New issue Game Studies
The second issue of the Game Studies journal was published. Last year around this time, if I remember correctly, the journal launched, stating they'd appear 3 times a year. I guess that the time it took the editors to put together a new issue shows the infancy of the field of academic game studies. It's good to see the website updated; even if they can't put together a new issue every couple of months, hopefully they can keep this important forum alive.
Aug 1, 2002 @ 10:39 » no comments » Research
Cognitive Mapping im Cyberpunk
Cognitive Mapping im Cyberpunk by Ingrid Lohman. Rather fragmentary, very graphics intensive page in German; many many links all around. By way of Bruce Sterling's Schism Matrix, some comments there as well.
Aug 1, 2002 @ 10:55 » no comments » Research
What is a weblog?
Dave got permission to reprint Meg Hourihan's O'Reilly column What we're doing when we blog. Taking that article as a starting point, he wants to refine the definition of what a weblog is, giving different people a voice, because as he says, "there is more to say". Let's see what will happen there... I'm a bit apprehensive about the project though, because I rather like Meg's minimal definition of weblog.
She says that the commonality lies in the format: timestamped posts, containing links and a permalink to the archives. This definition says nothing about purpose or content and leaves the field open for all kind of unexpected 'publications' to appear under the moniker of weblog. On the other hand, you could argue that its greatest weakness is exactly that it says nothing about purpose, content or "rhetorical form"; or maybe that it relies too much on the technology that is used. That said, I agree with Dave that there might be more to say... I just hope "weblog" doesn't get defined into a corner that we can't define it out of anymore.
Aug 1, 2002 @ 11:20 » no comments » Research
Between a bug and a deep hole
Yep. Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Windows 2000. As was to be expected, they changed the EULA (End User License Agreement, you know, that boatload of legalese you have to Agree to, to install...) so that it gives them the right to use your internet connection to check your Windows installation without asking you or even giving you a notification and if they deem it necessary, to 'update' your installation, again, without asking or notifying you. In their words:
The OS Product or OS Components contain components that enable and facilitate the use of certain Internet-based services. You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer.
So what's it going to be? Are you going to update and give Microsoft total and utter control over your computer or are you going to leave your computer full of holes and buggy as hell because with this EULA you refuse to patch the 64.000 holes they left in their software for hackers to play with. And I'm not even talking about the undoubtedly buggy auto-update system that will probably within months allow hackers to push malevolent code onto your computer without you even clicking on that attachment.
I must say that Linux is looking better every day. I've tried out the OpenOffice suite of programs on Windows and I must say that I'm pretty impressed. Maybe not completely up to par with MS Office, but for what I am doing with Office, it's plenty good enough. It read all my MS Office 2000 documents without a hitch and allowed me to do basically whatever I wanted to do. I'm already very happy with my FreeSCO Linux router, so my next computer is going to run Linux, if I don't make the change sooner. Let's see if I can get my fingers on an old machine to experiment with before I move my production machine to a new OS.
Aug 1, 2002 @ 23:32 » no comments » General
space was all
Scarce, I thought, were designers who embraced the smallness; who looked it in the eye and, instead of squinting, tried to imagine what good could come if such a space was all that was ever made available to them. Those who see that every container, no matter the size, can give only a portion of itself to the carriage of something else, and that (for want of a better word) appropriate presentation tends not to do well in crowded conditions. (Dean Allen)
I've been constantly trying to give this site more 'air,' more unused space, more white, but all that functionality that I want in here has to go someplace. Maybe this site isn't the right place to create stillness, it's a work(ing) place.
Aug 2, 2002 @ 10:07 » no comments » General
Salon blogs a succes
Dave writes: "Imho the Salon blogs have been a total success." I don't mean to diss Dave, but... already?
Aug 2, 2002 @ 10:21 » no comments » General
Slip them a Dreamcast
The Register reprinted a Security Focus article by Kevin Poulsen, titled When Dreamcasts Attack. Two white hat hackers
developed their game box cum attack tool after finding themselves more than once with physical access to a client's facilities -- posing as an employee in once case, crawling through a drop ceiling in another -- but without a way to leverage that access into remote control of the company's network. "It's not that hard to get into an organization for one or two minutes," said Higbee.
