Dr. Cosmos

ROI

2011-06-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

We're trying to figure out what to do with augmented reality, how to build it "right".

The business guys realize how much desire we can build with it. They see dollar signs. I mean I could surround you in a whole arrangement of things you'd want to pay money for. Women, merchandise, pokemon. These are the applications that companies are trying to build and perfect. Desire builders.

Throughout history a few noteworthy individuals have stood up and made some pretty compelling arguments against desire, attachment and past/future wanting. Hindus, Buddhists, even christ himself would have called our digital distractions, simply that. Demonic.

So I have to wonder if there's an augmented reality that doesn't try to augment anything. Can we use this technology to help the user BE HERE NOW, or will we only sell suffering through distraction?

Perhaps if we can tell the user more about their world, more about their surroundings. If we can help them play music, share art, contact loved ones. If we can keep the games we build simply games, and steer away from... steering away, then some day people will look back at augmented reality as a spiritual art form and not a pornographic representation of humanity's mislead dis-satisfaction with the here and now.

-Cos

Reporting Live

2011-03-13T04:02:00.000-07:00

From the front lines of the change we all saw coming, but never felt. They're going to try to blind you, to steer you to buy more, watch more, crave more and sell more of yourself than nature ever asked. It's called entertainment, engagement, virality.

It's really just a distraction. Today I went to their mecca, the headquarters of digital illusion and derangement and witnessed a generation of far-removed air traffic controllers attempt to party. Sad, awkward, insincere. We pretend to have something to party for. Go win a war. Go survive a tsunami. You clap for the iPad 2 and thank them for distracting you with dollars.

Things are going to get a lot worse. I've been working on the edge of it and I should tell you that the tools I feared, exist. The methods I imagined are now retweeted keynotes. The ability to drive masses of individuals to act in controlled, predictable, profitable patterns is being tweaked and perfected every hour, every day, with every fervently ignored breath they allow.

So what can we do? Steel up. Go through the chemical motions of sincere vitality as often as you can. Ignore your own facebook. Look at those who exist around you, try your best to accept that they are real and just as valuable as you could ever be. We pretend to connect with more people using their feed pipes. Connection is energetically, chemically and fundamentally impossible without being in the same "place." Not pysical, not necesarily. Place is solely the product of intention, attention and sincerity. They steal this from us. They take it out of our hands and smear it over their needless products in attempts to solidify their own advantage over the populace. Forgive them.

Fight back. Their illusions and trinkets might satiate in that instant, that 99 cent impulse.

But it won't fill you up.

Only you can.

It takes a lot of humility, complete acceptance and an infinite amount of appreciation.

Dance.

The computers will never get it.

Lucky them.

-Cos

To-Do List

2010-12-22T16:29:00.002-08:00

Sterling Advice From ARE:

What are you doing? Think of yourselves as the worlds first pure play experience designers. Whose reality needs to be augmented? Is it the hardcore geeks? Are they the people who need you the most? Whose experiences really need to be redesigned?

The blind. Foreigners in a new reality. Confused, mentally troubled people.

Why do the wealthy need it? What is my $ doing to the world? Think of yourselves as the torch that lights our steps. Without vision the people perish. We could really use a good honest Internet tech boom right now, but you'd better take tactical steps. Get out of the hot bath, get dressed, have a coffee and make a solid to-do list. I'll be watching.

twitter.com/bruces

Bath was quite nice, thought about things for awhile. Coffee is brewing. To-Do list reads like this:

1. Fund AR by selling it to as many people as humanly possible. Build fun, attention-grabbing experiences where possible.

2. Take video games, photoshop and blender outside . Help visionaries show the world in ways it COULD be.

3. Provide goal structures (games?) that make this worth people's time. Utilitarian quests. Constructive mechanics. Foster local tribal respect for territory preservation + beautification. Minimize real violence.

5. Write a book about what goes wrong.

6. Tap out.

-Cos

Mobile Marketing, Coincidence Farming and Artificial Intelligence: AR predictions for 2011:

2010-12-19T20:05:00.000-08:00

2011 = more people doing more things in more places with their smartphones. Buying things. Finding things. All of these actions will be recorded, analyzed. Used to build what we at metaio will call “coincidences”.

