• SceneCaster hits a milestone

    Hours Categories Game talk

    The Facebook version of SceneCaster has hit a milestone — it was the “most active app” a few days ago. Now, Facebook defines “most active” as what I would tend to call daily tie ratio; meaning, they are ranking apps based on what percentage of those who have it used it that day, and not total users. In SceneCaster’s case, it was a highly respectable 80%. (I just checked and today they are down around 16%).

    Total usage for SceneCaster is around 21,000, based on that 16% figure, which is a far cry from being a mainstream app on Facebook (the top apps have multiple millions of active users, and some get tie ratios above 20%, such as Super Wall or Scrabulous). But it’s still an interesting stats, because it shows that a mostly non-interactive “virtual world” app can garner an audience that seems interested.

    Virtual Worlds News has an interview with some interesting tidbits.

    “Our philosophy going into this was very different from your traditional virtual world philosophy,” explained Zhoar. “We looked at how people are interacting, and it’s all asynchronous. People come in and leave a message on your wall, and we’ve tied into that with this application that gives them a great capability to express themselves on the Web through these highly immersive experiences and then publish them.”

  • The Sunday Poem: I Saw and Heard

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem

    Sorry for posting so late, but I was at a very enjoyable party up in LA today, and wasn’t home most of the day. This here is a rewrite of a fairly old poem, mostly just cleaned up for meter.

    I saw and heard

    A tethered girl with a guitar, restringing
    On a park bench, clothes and voice wringing
    Wrinkles from a rag. She twitched her head,
    A nervous finch, her bones aslide, fluid
    Bumps beneath her drum-tight skin, a flock
    Of birds enclosed by brittle flesh, a-cracking,
    And cracking only when she sang.

                                            I feel
    A minor need to make her something real:
    To steal aloft the eagles trapped within,
    To cut them free from helpless hampering skin,
    Take hold of jesses, loose them in a spasm,
    To watch the music soar past sky and chasm.

    But “real” lies in beholder’s hearts, and “real”
    Is not lived day to day — is just a tale
    Told to children full of fancy dreams,
    Who picture avian souls and eagle’s screams.

    The whole short scene was just her playing.
    She’d sung some words before, I’d say,
    Will sing again, will strive, earn cash, survive,
    And lyrics do not modulate our lives.

    But where is the poem in that?

  • MIT Fan Labor panel audio and video

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Archives

    The final panel on the first day of our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference, on fan labor, is now available for download in audio and both high-res and low-res video form.This panel is available here in audio and video form. The video is intended for download, and some browsers may try to display text if you don’t right-click the link to save to your computer. If your browser tries to download it as a “.txt,” remove the “.txt” from the name, and the file should work as an “m4v.”

    The panel features a conversation among Mark Deuze of Indiana University, Jordan Greenhall of DivX, Raph Koster of Areae, Elizabeth Osder of Buzznet, and Catherine Tosenberger of the University of Florida, moderated by Henry Jenkins.