• The Sunday Poem: When Is a Rhyme a Rhyme?

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem

    I am here in Austin for AGDC, after a difficult day of travel. My last-ditch attempt to make it to Rudy’s for some BBQ before they closed missed by 20 minutes thanks to various flight delays. So here I sit with Sonic cherry limeade, melancholy, a Marriott substituting for a garret, to write a Sunday poem for you… 😉

    When is a rhyme a rhyme? A pair of words
    Vibrating twain and twin, a homonym
    A scanty, scarcely fraction time, a blur
    Of vowels assonancing on a whim…
    Half verb, the penult, higher ante, quill
    That sometimes speaks in halves and sometimes sprung,
    And in the clumsy piling on of syll,
    The ables and alliterate undone.
    Is all it is the music? Nothing else
    applies? The quatrain’s break, the plosive sound,
    The prayer on the couplet’s open verse?
    The sense of it, the consonance profound?
    The algorithm elegant, the twinning still sublime,
    Is it still a poem, if we forget to rhyme?

  • Virtual worlds in the ambient cloud

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    The Web is moving towards a user-centric experience. Whereas a few years ago, it was all about visiting destination sites, now it is about destination sites spitting out data that comes to you, via RSS. The attraction of things like Twitter or Facebook lies in the ambient information that flows out and about, and in your largely asynchronous, largely placeless, largely shallow updates on what your friends are doing. You come to know them deeply not by engaging deeply with them, but by building up pictures of lots of small actions they take.

    Compare, for example, the destination-like IRC versus the ambient Twitter. Hardcore Twitter fans use it almost in realtime. They answer people, with their @fred syntax convention. They have a better history, perhaps, because they can search the stream in a way that IRC doesn’t really support. But more importantly, you follow Twitter by filtering it; it’s one big stream, and you take little bits of it out. It is as if IRC were all one channel, and you happened to build an aggregate channel of just the people talking that you wanted to hear.

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  • A poetry lesson for Bartle

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 19 Comments

    Richard Bartle has a little piece on the rhyming structure of this lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

    Mrs Schofield’s GCSE

    You must prepare your bosom for his knife,
    said Portia to Antonio in which
    of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,
    insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch
    knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said
    Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?
    Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death?
    To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?
    Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – do you
    know what this means? Explain how poetry
    pursues the human like the smitten moon
    above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
    make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:
    speak again.     Said by which King? You may begin.

    Sez Bartle,

    Maybe I’m missing something, or I’m not reading this with the right internal accent, but calling this “rhyming” is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?

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  • New major study on MMO players

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 35 Comments

    Dmitri Williams has released the first paper from an initiative that I helped get off the ground years ago, before leaving SOE. Basically, SOE gave him full (anonymized) logs of activity for EQ2.

    Some key findings:

    1. the largest concentration of players are in their 30s
    2. There are more players in their 30s than in their 20s
    3. Older players also play more than younger players
    4. Female players play slightly more hours per week than male players
    5. EQ2 players come from wealthier backgrounds than average, & are also more educated than the general population
    6. have substantially different levels of spirituality than the general population, particularly are far less likely to be Christian and much more likely to state they have no religion compared to the general US population
    7. Physically, EQ2 players are healthier than the regular population. So much for the overweight geek stereotype
    8. However, they have lower indicators for mental health — particularly for depression
    9. the desire to get ahead (“achievement”) and the desire to spend time with others both predicted increased playing, whereas the desire for immersion was a predictor of playing less

    More papers will be coming — they had to goto NCSA supercomputers to crunch the terabytes of data! — and I look forward to seeing what else emerges.