Placetracking applications like foursquare, gowalla, junaio and facebook places will have amassed pools of user data (where, when, how and with whom their users do things) large enough to begin making intelligent suggestions that change the course of our daily lives in different ways. "Go check out this gallery opening," or, "Visit Wal-Mart for 75% off Fishsticks and earn 10 points!" It’s our responsibility to keep these suggestions as “positive” as possible.

Good luck defining “positive”.

As this mobile advice gets better and better, we will listen to it more and more, responding in increasingly complicated ways. Thus the pooling of our intelligence (checkins, user ratings, maps) will begin to respond intelligently itself in real time, to us. Some will call this “artificial intelligence” and fear it, missing the point altogether. See, in 2011 we will begin to take the intelligences we have pooled within the internet and deploy them over the real world as an augmented, living structure which we can read, manipulate and continually improve; Inhabitable, architected structures which process the world in real time.

In 2011 we will begin to develop The Intelligent Edifice.

-Cos

Concept Art

2010-11-16T22:09:00.000-08:00

Can be really, really, really imporant.

www.guildwars2.com

6th Grade Singularity

2010-11-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

"We all have a place for improvement in our minds
from the dark corner where the fear waits to be called upon and the machinelike chain of
ideas ever going around.. around so swiftly so swiftly yet slowly.
and the memory in the middle which no one understands until the last moment, slowly
dripping away farther to the back of the mind where all finished thoughts eventually go.
yet the room is only half lit for one side has not yet been born and sits there waiting for

evolution to occur."

I remember how pornographic these words had felt, furiously typed on the family PC late one night. 5th grade? 6th? Printed it out so I'd always have a copy, hid it in my cabinet so it would never be read.

Well there you go: the post-human ____ of a kid on a computer in 1994*. I wonder what the kids are worried about now that the singularity is a such given.

Maybe they aren't as convinced that we'll improve.

-Cos

What are some ways to tap into compulsion circuits in social game design?

2010-10-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

Xianhang Zhang, I design for social interaction

14 votes by Seb Paquet, Jüri Kaljundi, Yishan Wong, (more)

Intermittent reward
Occasional oversized payouts - Quora does this really well. Occasionally, an answer you write will "blow up" and get a disproportionate amount of upvotes. You start to get addicted to discovering the process that caused it to happen but, since the process is essentially random, you continually answer in order to chase that original high.
Steady stream of accomplishments
Constant action required
Appointment mechanics

Probably the best places to look are casino design and advertising design respectively.

3 Comments • Thank • Not Helpful • Sep 23, 2010

Those are actually methods for tapping into compulsion circuits, but doesn't identify the circuits themselves. I've changed the question to fit your answer :)

Seb Paquet • Sep 23, 2010

What do you mean by "appointment mechanics"?

Amal Dorai • Oct 7, 2010

Are these truly the "best" places to look, Xianhang? Casinos ruin lives and advertisements manipulate. Play should be a freeing experience.
Those of us who have the resources to design "for" social interaction must acknowledge our responsibility to cultivate healthy psychological states. Anything else is black magic.

Dr.Cosmos • Delete • 11:15am

The State of the Art

2010-10-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

"For whatever failings or false starts the pundits may heap on augmented reality, it’s just too useful to be left behind. We want to see the world for what it is, rich with data & paths & affinities & memory."

"When architecting augmented reality platforms it should be paramount that the open internet is the core model. AR is simply a way to draw the net out on to the phenomenal world. As such it needs a common set of standards."

"The marketing money will dry up so it’s imperative that the young platform companies collaborate to coordinate the standards under the hood, freeing them up to differentiate by the unique experiences & services they build on top. This may seem inevitable (or impossible, depending on your half-cup disposition) but look at virtual worlds – another technology that might be stronger if there were common standards & open movement across experiences."

http://www.urbeingrecorded.com/news/2010/10/13/is-ar-ready-for-the-trough-of-disillusionment/

Mediated Holograms

2010-10-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

I am now working for a company that sells software tools which allow artists/architects/computer wielding humans to build applications in which a viewer to led to see 3D illusions in their world. The objects are not really there, but people react to them as though they are.

