Year: 2007

  • In defense of the content consumer

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    CNet sat down with Howard Rheingold within SL to discuss his take on the overall virtual world and online community sphere. He sides with those who assert that the size of SL matters less than the quality of the discourse within:

    As far as I am concerned, tens of thousands of people who are actively creating new stuff are more interesting than millions of more passive participants.

    There’s something about this quote that bugs me, despite the great respect I have for Rheingold. And it’s this: is creating really more privileged than consuming?

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  • The Slamdance controversy makes CNN

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    The link is here — looks like a version of the AP article from a couple of days ago, complete with the oddity where the organizers offer two separate justifications:

    “I spoke to people who are still suffering very much from Columbine,” Baxter said Friday. “Some things are more important than one game or a festival.”

    Baxter said organizers were reluctant to expose Slamdance to possible legal issues over music in the game.

    “We have to preserve the ability to support gamemakers and filmmakers in the future,” he said.

    It’s still quite possible, of course, that it was both of these, plus other factors — basically, a number of factors overall contributing to the decision. It will be interesting to see the reactions in the mainstream media.

  • The Sunday Poem: Ode to Code, a Geek Poem

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 21 Comments

    OK, this is for the geeks among us. In fact, it is geeky on many different levels. It merits explanation in advance.

    Last night, I was working on a game I’ve been messing with. It’s circular, so there’s a lot of Sin(a) and Cos(a) and incrementing arcs and stuff. I was up until 4am, in fact, and needless to say, when you do that you end up with dreams. Mix into this the fact that at the Cub Scouts this past week, the demo was of optics, and we saw white light broken into the spectrum, and the wavelengths of the colors identified (and blue is damn close to 440 nanometers, and the note A is of course at 440 as well), an article I read a year ago about how the vibration frequency of the universe is the note A, how the composer Schumann (who went insane because of syphilis and mercury poisoning) was driven mad by hearing the note A… well, soon you end up with a poem that mooshes it all together.

    Then, to top it all off, I wrote it in blank verse: iambic pentameter, with seven-line stanzas, and one extra coda line (alas, not 440 syllables — 290). The stanzas arose organically, but each verse really hated being in lines — words broken across lines, etc, like strands that shouldn’t be interrupted. So then I re-broke the lines to be in a sine wave. Because I could. They seemed to want to fall that way. Eerie, huh? 🙂

    So finally, you’re left with a poem about, well, making games. And one I am tempted to annotate with Wikipedia links…

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  • Virtual Citizenship Association

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 23 Comments

    The Virtual Citizenship Association appears to be a recently founded group to promulgate rights for virtual world users. There isn’t a rights document per se up there yet, but it does start out by bluntly declaring that “living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there,” which under strict definitions seems a bit overreaching.

    Their social contract includes the following points:

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