're talking to the people right in your neighborhood. To get a message to someone across the country, you might lie about your location, or ask that it be passed on, Milgram-style." Filtering by proximity in a restrictive – but potentially more useful – manner. Interesting.
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"This is the challenge, it seems to me: it's to do with the tools of design– rules and states– what other media do with images and sound: reveal the world as seen through different eyes, with lapidary clarity and moral courage. And this means moving beyond merely empowering and entertaining the player."
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"Everything breaks, so what happens when we wire the world on the sort of massive scale being proposed and every day is more irritating than the next? Probably what will happen is that people will just walk away from the entire project damning it first with market insignificance and if that doesn't work then rendering it meaningless with government regulation. It's worth at least talking about." Aaron is awesome.
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"i have made an "electronic" 8bit calculator (not "mechanical" calculator) with the Beta LBP demo.it do decimal/binary conversions and it can do Add and Sub… computation take clearly less that a half second. this calculator use: – 610 magnetic switches – 500 Wires – 430 pistons – 70 emitters and others stuff…" Amazing – especially the pan-out to the whole contraption.
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"The big dilemma is that needs are different. I’m normally on Mobile Google Maps when I’m frantically trying to find a place, often the hotel I’ve booked. I’m lost, I want to sleep – I’m not exploring the possibility space, and I don’t want to wade through marketing garbage. Note that this doesn’t make sense for these kinds of advertisers either: I’ve booked already, and I don’t want alternatives." Once again, the problems of the mobile context (rather than the mobile technology) rear their heads.
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"On April 1, 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page “special report” about San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of this obscure nation." Wonderful
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Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).
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"The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order – jugglers and prostitutes for example – and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." Wow. I did not know that.
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"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" Amazing.
Obama for America, the MMO
07 October 2008
Almost everybody’s linked to the Obama ’08 Official iPhone Application by now. With just cause, as well; it’s a nifty, attractive piece of crowdsourced software development that focuses on a single task that’s well suited to mobile – canvassing – and provides the amateur campaigner with the tools to canvas more effectively.
Skimming over the official page, though, I couldn’t help but notice this in the list of features:
See nationwide Obama ’08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
So whilst you’re canvassing your friends and recording just how many of them are going to vote for Barack in November, you can also compare yourself to how everybody else using the app is doing. In one click, you’ve got a massively multiplayer high score chart – and of course, you’re going to want to beat everybody else on there, so you go off to canvas some more.
Obama for America just launched an MMO, and nobody noticed.
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The results are now out. No surprises that Soundless Mountain II wins, but nice to see a late entry from the entertainingly Crush pastiche, "Squish". In Squish, a 2D game gets flattened to a 1D game at the touch of a button! Brilliant.
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"I used to scoff at paying a premium for jeans that come with holes in them already. Then I saw just how much work goes into distressing jeans, and I realized that these people are artists."
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"The main screen of the application. All operations are performed using this screen." And you can tell, you know. What a UI!
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…and then a massive anonymous slagging-match and name-calling session begins in the comments. Some reasonable commentary in amongst a lot of mud-slinging about the state of EALA…
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"Take the hassle out of organising football". It's been done before, but perhaps the brand, mobile experience, and quality of product will win out for Nike's team-management app. They showed us the MMO with Nike+; now they're doing guild management for the masses.
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"In essence, the in-game physics cooked up by Pure's designers isn't merely a matter of being realistic or unrealistic. The physics is evocative, creating your worldview within the game, and even metaphoric: When you play Pure, you realize that physics is one of the truly artistic elements of an action title." Yes! Spot on, Clive Thompson.
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"The technology will probably improve, but in lieu of the promised emergent web AI, we need to build more small tools, more games to bootstrap datasets, and more simple ways of encouraging people to play their part in the semantic web without ever having to explain what it is." tt++.
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Fantastic presentation from Giles Bowkett, which is about generative music, art, shipping, Ruby, and building things for yourself.
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"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article
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"At its core, what should this product be best at? When users think of this product, what is the central feature(s) that should spring to mind? Everything else is distraction, clutter, cruft."
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"I think this vision of artistic expression as a form of collaboration is a truer description of the nature of game design than of any other medium, because video games are inherently interactive." Pliskin on Steve Gaynor, and the gap between the screen and the gamepad.
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Portal-inspired homebrew game for the DS. Looks rather sweet, although not keen on collect-em-up mechanics.
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Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.
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"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.
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"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.
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Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.
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"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.
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"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.
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"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.
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"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.
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"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).
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"If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.
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"Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions." Beautiful, notably "I wish I were the Moon"
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"In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"– the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts." Fantastic piece from Steve Gaynor, which touches on some notions of the death of the designer – namely, that the designer *is* inherently present in games; they embody themselves in mechanics, and games that downplay logical mechanics that players can reverse-engineer do themselves a disservice.
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I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive… but "Height" is really lovely.
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This might come in handy sometime.
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"Restore harmony by clicking the tiles until no open end is left over."
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Excellent interview with Yoshi Ono on some of the design challenges and nuanaces of Street FIghter IV. The stuff about when to skip frames (and when not to) is particularly interesting.
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"Maybe it's the tusks, and the horns. Running with a dangerous crowd. You have to admit, dark elf boys are kind of wuss. And let's not even talk about gnomes. Or maybe it's part of the separation process. Getting away from your parents. For sure I can't ever visit her in the Undercity."
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"Still, it’s 110 days (or 2,663.18 hours) that I’m sort of responsible for taking from a girl’s life. Phileas Fog circumnavigated the globe in less time than that." A lovely piece of writing from Simon Parkin, tracking down a digital life he sold long ago.
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"…one final achievement, ‘Remember September ‘44′ rewards players with no less than 50 achievement points for simply playing the game at some point on September 17th, the anniversay of the events depictied in the game. As you have to be connected to Xbox Live at the time, there’s no way to cheat by fixing the time on your console’s clock, meaning that gamers who want the full 1000 points on offer will have to hang on to the game for close to a year from now…"
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"Turn photos of your designs into real life things." Fabbing based upon photographs or illustration. Blimey.
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"The rumblings you've been hearing in the criminal underground since July indeed are true: At long last, we are seeking new applicants to the League." Eeeeexcellent.
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"The Wireframe Graph Paper Notepad is made for visual designers, interaction designers, and information architects… These pages are great for sketching, but also work well when producing high fidelity drawings. The grid consists of 24 columns with gutters, so you can easily divide your canvas into common divisions…" Oh, yes please.
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"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.
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"Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.
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Make Iced Tea!
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"Now noisy makers can assemble and modify their own light controlled analog noise friend!" I want an analog noise friend.
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"Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level — one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.