(Granted, computer code exists while it's running, never say that it doesn't or your grandchildren will call you the 2050 equivalent of a racist)

But now, in order to sustain himself, Dr. Cosmos must explain why perfectly decent people need to use "Augmented Reality" to make money. This involves personally influencing marketers to invest in their own ability to digitally steer human emotions around events, experiences or brands.

Pretty cool!

But this web-log has traditionally been a forum for my disagreements with the misuse of media towards purposes of persuasion and control! I cannot say for certain that AR will make the world any better.

But it might.

It could allow us to share our thoughts in a more harmonious way. To create levels of cognitive balance unexperienced since the creation of the spoken word by providing our race with a better way to share the hallucinations/machinations of its respective personalities through time.

Wait okay hold up. So then why should advertisers be allowed to deploy AR-powered mass mobilizations? Why would we give them the tools to create reality-fortified propaganda?

Because thats what they get for their donation. Their patronage. Through their support of this essential experiment in human communication, corporate creative is helping to save the world one project at a time.

Buy it.

-Cos

Sometimes

2010-08-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

I wish there was a website where I could go and experience the pure informational sensation of the internet condensed into one place. A blended flashing smoothie of video game trailers, emails from valued people, videos of uncanny events... every node of stimulus out there packed into a clickable KABLAM. Satisfaction.

Then, with the click of a button, I could relay my recent experience out to every person in the world, all at once. The sensation i sent out would then be so wonderful and affective that everyone in the world would click their "like" buttons and trigger holographic lucky charm marshmallows to rain over me and my computer.

But... I can't shake the feeling that I'd grow tired of their marshmallows. I'd probably start searching for better ways to display my torrent of social affirmation such that it was "cooler", and thus more likely to inspire further likes. Heck, I'd probably get tired of the KABLAM site itself after awhile and be left with a longing desire for more... a feeling that the internet had let me down.

Is this it?

I'm growing tired of my knee-jerk search for affirmation from the internet. Every idea I encounter becomes valuable only in its ability to be spread out to the masses. Is this the nature of memes? Of ideas? Must they exist only to be communicated?

Perhaps thought has always been tailored to attract the reward of a few "likes".

Do me a favor? Don't click the like button, don't forward the link. Don't quantize me this time.

Because that's what we do, what we've always done: categorize ourselves, the world and the way we see it into ways that are measurable, improvable and thoroughly fictitious.

Long story short: I deactivated my facebook account so I could start living again. I'm moving to San Francisco.

II. Conceptual Obligations: (a.k.a. Dr. Cos' wordy philosophical prescript)

2010-06-22T22:45:00.000-07:00

This project's existence will have lasting effects on the future of gaming, art and the human experience. As we aim to shape the future of outdoor gaming and reality manipulation we must remember to grant users as much cognitive freedom as possible within the goal structures we create. The goals we set are made to inspire creative thinking and enjoyment, nothing more. Misuse of design to inspire players to invest their time, thoughts, emotions and labor with us inappropriately could lead to the dangers of addictive escapism, compulsion, manipulation and cognitive control. These dangers should be kept in mind by all those constructing what is essentially a new world for people to live in. That said, the player chooses to participate and not everyone will react positively to what we make. Let us strive to inspire fun and play in the greatest number of participants as we can and to avoid creating unncessecary methods of manipulation and deciet ( or borrowing irresponsible designs from historical political and social goal systems).

Properly addressed, these dangers should not distract us from the task of construction: change is inevitable and we will only learn by doing. Those working on this project have been given an important opportunity to build it well. With that said, let's change the world.

: |

2010-05-08T01:06:00.000-07:00

"This could evolve into a very interesting sub-culture of hardcore gamers."

-things that didn't matter enough to make it into the pitch.

Physics Post #1

2010-04-28T17:38:00.000-07:00

There's something off-putting about the flow of activity at this College. Buildings and spaces are so perfect, so manicured here, and yet the activities which take place between them are brimming with anxiety and distraction. It is as if the architecture has been placed as a stoic, orderly damper on the anxiety that pushes us to compete for survival against one another (or for highest gpa, whatever).

Once in a while, when I'm off campus, I can relax to the point where I enjoy words again. Where I am confident in the products of my own thought. I think that things have been designed in the wrong way, but I can't quite figure out how. We need to be more playful.