With firewalls and other intrusion countermeasures in place at the electronic perimeter of companies and organizations, the physical perimeter of those same companies and organizations often turns out more porous. The two white hats demonstrated how dirt cheap 'throwaway' hardware, in the form of the discontinued Dreamcast game console, running Linux could easily be smuggled into a company's buildings, hooked up to their network through the ethernet port the Dreamcast provides. Outbound connections are usually not so strictly policed as inbound connections, so from that point on the hacker would have a whole arsenal of techniques at hir disposal to remotely exploit the now compromised network.
Aug 2, 2002 @ 14:33 » no comments » General
Linux trial
Knoppix is a full Linux distribution, with lots of software and automatic hardware detection, that comes on a single, bootable cd-rom. It runs completely off of the cd and requires no installation whatsoever. I've tried it out and I'm very impressed!
I complained the other day about Microsoft releasing the latest Service Pack for Windows 2000 with an end user license agreement that gives them the right to check up and install or remove software on your computer without any further notification or consent on your part. (Slashdot and The Register report on it too.) I also said that I was seriously thinking about running Linux on my next computer, but that I needed a spare computer to experiment with it. Not so with Knoppix! Because it runs completely off of the cd you don't have to install anything. If your computer can boot from a cd (or if you make a boot floppy) you can boot straight into Linux, try out all the software and the KDE 3 desktop and when you're done, just log out and reboot into Windows.
I read about the Knoppix 'live-on-a-cd' Linux distribution on Slashdot (where else?) and decided to download the ISO cd-image. If you don't have a fast connection, you can also order the cd-rom. I burned the cd, set my BIOS to boot from the cd-rom drive and rebooted. Knoppix ran straight through the whole bootprocedure in one go on my AMD Duron 600 on an ABit KT7-Raid motherboard with 256MB RAM and Voodoo3 video card, and presented me with the KDE 3 desktop. It took only slightly longer to boot from the cd-rom than it takes Windows 2000 to boot from the harddisk. Graphics worked just fine, the sound card (Soundblaster 128) worked, the USB peripherals were recognized and functional, both my network cards worked and I immediately had internet-access through my local area network. Amazing!
I tried out the Knoppix cd-rom on my computer at work this morning, a Dell Optiplex GX110 (Pentium 3 667MHz, 128MB RAM, probably Intel i810 chipset with integrated sound and graphics). Interestingly enough the BIOS was not password protected, so I didn't have to make a separate bootfloppy and I simply set it to boot from cd-rom first. Immediately the bootprocedure halted with the message "You passed an undefined mode number" and offered me to either set a display mode by hand or just to continue by hitting the spacebar. I hit the spacebar and after that it was the same smooth experience as on my computer at home. Knoppix booted straight to the KDE 3 desktop, sound, graphics, internet-access (through the university LAN), everything just worked. I'm impressed.
A few niggles: the mouse scroll button on both systems didn't work; I wasn't able to find out how to change the screen resolution and refresh rates (and I _did_ poke around in the preferences quite a bit); gawd! text looks totally awful on screen and the provided fonts are not up to par with Windows (hopefully this is something that can be changed from the defaults Knoppix provides).
Knoppix automatically mounted the NTFS formatted harddisks of my computer at home as well as at work, which gave me instant access to all my data. Opening one of your MS Office files is as simple as double clicking it, because OpenOffice is included on the Knoppix cd-rom. The OpenOffice suite of office applications had already convinced me that it was more than adequate for my needs (I'm writing a PhD, so I guess that unless you're using some very specific MS Office tools, it'll be good enough for 80 or 90 percent of the people out there). Again, I'm impressed by the sheer quality of the experience.
So, what's next for me? I can't go on booting the same static Linux installation from cd-rom if I really want to put it to work, can I? Well, since I bought a second harddisk only weeks ago, I think I'm going to try to set up a dual boot system. Reading through a couple of tutorials, it doesn't seem too difficult to do and besides, I have plenty diskspace now. So, next is deciding what Linux distribution to get.
