cognitive space mapping

At DiGRA, Espen Aarseth gave me an interesting link, Pierre Gander and his PhD on participating in a virtual story-Lund University. The papers were also good.

cognitive space mapping

At DiGRA, Espen Aarseth gave me an interesting link, Pierre Gander and his PhD on participating in a virtual story-Lund University. The papers were also good.

Handy review of qualitative methods

Handy review of qualitative methods:


Phenomenography:

Interesting read

Hmm should get time to read everything I post!
(From Oliver Grau's book)

small portable pcs called handtops or UPC

the above (flipstart) looks most interesting to me and smaller than tiny laptops on sale now but the below handtops are already on sale:

antelope mcc
oqo

What else is out there, running Mac or Linux OS?
And what can run on 8mb graphic cards--Flash?!

reviews
PC world
Engadget
bargain pda on the OQO
OQO
review of antelope mcc flipstart oqo etc
review of flipstart
review of sony vaio
sony vaio u series specs
sharp handtop
flybook
PS some probably need a projected keyboard.

planeshift

looks interesting as do the screenshots
getting the designers to pay and players have free entry? hmm.

Introducing Place (article on place in online communities)

Quite interesting. I wish the formatting was more legible though.

Architects grapple with the physical aspect of place. They see it as grounded in physical space, they study - together with other disciplines - the mechanics of its construction, and try to adapt their designs to accommodate 'placemaking.' Place is the goal of the architect: "space is the opportunity; place is the understood reality (Harrison and Dourish, 1996)."

But here, ha! Architects!

Disembodied experience and intimate place, however, do not seem to be mutually exclusive.
Hmm. A chat world is not a 3D world. So why do we keep calling them both place?

crazy geek gear: Solar powered bags

needs no comments does it?! now all I need is an iPod and I too can be recognised as otaku.
Other geek links:
http://thinkgeek.com/
http://www.compgeeks.com
http://www.cracksmokingshirts.com
http://www.mallasch.com
http://www.thegadgetbox.com
The last link ("It’s perfect for geek wannabe’s")proves that Geek is a self affirming term--how could there ever be a nerd wannabe?
Apparently Otaku in Japan has undergone a similar connotation shift.

And a wireless camera detector?! sheesh.

dancing with robots

"In a nutshell, while a dancer performs on stage he or she is wearing wireless sensors that monitor key physiological signs (respiratory and muscle activity, cardiac activity and the nervous system). Then, these measurements are captured in real-time during a performance and projected via colorful 3D renderings on a screen for the audience to watch."

Last night

Last night I went to a launch of Traffic no.5 and got complimented on the name of my article:
Indiana Jones and the Joystick of Doom: Understanding the Past via Computer Games..
But more importantly, met some interesting people. However, Bruno, that does not mean I think Bram Stoker's Dracula is more interesting than the real Vlad the Impaler! (Why did I link to this Bram Stoker link? Because the typo is so funny!

Or maybe Stoker did actually play in the Strokes under his reputed name of Stroker.
Oh, people they don't understand
No, girlfriends, they don't understand
In spaceships, they won't understand
And me, I ain't ever gonna understand (the Strokes)

Very interesting Paper of the Day award

iPerG
Position Paper For the Second Conference of Pervasive Computing Workshop on Gaming Applications in Pervasive Computing Environments
April 13th -21st Linz/Vienna Austria Date: February 13th 2004

Our Vision of Pervasive Gaming
Pervasive games are a radically _digital_ new game form that extends gaming experiences out into the physical world– be it on city streets or in remote wilderness. Players equipped with handheld and wearable interfaces move through the world. Sensors capture information about their current context, including their location. The sensor info is used to deliver a gaming experience that changes according to where they are, what they are doing and even how they feel.

Best Graffitti in the world

My favorite:

God is dead signed Nietzsche.

then someone (some deity?) scrawled above it (Nietzsche is dead signed God).

I forget what sort of paint God used, oh well.

Here is the metaphor applied to virtual travel information.
I think I am going to use the irony word again.

Maybe a better name for a travel website would be 'MetHerB4"? Oh perhaps not.

1s and Os now get all fuzzy with computers

“The digital computer is dead,” writes media theorist Chris Chesher.

Did not know it was alive. I suspect metaphors are getting loose and furious in all this talk of digital media.

"The coming digital age holds much promise. It will extend human abilities and shrink space." Get Ready for Digital Convergence: A Primer on Life in the Twenty-First Century

Frankly I quite like my neighbours to stay being neighbours. One is Greek (probably ancient Greek for all I can tell) and feeds her plants at 6 in the morning like clockwork. Very noisy clockwork.

What happened to fuzzy logic and all that talk on getting past binary logic and random buddha quotes? (Hmm yes it was a strange book). Here are some fuzzy links

O what is it?
"Fuzzy logic is a superset of conventional (Boolean) logic that has been extended to handle the concept of partial truth -- truth values between "completely true" and "completely false". It was introduced by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh of UC/Berkeley in the 1960's as a means to model the uncertainty of natural language. (Note: Lotfi, not Lofti, is the correct spelling of his name." (reference)

If you know all this you can see how fuzzy you are (well how much you know - a bit ironically, this is multichoice. I wonder what a fuzzy questionnaire looks like?)