In short, I have been watching patterns. Trying to verbalize that which I see around me. There is an artificial order which holds us back from the chaos of play, interaction and culture, and it has been placed here at Dartmouth with careful intent.

Anyway... here's a thought on physics I could only safely have once the anxieties of survival were sufficiently addressed and poorly :

Your body has a gravitational field.

Every one of your molecules pulls everything else around it, pulling your body and the rest of the objects around you, towards you. These fields stretch out to the ends of the universe, weakening as distance increases by a factor of 1/r^2. So something a billion light-years away from you, even if to a negligable degree, pulls on every atom in your body.

So given a near-infinite sensitivity to gravity, one may hypothetically "feel" every other atom in the universe from a single location by measuring changes in the intensity of its pull.

Out there... I know. But humanity is growing more and more able to take in information about what's going on around itself with every technological and linguistic hurdle it tackles.

We aren't necessarily perceiving more. We focus on certain things, like work and GPA and driving and food. How often do we pay attention to gravity? To the stars?

They did this study where they put 30 people in motion capture suits and told them to be "angry" "sad" "happy" etcetera while measuring their physical movements. Then another study found that subjects could recognize a given emotion just from watching a single light source move.

http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190152

So something could be attuned to subtle changes in gravitational effect in such a way so as to perceive the physical movements of every creature on Earth. Through body language and gesture recognition, the feelings of all emotion-wielding objects (beings) within range could also be sensed.

The Buddha felt suffering all around him. If I were attuned to all the forces of gravity pulling on me, could I not identify, out of those forces, a human figure by the way it moved? Could you not recognize the sensations which their movements would make onto you as they... suffered?

Could such a sensation take place inside us without us knowing it?

Could we create a machine that might do this?

Please read this:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Too Stressed For Fun

2010-04-12T18:43:00.001-07:00

The "Sun God" walked around Dartmouth in a beautiful carnival mask for two months promoting a LOVE MARCH which went down today. It's intended purpose was to provide students with a forum in which to celebrate the passion that drives their myriad humanitarian initiatives.

And few people showed up. Maybe a dozen. We were all too busy.

Love for the sake of it? Will my 50 minutes return some form of measurable reward? Can I put it on paper? No? Alright... I'll just give you the $5 and keep goin, thanks.

I didn't go to the march. I was doing work. Love doesn't get things done, it's just the reason for why we should.

I hear they have robot rehabilitation centers in the real world.

I can't wait.

Violence Is A Game Mechanic(?)

2010-01-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

[written a month ago]

As I stand in a room with my two aging grandmothers, I find that I haven't cared to listen to their discussion of family events for the last 30 seconds. I verbalize the source of my attentive apathy with tactless honestly:

Cos: Yeah... I've been killing people for eight hours.
Grandma1: ...
Grandma2: what?
Cos: I spent all night on my computer trying to kill other people.
Grandma2: [My name], don't do that, it'll get into your blood.
Cos: It already has.

*A woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's seems to look at me for the first time in awhile*

Cos: I was playing computer games. [I explain Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2]
Grandma2: It'll make you want to kill people!
Cos: I don't want to really kill people, I just want to... I dunno. I guess it's in my blood.
Grandma1: I hope you can keep those games separate from reality...
Cos: I think I can... at least see it happening. Most guys playing don't.

A buddy's "squad" (team of 5 or 6) showed me around Call of Duty last night. They are very good, very angry and play a lot. Hours.

Sounds silly if you haven't been there, but our society needs an outlet for aggression, for conflict. We find it fun, compelling, intoxicating.

I want to play!

Nighthawk: Hey, what are you doing?
Cos: trying to blog about why I want to play this goddamn game.
Nighthawk: That should be easy.

Myst and Math Blaster don't get in my blood like killing does. Yeah, I said it. The first person perspective, the near-realistic atmosphere of violence...

Here's a guess: It's impossible to design a nonviolent game that is compellingly "fun" in the same way this is. Yes, it's is a huge problem that I'm wired to enjoy the mechanics of combat.

Is nonviolence possible, or is a simulation the safest place we can keep killing?

Let's see if I can get a post a day before I let myself blow up.

-Cos

[forgot to post it]

Ignorance of Their Law

2010-01-17T23:02:00.000-08:00

Today I got a ticket for parking on the street past 12am.

On weekdays you can park there till 2am, when the library closes.