The only thing that bugs me is that I have years of experience in setting up a fairly stable and fairly secure system using Windows and now I have to go through the whole learning process again. And I just know that it won't be for quite a while before I feel safe and somewhat knowledgable on a Linux system. It's also very annoying that I should go through all that trouble (although, I enjoy the challange on a certain level) while I simply want to get my work done. But that's something I feel I can only blame Microsoft for. Whatever you think about their monopolistic practices, you still had a choice of whether or not to download/purchase and run a different browser, a different media-player or even a different office suite, but with claiming root/administrator rights on MY computer in the EULA, Microsoft finally went over the line for me.
Aug 5, 2002 @ 14:12 » 3 comments » General
in/outsite links difference
Hmm, Rebecca Blood did something interesting with the hyperlinks on her website: the links that point to another website have a different appearance than the links that point to a different part of the same website. Very simple, very logical: good use of defining links with CSS. Should have been a part of HTML standards a long time ago. Only con is that you have to add a CSS class definition to either every off-site or every on-site link.
Aug 6, 2002 @ 12:12 » no comments » General
MSNBC blogs coming?
Webwereld, a Dutch internet news site, reports that by the end of August MSNBC is going to offer users weblogs in an attempt to gain more "editorial control" over the users' contributions. It says that last year MSNBC shut down their discussion boards because it had to filter 17 million messages a month for hostile and/or obscene content. With offering blogs they hope to again give the users a sense of community, while at the same time eliciting more responsible behavior and more responsible content. Interesting development, right on the heels of Salon offering blogs. Looks like blogs are gaining a lot of mainstream exposure now.
This News.com article appears the source of the Webwereld article. News.com doesn't mention any shutting down of discussion boards over at MSNBC.
Aug 6, 2002 @ 12:36 » no comments » General
Mozilla Museum
The Mozilla Museum. Many mesmerizing Mozilla memories.
Aug 8, 2002 @ 10:03 » no comments » General
Popinstituut
What the !@#$%? The Dutch institute for popular music, the Popinstituut, which has an international/English version as well, is only accessible with Internet Explorer and Netscape version 4. It won't load with any other browser. The mind boggles... it feels like 1997 all over again. Could someone a little closer hit them over the head with a cluebat and point them towards the W3C and Webstandards.org please?
Aug 11, 2002 @ 23:10 » no comments » General
Two silly links
Driving lessons... scroll down a bit and wait for the 1.1 meg shockwave file to load.
Midget Tossing... no actual little people were harmed in the making of this game. I must confess I harmed quite a few while playing the game though. (via Samurai Panda)
Aug 12, 2002 @ 09:40 » no comments » General
Bruce Schneier on security
A long article in The Atlantic that goes into many aspects of security, both electronic and physical, based in a large part on Bruce Schneier's views. This article should be required reading, for just about anybody. (By way of an interesting Slashdot discussion.)
Maybe so, Schneier says. "But think about screw-ups, because the system will screw up." [...] Indeed, as a recent National Research Council study points out, the extra security supposedly provided by biometric ID cards will raise the economic incentive to counterfeit or steal them, with potentially disastrous consequences to the victims. "Okay, somebody steals your thumbprint," Schneier says. "Because we've centralized all the functions, the thief can tap your credit, open your medical records, start your car, any number of things. Now what do you do? With a credit card, the bank can issue you a new card with a new number. But this is your thumb -- you can't get a new one."
Aug 12, 2002 @ 21:21 » no comments » General
MMORPGs making money
Once a destination for the fringe Dungeons & Dragons crowd, the online role-playing game [EverQuest] now has 433,000 paying customers who generate $5 million a month for the Japanese entertainment giant. Given the 40 percent gross-profit margins, and the fact that this world practically runs itself, the dragon-slaying business is looking pretty good these days.
Business2.0 has an article up about the big business virtual worlds are turning into. Not overreacting, the article also says that Sony makes a couple of times the money from a big movie hit that it is currently making from EverQuest. The point however is that online gaming has the potential of getting very big if the succes can be replicated in other games and other platforms: think consoles, with both Sony and Microsoft working hard to get their game consoles networked; later maybe pervasive or roaming gaming on your mobile or handheld, who knows.
