The PARC visit was great!

 Posted by (Visited 4876 times)  Misc
Jan 262006
 

There’s something really cool about being somewhere where so much computing history has been made. I got to see a “gadget wall” that was a tribute to the main guy behind ubicomp, for example. I also learned that even PARC can’t prevent plasma screen burn-in. 😉

The Forum was very well-attended (thanks for coming, Brian!) and I think it went very well. I got a souvenir pen and a copy of the poster, which is basically a large colorized version of this image. I have to admit it was mildly depressing when one of the folks organizing the thing said “It’s so nice to have a Forum speaker with graying hair!” I ended up whining, “But I’m only 34…!”

Considering I was running on three hours of sleep (and still am, actually), I think I was reasonably coherent. Big thanks to the PlayOn guys for having me out there; we had a blast spending the whole day digging into all kinds of questions about social architecture in MMOs, in-game economies, and lots more.

Also, Bistro Elan in Palo Alto has a really good butterflied chicken breast in pineapple curry sauce.

I’m too fried to try finishing any of the four different partially complete blog posts I have here, so I’ll see you all here tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-feed.

Yeah, but can West Virginia do freeze arrows?

 Posted by (Visited 5222 times)  Game talk
Jan 252006
 

West Virginia uses DDR in schools to fight obesity.

A couple of years ago, I lost 15-20lbs playing DDR for a half hour every morning. Then SWG crunch started and I didn’t have time to do it anymore. All the weight came back, alas.

There are even incriminating snapshots of me playing DDR versus such MMO luminaries as Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab and Second Life, Randy Farmer of Habitat (OK, that one was actually Pump It Up), and Serafina Pechan of Atriarch.

Fortunately, I think most of said snapshots are not actually on the Internet.

Yet.

Anyway, insert obligatory post on how many serious applications there are for game technology, etc. Then go do “Paranoia” on hard with two mats.

Reminder: PARC Forum tomorrow

 Posted by (Visited 7965 times)  Game talk
Jan 252006
 

Just wanted to remind everyone that I am giving a Parc Forum tomorrow.

Title: The Medium That Ate the World
Time and place: January 26, 2006, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Description:

Games. There they are. We all know about them, at this point. We grew up on the classic board game sort. We dropped quarters at the arcade, we collected cartridges and disks; we downloaded hacks, and wrote walkthrough manuals.

Now here we are in a connected age, and the games are connected too. With all this experience, we’ve asked damn few questions about what games really are, how they really work, how they change and how we are changed by them.

Today games are not only rising in the popular culture, but are shaping the ways we think. The future of cyberspace is developing in the game world, not in the staid halls of research labs, and as a result, it is full of far stranger things than we would have imagined.

This talk will describe the core architecture of how games work, the ways in which they are revelatory of the human condition, and the blinkers that a gamist view of the world puts on. It will explore the future of games and ways in which our culture will be shaped by play.

Welcome to the medium that is going to swallow the world, and present it back to us with the forms of things unknown.

Of course, I haven’t finished my Powerpoint slides yet, but I hope to have them wrapped up today. If not, I may be frantically getting them done on the plane at 6am… 😉

Any of you Bay Area readers, I’d love to see you, if you can get out of work early and stop by. Alas, I will be flying out in the early evening, so I won’t be able to stay in the area for dinner, which means I’ll miss out on all the restaurants around there (at least GDC is soon, and I will be able to satisfy my cravings for Teske’s Germania!).

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