It takes a certain kind of stupid to raze my nerves, and I'm straight up infuriated by the concept that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Of course its an excuse, you just have to enforce your law regardless or enforcement would fail completely.

If you want me to play along with your system of arbitrarily selected rules, update me. Inform me. Who in their right mind would willingly choose to be ignorant?

Maybe a lot of people.

In court, ignorance of fact IS usually treated as an excuse. They only really cite the IOTL rule in regard to criminal offenses (I swear I didn't know I couldn't burn you!). The difference between criminal and non-criminal is one of degree... whatever.

I just want the day to come when the parking space I use can alert me to it's limits just like any other well designed machine or application. A parking spot is a piece of social technology; I shouldn't have to pay a fine just to be handed its instruction manual.

(the parking schedule was printed on the ticket. thanks guys.)

I would like to be informed of the law before I act, and AR might help dynamically prevent "ignorance of the law" in future situations. This guy has the right idea. (Concerning bad ideas)

Two things, tho:

1) Giving law enforcement info-tracking tech in the real world could lead to some serious privacy issues and eliminate those instances when we can harmlessly break rules.

2)All of this really boils down to the fact that the Officer waited till 12:05 to give me the ticket. I'm outside a college library, you know what I'm doing. C'mon.

Is his ignorance of the library's hours an excuse?

Everybody's got their rule-book. If we every human was aware of everyone else's rules we wouldn't need to have language.

Perhaps creativity is just a crutch for ignorance.

-Cos

3D Adrenaline Makes It Hard To Remember.

2010-01-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

From: Dr. Pepper
To: Dr. Cosmos
Subject: Avatar

Is awesome because that technology will make virtual experiences more visually and imaginatively pleasurable than real life and will keep getting better. And the movie could be all about affirming the imaginary or fictional world because the guy chooses pandora over humanity, and the pandoran world is depicted as being so much better. So, we should embrace upcoming virtual realities? But they can't last indefinitely because humans will come back?? So its better but not??? Cos??? What's it all mean??!? ahhhagdvbhd I've been $#@%%^$ all day. miss everyone, movie was good

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

From: Dr. Cos
To: Dr. Pepper
Subject: Re: Avatar

I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner man; but you're dead on. There's quite a lot going on in Avatar. In the end the marine chooses to stay in his Pandora game-world and live a life of avatar-pleasure rather than remain faithful to his physical human past... So it seems like they're saying "HEY, VIDEO GAMES ARE BETTER THAN REALITY!, WORLD OF WARCRAFT FOREVER!"

But I think that Cameron was going for something different. In the last moment of the movie the hero opens his eyes in a new avatar body and the lights in the theater flash on. After hallucinating for 2.5 hours, anyone really watching that movie feels a shock, a jarring sensation of being thrown back into their human bodies. I personally believe that my reality is fictitious to a degree (I'm the author), and so any subjective perception of "reality" is by definition just as invented as Avatar 3D was.

Thing is, when you get thrown back into your physical body at the end of the movie, your world is a bit different because you've been subtly handed a new set of shiny goal structures within which to live (/play):

Hi, I'm James Cameron. Uhh, Spirituality, conservationism and harmony with nature, you know? Down with capitalism, $#@% Iraq and long live collectivism! Don't pirate movies.

No? There are some very seriously confusing messages about how we should return to earth following this movie. Sure every film/game/novel/dream has its messages. Problem here is: this pamphlet is making a billion dollars cash. It is itself the greatest mass-exodus of escapist citizens ever executed within our capitalist system, and they pull it off by deriding the very system that pays for it! The popcorn bags used to watch this thing worldwide probably leveled half the trees in New Guinea.

Our way of dealing with scarcity is very confused right now; it seems to be commenting on itself by selling a simulation of its opposite, ie, "Pandora." Avatar: 3D Technology allows a top media tycoon to show you a world where technology helps a public servant enter a media-free paradise and defeat technology-wielding mineral tycoons by blowing up their technology with technology.

We're confused. We can't decide whether or not to embrace virtual reality (technology-enhanced-existence) or live in a tree. I say: Embrace the alternate realities that are presented to you with every moment, sure, but there's an underlooked aspect of Avatars' hero: he was crippled. His avatar grants him the ability to move again and escape suffering.