Most importantly though, the article mentions that these online game spaces keep attracting players because they are social spaces. The article doesn't really go into the point, except for saying that people keep coming back because apart from the game goals, the game really is about playing together, or, put in more Business2.0-like economic terms:
The beauty of EverQuest... is that players effectively pay to entertain each other.
Currently there are a good deal of big MMORPGs in the pipeline, including StarWars Galaxies (also produced by Sony), which is said to become the next big thing in online gaming. I wonder though, if socializing is really such a big thing, could it be replicated beyond a game space, into a virtual social space of the size and quality of current games? I'm thinking Metaverse here: essentially a virtual corollary (using the term loosely) of the 'real' world; no direct game related goals, but a very realistic cause-and-effect system.
First thing though, for widespread acceptance: lose the MMORPG acronym. That's not going to bring in the big crowds. In the mean time, keep an eye on who's making the money and what kind of worlds they're crafting... do you really want them replicating our everyday social structures in the places you go to escape everyday reality?
Aug 13, 2002 @ 17:22 » no comments » Research
Took a long time
Sometimes after starting to read a book, I wonder why it took me such a long time to either buy the book or if I already bought it, why it took me so long to get started in it. Sandy Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) is such a book. Since it came out in 1995 I knew it was there, I knew that I wanted to read it, but somehow it only kept hovering in the peripheral field of my consciousness, just out of reach of the desire to act on that knowledge. But about a month ago I remembered I'd wanted the book for a long time, went online, ordered the book and now that I've finally started it, I can hardly put it down. More later, I guess...
Aug 14, 2002 @ 09:51 » no comments » Research
More bad webdesign
Apologies if this appears repetitive, but it irks me to no end that the webdesigners of high traffic websites can't seem to put together a website that simply works in all major standards compliant browsers. NRC, one of Holland's 'quality' newspapers, doesn't work in Opera nor does it validate: the left navigation bar misses completely and something funky happens to the links in the right navigation bar if you move over them. On the positive side, at least the new design works in Mozilla, unlike the old design that only worked in IE.
I'm proud to announce though, that I have developed a simple, universal remedy against badly designed websites: I don't visit them anymore. Their loss.
Aug 15, 2002 @ 16:01 » no comments » General
Digging a hole
With respect to the previous post about yet another big website not validating... isn't it a bit ironic that linking to the W3 validator breaks the validation on my own site, because the URI has unescaped ampersands in it? That means that for every URI that I copy and past to refer to another site I have to check if it has ampersands in it and then escape them by writing & amp; instead of &. Well, too bad, I'm not going to. Unescaped ampersands are quite a different thing for validation than structural faults in my code. *grumble*
Aug 15, 2002 @ 17:24 » no comments » General
Photos
I didn't know there were pictures! That's me, fragging some people to pieces in Quake after the 2001 Computer Games and Digital Textualities conference in Copenhagen, Denmark (Charlie with glass in the background). Me again (far right). Me being professional about speaking in public. Ick.
Aug 17, 2002 @ 22:26 » no comments » General
Norah Jones
Just discovered this and I like the jazzy/bluesy songs. NorahJones.com, that's the way to sell your music. Simply put a live concert and some other performances online as MP3s and Real audio and video files. Now they just need to add a 'tip the artist' button that makes it easy to tip a couple of dollars if you like the music. Courtney would be happy. Funny, I usually don't like jazz being sung, even though I like a lot of jazz, but I like this. A lot.
Aug 18, 2002 @ 00:38 » no comments » General
-zilla
Take the quiz brought to you by Quizilla.
Little dragon guy sued by silly corporation. Who's next?
Signed, Fragzilla.
Aug 18, 2002 @ 14:18 » no comments » General
MacMyst
Had Myst never been released for the Mac, I think that there wouldn't have been much theorizing about games, hypertext and narrative.