Artefactual Agency

Well actually the above link should really be to this sprawling thread and I really should write up replies here, check the html and then if still feverish post back there. Like these comments on interactive storytelling.

A few suggestions:
in a game or virtual heritage environment (which is what I research) agency is not actually the component but _perceived_ agency. You can keep calling it agency but really the fact it is an illusion (but the 2d squirrel really _does_ like me!) does not mean it is not important, for we as pattern matchers assume agency to anything we can, God, inkblots, good looking cars, images of newsreaders.
Once I sat in the front row of a cinema and this guy (drugs drinks or some other condition) started having a conversation with characters on the screen-he honestly thought they were real. Fascinating, well to me not the others in the cinema. His dialogue started diverging from the actual cinematic dialogue though, ie they became characters in his head and not just people on the screen he believed were characters he knew.

Dialogue-it does not mean assymmetry, it means in ancient Greek parlance two people trying to reach a conclusion (Socrates via Plato). Gadamer wrote a wonderful definition of democracy/dialogue: entering a conversation with the tacit acknowledgement one could have one’s mind changed.
Anything less is not a true dialogue.

Story telling: story making? story sharing? story playing? It depends on the audience. The Kalevala is a story remembered, a play is a story interpreted and the nuances affected, theatre games are stories directed by the audience. All are slowly remade over time (nobody notices we have modified/semi-standardised Shakespeare’s spelling when he himself/themselves kept changing it).
Making stories and (spatial narrative in 3D games) is more fun because we are continually surprised by possibly meaningful forks in the narrative path and intrigued by its possible psychological effect on the audience/gamer:
Immanuel Kant nearly stumbled on this with his talk of aesthetic ideas, and Pynchon had an idea in the crying of lot 49.

Sharing meaning: when you can produce this in a virtual environment (game) I think it is hermeneutic. So far we have it in 2D but I don’t think we have it in 3D due to lack of personalisation or truly unique identification (ok so I can build a house in ActiveWorlds that looks like any other house in ActiveWorlds).

Sorry regards length, the thread re-awoke what I should be writing about, and reminds me what I should have said: Chris Crawford really came close a long time ago to the idea of interactivity so if his new book is even better it is a must-read IMHO.
et.


Extra homework:
"I was thinking this exact same thing over breakfast this morning. “Wait a second – isn’t ‘interactive narrative’ an oxymoron?” (I don’t actually feel certain that it is, but the thought did cross my mind.)"-Jeremy Bushnell
Is narrative interactive?

"If the creation of the story is non-trivially collaborative, even if a narrator is narrating the results to me, I feel the overall experience is best described as a making, not a telling. It’s clearer"-andrew
Interactive storymaking: when isn't it digital?

Ok I better turn the above into a _sensible_ essay. After all, I did promise to write a reply to the Selmer Bringsjord: "Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment?" article in Game Studies, Volume 1, issue 1. Note to self (he conflates drama, and compelling and turns it into an attack on the whole idea of AI rather than what the title suggests: interactive storymaking that is engaging).

Why artefactual agency as a title? Because few people talk about it yet but it is essential for cultural presence..

is language really just a human skill

what most interests me is this chimp was moved to communicate out of gossip not from a desire for food.
PANBANISHA, a Bonobo chimpanzee who has become something of a star among animal language researchers, was strolling through the Georgia woods with a group of her fellow primates -- scientists at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Suddenly, the chimp pulled one of them aside. Grabbing a special keyboard of the kind used to teach severely retarded children to communicate, she repeatedly pressed three symbols -- "Fight," "Mad," "Austin" -- in various combinations.

Austin is the name of another chimpanzee at the center. Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one of Panbanisha's trainers, asked, "Was there a fight at Austin's house?"

"Waa, waa, waa" said the chimpanzee, in what Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh took as a sign of affirmation. She rushed to the building where Austin lives and learned that earlier in the day two of the chimps there, a mother and her son, had fought over which got to play with a computer and joystick used as part of the training program. The son had bitten his mother, causing a ruckus that, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh surmised, had been overheard by Panbanisha, who lived in another building about 200 feet away. As Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh saw it, Panbanisha had a secret she urgently wanted to tell.

Idea for political election game

--a suggestion from a post I just made to the '1001 clicks' thread at the great blog www.grandtextauto.org--

or, you have pictures sent to you of the next generation of presidential hopefuls. Their facial features are mapped to a personality strengths and weaknesses image database (created by surveying audience responses to pictures of politicians). You musto find and groom the dumbest politician cunning enough to win once you mate them with Bush or Clinton genes and the more incompetent or corrupt decisions you make the more votes you get. Every so often you can hit the ‘God just told me’ or the ‘We need to invade someone for their own good’ button but you can only do so at the right time.
Interestingly, some are suggesting Jeb Bush (despite his current wishes) may run against Hillary in 2008. If so, imagine the polarisation you have now and double it.

Snappy titles appreciated.