By entering nature. Ready for some high theory? Deep breath.

Nature is change over time, dynamism. Self-aware (intelligent) systems that are forced to stagnate (not-change), experience suffering. Humanity, given the ability to remember, experiences suffering in the preservation of one personality throughout a lifetime of change. Because nature is in a constant state of change, and we are not, we revere it. It is everything our hard-drives are not. Computers and archives and facebook pages attempt to protect our fictions against the onslaughts of time and change. At the same time, we are afraid of getting stuck on a planet that has "killed its mother," forgotten all reverence to change and fully embraced mechanization as g_d.

An intelligence fully stuck is the saddest thing in the world. Don't leave your computer on.

Anyway.... those of us playing Halo, World of Warcraft and all the other immersive virtual realities we have today cripple ourselves in order to escape to our avatars. We can't move or walk or smell or make out with our fictional worlds, yet. We play because we're handed systems of challenges that we know we can accomplish and enjoy the visual and social rewards that have been meticulously created to seem more attractive than those we would receive with equal effort in the real world. Blizzard makes 80 million dollars a month through subscriptions to their desktop-pandora, and everyone plays it sitting down.

Games don't change unless you let them.

So Cameron is telling us to get out of the movie theater and rediscover mobility, nature, change, whatever(?) Whether we can get the same awesome visuals and subject-enhancing super-powers that you'd find in Pandora laid over our comparatively drab WalMart landscape is really... the question. The future is gonna be whacky.

Pepper, once we can step away from the desktop/Imax theater and get the same visual gusto in a fully mobile, 3D glasses-type mobile device, the question will indeed be : "should we embrace it?"

But by that point I think we already will have done so. We want to be entertained, and whatever makes people happy, in the end, is what they will/should(?) do.

I've seen avatar a few times. Half of the planet shares a secret existence with me in that world. We've all mind melded that Na'vii princess.

And we want to go back.

-Cos

The Librareome Project

2009-12-25T18:53:00.000-08:00

The kindle store doesn't have any books. (100 years of solitude, house of leaves, midnight's children, anything by Borges, gravity's rainbow...)

just an empty skeleton. corporate b_ll$5*t.

We had better not forget the Library.

[Being able to pull up definitions of any word is cool. So is being able to download "previews" for free. Having 40 books in my backpack isn't bad. I'm just... worried about what won't get picked up because the publishers don't predict profitability.]

Borges? Really guys?!

-Cos

The Black Whole

2009-11-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

[I'm sitting here reading my Major Advisor's most recent article and feeling two things.

1) An overwhelming sense of Attention Deficit. I want to be browsing my favorite sites instead (eating mental sugar), playing games, overstimulating myself.

2) The sites I visit are somehow less exciting than they used to be. I go to them because they're easy, because it takes virtually NO willpower to enjoy them.

I just wanna absorb.

So I'm struggling to read through [my advisor's] writing. It's detailed, methodical, logical. I feel like a 2nd grader trying to enjoy the dictionary. It's not his fault, it's my own. His essay is trying to describe the reasons for why I feel driven to browse the web as I do, but mental habits produced by years of browsing make it difficult for me to understand what he's getting at. At this rate it's pretty easy to imagine a time when I might be unable to understand a commentary on the deficiencies in modern cognition due to the deficiencies being described.

He writes:

"We visit the same sites each day, settle into familiar and comfortable habits of browsing. But it was not always so. Twelve years ago you did not browse but surfed the Web. Surfing is active, thrilling and risky. The waves carry you where they will, and the water may even overwhelm you. The experience of surfing the Web used to be an unpredictable and exciting one; the next link led who-knows-where. "

But it isn't like that anymore. Geocities was taken down last week, sites are becoming more standardized. There isn't as much risk, as much mystery as I experienced as a child hopping from keyword to keyword.

Right now I'm writing about an article I haven't finished reading. Where's that tab....? I have 34 open. What?

Whenever I spend the time to actually sit down and read something
great, I become overwhelmed by the number of remarkable ideas buried underneath the garble of dated prose I encounter. I want to take every little snippet of clairty and type it into twitter where my less patient peers might gobble-up and reproduce the abbreviated idea. Does this mean I'm simply underexposed to good ideas, or has my hop-skip-jumping from concept to concept given me a better ability to see the far reaching implications of the singular "good idea"?

