Zip

So today I cancelled my subscription to Zip, the Canadian equivalent to NetFix. I liked the idea, but it didn’t work for me. Some of the reasons are:

  • You don’t get the DVDs you want in a timely fashion. At best you chose something and it comes a week later, but most of the time I would have forgotten why I listed something by the time it came, if at all. In other words you can’t scratch a desire.
  • All the stuff you really want to watch never seems to come. You have to have this long list and stuff comes based on availability which seems random. With a video store at least what you find on the shelf you can see that evening.
  • I had the 4 DVD service, but they didn’t seem to send me more than three at a time. I suspect they don’t have enough copies to handle the traffic.
  • The stuff that comes never seems to be the stuff I want to watch tonight. That’s the problem of depending on availability – you get what they have on hand not what you feel like any particular night. So I would go out and rent a video while letting the Zip DVDs lie around unwatched.
  • It’s not worth the money unless you watch the DVDs when they come in and send them back pronto.
  • I began to get notices that DVDs I put on my list were not available at all. Why is this? Do they list things they don’t have and then buy them (or not) when someone asks for them? Or do they not replace damaged copies?

To be fair, I’ve seem some hard-to-get movies through Zip that were terrific like Ali Zoua: Prince of the Streets (2000) – one of the most moving movies I’ve seen for while. It’s about and acted by glue-sniffing street kids in Casablanca and felt more authentic than anything else of its kind. Zip is also good for TV series. Once they send you the first episode in a series you get the others in sequence. (What would be more annoying that get the first DVD of the second season of the Wire and then not getting the second DVD for a month?)

Anyway, I’m back to renting while I wait for the ability to buy/rent online directly.

Prize Budget for Boys

Prize Budget for Boys is an arts collective “convened in Toronto in 2001” that has been creating interactive arts games. Pac-Mondrian
, for example, is a Pac-Man like game where you eat through a Mondrian work to the tune of boogie woogie jazz. (See the New York Times article, Arts > Art & Design > Chomp if You Like Art” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/arts/design/27mond.html?ex=1261890000&en=bc65f21f79d37d0a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>Chomp if You Like Art by Sarah Boxer (Dec. 27, 2004.)
Calderoids combines Asteroids with Calder like mobiles.
Continue reading Prize Budget for Boys

Most Influential Gamers?

MTV News has a nice story about the Most Influential Gamers? (June 21, 2006) by Stephen Totilo. The news story assembles 10 influential gamers for debate like U Michigan prof Peter Ludlow who was kicked off the The Sims Online for running a newspaper in the game. Another is Patrick Wildenbord who found the sex-game buried in Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas which causes a fuss.

Are top gamers becoming the sport stars of the net?

Thanks to Jean-Guy for this.

Perron: Cognition of Gameplay Emotions

A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions is a paper that Bernard Perron gave at DIGRA 2005. He adapts discussions of how viewers respond emotionally to cinema to understanding the emotions of playing computer games (specifically story-based ones.) I think he gets it right.

But inasmuch as you can make your avatar act, you have to make him take action. If not, there will be no game. Otherwise, as Iíve often stressed with regards survival horror games, it is certainly not the avatar that is meant to be scared or have emotions, but rather the gamer [19]. The avatar, incidentally, generally stays expressionless, whatever the situation. We saw that emotions depend on the gamerís appraisal of a given game situation. This individual appraisal will consequently produce subjective emotional reactions.

In many ways the mission style of certain games provides the overall motivation (you are just following orders) and it is in the achievement of the assigned task and overcoming the problems that the emotions of playing lie. Few games are sufficiently open ended that you can choose the general attitude to take to playing/living in the game-world. It would be much harder to program a game that was so open ended. By choosing the play a mission you suspend your choice of life goals in order to take pleasure in the goals set by the game. What does this say about levels of (free) will?

ESCI LiveCoda

Steve Ramsay sent me this link about esci (livecoda) – a realtime coding competition that was run in a bar in Australia. The teams were given a graphics stream problem (where they had to correct color problems) and timed. Teams of 4 could work in their favorite language. The winners were the team that took the last time. Not surprisingly teams that drank didn’t do as well. Reminds me a bit of Rebecca, but more fun.

Academic Blogging

The Chronicle of Higher Education has two online stories related to scholars who blog. The first by Ivan Tribble (a pseudonym), Bloggers Need Not Apply (July 8, 2005) asks “What is it with job seekers who also write blogs?” It goes on to suggest that, “More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.”

The other by David Glenn from the issue of June 6, 2003, is titled, Scholars Who Blog. It starts with the question “Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?” Glenn goes on describe actual cases of scholars who blog and provides a case study of one that took off. Glenn is more sympathetic:

Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.’s.

I would add that blogging can also be a way of connecting to unanticipated other researchers and a way of opening/sharing the process.

Google Book Search: Opinion

To scan or not to scan? (Guardian Unlimited, March 8, 2006) is an blog entry by Culture Vulture Victor Keegan in defense of Google’s scanning of millions of books, including books still under copyright. The comments are good too. The key issue seems to be whether this is covered by “fair use”.

Technically, as Charles Arthur points out, this is blatant infringement. Turn to the front of any book and you will find a paragraph that states that no part of it shall be copied or stored without the publisher’s permission. The University of Michigan is keeping material that is still within copyright “dark” until the copyright runs out, while Google argues that letting people read snippets of copyrighted books is covered by “fair use” provisions of the kind that mean we don’t go to jail for sneaking into Waterstone’s to look up a reference.

I found this from the Google Book Search – News & Views – Media Coverage page.

Amazon Text Analysis

Amazon has recently added a neat feature to the pages on certain books. If you go, for example to, Amazon.com: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture: Books: John Battelle and mouse-over the image of the book it gives you:

  • SIPs: Statistically Improbably Phrases
  • CAPs: Capitalized Phrases
  • and the ability to search inside the book and get a concordance.

They are providing a simple form of text analysis right on the book page. You can click on a SIP and see what other books (for sale on Amazon) have a high frequency of that improbable phrase.