Aug 18, 2002 @ 16:42 » no comments » Games
Version 1 browsers
The Counter.com browser stats:
Mon Jul 1 00:05:01 2002 - Wed Jul 31 23:55:03 2002 31.0 Days
1. MSIE 5.x 186444766 (50%) 2. MSIE 6.x 145236435 (39%) 3. Netscape 4.x 11747645 (3%) 4. MSIE 4.x 9781300 (2%) 5. Netscape comp. 3736452 (1%) 6. Opera x.x 3475303 (0%) 7. Netscape 6.x 2960621 (0%) 8. Netscape 5.x 1753018 (0%) 9. Unknown 1393483 (0%) 10. Netscape 3.x 191522 (0%) 11. MSIE 2.x 186229 (0%) 12. MSIE 3.x 175579 (0%) 13. Netscape 2.x 21868 (0%) 14. Netscape 1.x 520 (0%) 15. MSIE 1.x 489 (0%)
Wow, pretty amazing. Some people, granted a small minority, is still using Version 1 browsers. Significantly more people still use V.2 browsers.
Aug 19, 2002 @ 21:59 » 2 comments » General
Feeding frenzy
Just looking at the server statistics of this site: Ten out of the top thirty visitors (by number of hits) are search engines and six out of those ten are googlebots.
Five out of the top ten visitors (by requested amount of kilobytes) are search engines and three out of those five are googlebots.
I guess the site is well indexed then :-)
Aug 20, 2002 @ 09:28 » no comments » General
What happened
This happened. Brilliant. Very recognizable for a pet owner.
Aug 20, 2002 @ 10:17 » no comments » General
Derrida
The Derrida Reader by itself was not enough to keep the lid of the scanner pressed down on the unruly and springy cover of Sandy Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age and that somehow seems suitable.
Aug 20, 2002 @ 21:08 » no comments » Research
That happens too
I feel for Henry Jenkins who got clobbered over the head on the Donahue talkshow. The public reception of the show probably wasn't half as bad as his own perception of it. I've had a somewhat similar experience, appearing as the only guy in a panel debate organised by a feminist magazine. I had my facts down, my theories sharpened and really, we were not that far apart, basically, I think, we're on the same side. And I really can't say anything bad about the organisers or the other panelists, but the discussion with the audience just caught me totally on the wrong foot and I lost balance immediately. That wasn't much fun, but hearing back about it from some people I trust, in retrospect I believe my performance wasn't as bad as I thought it was right afterwards.
Aug 21, 2002 @ 00:42 » no comments » Research
What?!
No video footage? (by way of Leuschke pointing to MeFi)
Aug 21, 2002 @ 00:50 » no comments » General
Old browsers
With respect to my post about people still using version 1 browsers... they should certainly revel in the idea of being able to download the grandfather of all browsers, NCSA's Mosaic... Version 0.6b nonetheless! Evolt is a wonderful site to explore and don't miss their browser archive if that's your kind thing :-)
Aug 21, 2002 @ 01:47 » no comments » Research
Free Davezilla
Free Davezilla image nicked from Punkprincess, original here.
This one's pretty cool too :-)
Aug 21, 2002 @ 16:49 » no comments » General
New graphics chip for XBox?
Dutch internet news site Webwereld reports that Microsoft will incorporate a new graphics solution for the XBox when they switch production over to a cheaper motherboard. The new graphics solution is from Focus Enhancements (never heard of them before) and as Webwereld notes, the new solution will save Microsoft a couple of dollars per unit, slightly reducing the loss of $150 at which they're selling them now.
[update 23-8-2002: Turns out, it's not going to be Nvidia's graphics chip that's going to be replaced, but the decoder chip that transforms the videosignal to a tv signal... not all that revolutionary after all.]
Hmm... another interesting side-effect of using mostly standard PC components shows itself: changing game console specs halfway through the console's expected lifespan. I recon that Microsoft will make sure that from an API point of view nothing changes, but I still think that programmers will not be too thrilled. I pretty sure Nvidia isn't going to be too thrilled either... (although they might be relieved to get rid of the commitment to an underselling console and the huge pile of dedicated chips they're apparently sitting on)
Aug 22, 2002 @ 11:10 » no comments » General
Photo contest
Take the Photo Quiz. It's a good one. (You can view the results after 10 or so choices.)