Does the same thing happen to the physical world as we master and commercialize it?
Maybe, though I don't think my generation gets out enough to have reached that point.

"A dozen years on and the risky thrill of surfing has given way to the bourgeois fantasy of browsing. Idling one's way along the aisles, one peruses goods which for their part offer no resistance, no threat, and very little surprise."]

I stopped writing this post for some reason a month ago. I must have been distracted by something. 我要學中文可十想謝。Found an email I sent in response, where his ideas are discussed further. Please take the time to power through his essay, here.

[Dear Professor X,
I have finished reading your article and thought I would share some of my thoughts. My favorite bit is found in your abstract conclusion. You hammer on a very important chord. I quote so you don't have to go searching for what I'm talking about:

"When Eve eats the first apple, man discovers his humanity: alienation from nature and from God is the human condition, but the Fall is also the condition of freedom and responsibility. Wozniak dreams the undoing of the Fall; this time the first Apples, rather than leaving you to your own devices, let you know what you want, resubmit humans to a nature and thus to a (digital) God who rules that nature. After all, the computer that tells you what you want provides not only your desire but also its satisfaction: the black whole."

"The black whole." The thing we reach for, are drawn towards with every click. I think this is a very important idea and I wish only that you would flesh it out for me. The subjective levelling-out that you point to might be more dangerous than you reveal. You hint at it:

"Exciting and powerful, interactivity is thus also dangerous, for it threatens to dissolve actors and medium."

I wonder how you think such this system will or could perpetuate itself. I don't think it can! Wouldn't we reach a point at which... the division becomes indiscernible? What would such a scenario look and feel like? We are clearly heading towards this black whole, drawn there. But is every form of web 2.0 a symptom or can the destructive be parsed out from that which is not? What is the opposite of "the black whole?"

You hint at the existence of such an opposite when you say:

"Self-expression and thus also self-recognition become the defining experiences of Web 2.0, such that the Web is both mediate and immediate at the same time. How far does this paradox extend?"

Perhaps only technologies within which the user does not have a subjective representation are safe. Facebook, WoW, Email... technologies which alter/ abstract / amplify/ distort the subject... are worse than those that do not? Can anything we interact with on a computer avoid affecting our subjectivity?

So you ask how far the paradox extends; perhaps we can only guess: How far could it? How close are we to the limit if there is one? Which technologies bring us closest?

My guess: It goes to the brain stem, to the basic drives behind every human action (understanding of death, sexual drive, self-awareness). I see the black whole as a point where we no longer have individual will, where we can be swayed by outside media/inputs/forces into action without question. Where we prefer to be.

When? 100 years. Worst current symptom? MMORPG's.

Because MMO's take a human subject and reduce it to a series of menus. ("Each user gets to assent to those expressions that suit her, authorship having disappeared in favor of selection, a menu-driven collective creativity.") This feels good, allows us to feel secure in a way. With menus we know we cannot make a bad choice, but in reality we cannot make a choice at all. As the computer comes to "know what we want," we can no longer see the menus. They feel too good.

Which leads to my only disagreement. You say:
"Linking, which was only a marginally revolutionary possibility even in Rosenberg's account, has now become simply a normal experience and no longer destabilizes the reader."

Yet I think that hyperlinks still destabilize the reader's subjectivity, fracturing it. The difference is that this destabilization now pases unnoticed; users are no longer as shocked into a reflexive awareness of what they are doing. It's just the hum of "browsing." Menu selecting.

The Paradox of Choice.]

We don't like having to make decisions. Actively reading heavy text involves many. Did you make it this far?

-Cos

Skype Metaphysics in 30 seconds.

