Serious Games Initiative

Serious Games is an initiative “to help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills.” (Serious Games: About from “Our Goals”). the project is directed by David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. They talk about the “emergence of a serious games industry”. I feel about serious games what I feel about the hype around games in education – it isn’t really a game anymore when you “play” it in a utilitarian context. What makes playing a game is the entering into a non-utilitarian context where invented rules apply. Of course, any game, in the sense of a technology or instatiation (like Monopoly) can be “played” for reasons other than fun, and that is the beautiful irony of the phrase “serious games.” It is a contradiction that provokes sense.
In the philosophy of play we have the problem of professional poker playing. Is a card-shark still playing the game of poker if he/she does it for the serious purpose of making money? Some would say that the shark is not playing poker, but working at poker. Are games of chance played for money now serious? How does the money change the play? Tough issues.

Make Love Not Spam

Lycos Europe has apparently launched a project to encourage users to launch a distributed denial of service attack on known spammers. They offer a screensaver that will attack spammers. For the story see, Netcraft: Spam Sites Crippled by Lycos Screensaver DDoS. I can’t get through to MakeLoveNotSpam.org to check this (and get my copy of the screensaver), but this sounds like a great idea (and a great title.)
According to this story, Lycos Europe denies attack on zombie army | CNET News.com the Lycos site could have been hacked in return.
Continue reading Make Love Not Spam

Stanford: Innovations in Learning

ideo, a design company, has a neat site up on their ideas for the Stanford Center for Interactive Learning. The site shows different types of learning spaces they are designing for Stanford. I like how they imagine pods and walls. The site design is also clean and easy to explore.
Stanford has their own site on Wallenberg Hall (where the Center is) that gives lots of details on the rooms. See Wallenberg Hall – especially the section on “exploring WH”.
These links are courtesy of Audrey Carr.

Gibson Aleph: Agrippa

William Gibson aleph – essential information collection is a site dedicated to the work of William Gibson. They have images and the text of the poem Agrippa (1992) that was issued on a floppy that was coded to erase itself as you read. The floppy was in encased in art by Dennis Ashbrough that was supposed to likewise fade. The book/disk was published in 1992 by Kevin Begos Publishing, New York. This link came from Matt Kirschenbaum.

[Update] See also The Agrippa Files, a web site dedicated to preserving information about electronic poem.

Games Research

The next challenge in the humanities is thinking about computer games. One way to do this is to start developing games as research. To do that we need open source game engines. Steve Ramsay sent me the link to Crystal Space 3D and an article about it at LinuxDevCenter.com: Crystal Space: 3D for Free. I’m not sure how, but my sense is that we are going to have to start weaving text tools into these game engines.

Culture Tracking

Alexa is now tracking sites. On their home page they tell you what sites have jumped and they have a “Traffic Watch” feature in their Related Info for: pages that graphs “reach”. A neat feature is that you can compare any of the sites they track.
A couple of years ago I gave a paper on tracking culture by graphing web hits. We (Skip Poehlman, Michael Picheca and I) built a system that could track keywords and store results from daily searches. One could then graph any two against each other and so on. I see now that Alexa now has this feature and has been tracking some cultural comparisons like “Liberal Talk Radio”. Will they generalize this? Will they let us track our stuff?

How the Wayback Machine Works

The Internet Archive is an amazing database of old web sites. James Chartrand pointed me to an interview with the director of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle from January 21, 2002, titled How the Wayback Machine Works. The interview is by Richard Koman and still interesting, especially for those of us interested in text spiders and archives. I was intrigued by Kahle’s claim that the IA is the largest database in the world, “It’s larger than Walmart’s, American Express’, the IRS. It’s the largest database ever built.”

See my previous post on Ghost Sites and the Internet Archive.