Aug 22, 2002 @ 12:21 » no comments » General
Standard blog templates
I always wonder why people choose to use a standard template for their blog. A blog is a rather personal thing isn't it? If you use a standard template it's not really personal anymore. I find myself immediately closing windows of blogs that use a standard template. I think my subconscious is telling me that if you don't care enough about the form then you probably don't care much for the content either. That's probably not correct and it certainly is a good thing that even if you don't have the skills to dig into HTML and CSS to customize your site that you can have a platform to say what you want/need to say, but a generic site just doesn't feel inviting to read.
Aug 22, 2002 @ 13:58 » 6 comments » Research
Everybody
Blogs. Everybody is a movie critic. I'm not. I have sinned. Twice. My sincerest apologies.
Aug 23, 2002 @ 16:28 » no comments » General
Zillified
Zilla! (But ma...! Mark did it first....)
Aug 23, 2002 @ 22:05 » no comments » General
Shocking discovery! Hyperlinks often used!
British Telecom (BT) had filed a suit claiming a patent on hyperlinks, aiming to levy a tax on the use of hyperlinks. They lost the case. Holland's quality newspaper De Volkskrant reports about this and writes about hyperlinks: "A hyperlink is an often employed method to refer from one webpage to other webpages on the internet."
I guess that qualifies as the understatement of the century. Is there any other way to refer to other webpages than by hyperlink?
Aug 26, 2002 @ 10:44 » 1 comment » General
Role-playing
From a somewhat interactionistic point of view a working definition of role-playing could be: to treat other characters as if they were real and discrete individuals within the confines of a particular (game) environment, suspending disbelief while recognizing that there are players behind the characters you are interacting with and that these players might animate more than one character (simultaneously).
Cf. Stone, 1995: 120:
In Habitat, avatars frequently know that their avatar friends have multiple personae, but they still manage to treat each persona as if it were a discrete individual. One Oracle said, "Other characters, even while recognizing that A-san equals B-san, will go ahead and treat him [sic] like a different person. I suppose that it is in these areas that in systems like Habitat we can identify role-playing."
A working definition from a particular perspective... I'm open to suggestions.
Aug 26, 2002 @ 15:17 » no comments » Research
Rethinking structure
A superfluous note to self (and others who I can't imagine being all that interested): I'm rethinking some of the structure of the site and when the rethinking is done, I'll start recoding it. I'm going to try to improve navigability by making the site layout and use of blog categories more transparant. As a result the previous message is posted to the "Terminology" category, which is not yet operational (and neither is the "Webdesign" category of this post).
Aug 26, 2002 @ 15:27 » no comments » Sitestuff
16 Horsepower
The 16 Horsepower concert last night in Paradiso, Amsterdam was very impressive. Superlatives fail me. (fansite 1 and 2)
Het rockte danig :-)
Aug 27, 2002 @ 10:36 » no comments » General
Geoblog and gendertest
Bruce Sterling in the Schism Matrix blog:
This is cute. There's a little regional map of London and people are sticking blogs in it.
Geographically anchoring your blog, kind of reminds me of Visual Route, a program that lets you plot traceroutes on a worldmap so you can geographically locate where a certain server or computer sits. Cool :-)
In totally unrelated news, a friend reminded me of The Super-Scientific, Remarkably Accurate Gender Test. It'll take you 5 minutes and it's pretty cool.
Aug 28, 2002 @ 10:20 » 1 comment » General
Choosing
Netscape launches version 7 and News.com reports Netscape's marketshare is down to an all time low of only 3.4 percent (also see the browser stats in this previous post).
The News.com article opens with the following line:
Netscape Communications on Thursday launched the latest version of its Web browser amid mounting evidence that most Internet surfers are choosing Microsoft's Internet Explorer instead.
There's not much choosing happening here, is there? 90 percent of all computers runs Windows and Windows comes with IE and since version 5 Internet Explorer has been "good enough" for most people. Most people couldn't care less about the browser they're using, as long as it shows them their webpages and gets them into Hotmail. For most people there never comes a moment where they choose a browser. They have one and it works. Why go out of your way to install another dishwasher or fridge if your kitchen comes with a decent one?
Aug 29, 2002 @ 18:38 » no comments » General
« July 2002 • September 2002 »