2009-11-16T10:58:00.001-08:00

Raven: can i be in more than two places at once, and be relaying different messages to different people at the same time?
Dr. Cosmos: no
Dr. Cosmos: you can only jump quickly
Dr. Cosmos: or have simulations of your thoughts act for you
Dr. Cosmos: : D
Raven: what if the other groups asked me opposite questions
Raven: and i answered "yes"
Raven: the other people with whom i was communicating
Raven: obviously i could do that
Dr. Cosmos: in this example each of your messages would themselves be a simulation of your original intent
Dr. Cosmos: like words in a book.
Dr. Cosmos: and each of them would ony "be" with you in their understanding of what you had thought at the moment you thought it.
Dr. Comos: if they even did that
Dr. Comos: Im not sure that you're really "here"
Raven: i am there
Dr. Comos: you are imagining that you are
Dr. Comos: hallucinating
Dr. Comos: assisted in your effort by the images on your screen
Raven: that's what you learn in Perception though... seeing me on a screen and being able to talk to me in real time is the same thing as me being there.
Raven: just imagine that this screen has perfect image quality
Dr. Comos: right
Raven: and it's so big that it reaches beyond your field of vision
Raven: and the audio is perfect
Dr. Comos: a perfect simulation would become the thing it tried to represent
Dr. Comos: i feel you
Raven: ok
Dr. Cosmos: though I feel that your conscious mind can only truly apply itself to one question, one place at a time.
Dr. Comos: surely you can have thoughts under the surface, or echoes in other places
Dr. Comos: but to "be" somewhere
Dr. Comos: i dont know
Dr. Comos: maybe I'm romantic

Someone who knows more than we do about the nature of everything would probably have more than a few things to point out:

1) To think that our understanding of the words "space" and "time" allow us to come close to understanding what's up is laughable.
2) Everything is a hallucination. You're "seeing" what the graphics card in your brain tells you you're seeing. So every sensation is a simulation. Even the buddha experienced a simulation, albeit one of stunning clarity.

I still believe that is only possible to "Be" (as deeply or sincerely as any human being can really "be") in one place at any given instant. I think we jump around.

If you break it apart it's something else.

My Mom Has Facebook

2009-10-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

You know, at first Facebook was just a playground; our generation grew up doing whatever we wanted here and figuring out how it works alone. I would have thought having parents online would... kill it. But their presence is proving to be, nice?

They (old people) complete things socially. The immigration of physical society onto... whatever facebook is... it's over. Sure there are parts of the world still left unconnected, but the generational void that we (born 1985-1995) have experienced since AOL 1.0 is closed. The whole gang is here, and you can bet my kids will be here too.

The "groups" we are forming are going to begin to consolidate into something more... useful? marketable? powerful?

Thing is, this facebook connection is TOO nice; too easy now. My "social network" is at arms length at all times.

We are going to become tribal. Close-knit emotionally but separated physically.

but will these networked tribes FEEL the same way the real ones used to? I've taken a digital break with my SigO because the interactions through 1's and 0's feel too... hollow.

So yeah it's nice to hear from my mom more often, but it's sad that my kids might not know what it means to really miss someone.

ps: How in the hell is Facebook building my news feed? They've recently revamped it. I'm only getting certain people... people I pay attention to. Big brother is blue and useful.

Everyone Would Rather Be Lucid Dreaming

2009-10-19T20:11:00.000-07:00

My dreams have been somewhat shattered. Somewhat. There is a strange tension that pervades The International Symposium On Augmented and Mixed Reality (2009). It's like there are 400 children who have been told to go to sleep the night before Christmas, except there might never be any presents. AR just might be hype and never really happen. Nobody knows, and there's a lot of squirming going on.

Plus there are 400 children vying for one gift under the tree.

What?

There will most likely emerge a monopoly within the AR industry, it's prophesized by the nature of the technology. The augmentations will have to be hosted and edited from a central point. Whoever hosts that will have to design a popular world, a first app that uses glasses (head mounted displays) with controllers (gloves?) properly and attracts the first wave of users large enough to matter.

They say that this emergent company will be whoever hosts the best "points of interest," the most useful geographically-tagged information datums. An unspoken understanding from deep within the Orlando Downtown Marriot: whoever figures this out will make billions of dollars.

Yep.

And the tension that pervades the building exists because of the buzz. AR IS SO COOL. Well what if they don't pull it off? Honestly it probably won't be these guys who do pull it off. Apple or Google could just as easily (maybe more easily!) become the super-emergent billion dollar AR host everyone is lucid dreaming about. Why haven't they made the move yet? Why aren't they at this conference?

I have yet to meet any other game designers. People want to figure out how to build a "facebook for AR." They want to know: how do you get people to start tagging places and contributing information and feeding the host company piles and piles of personal data so they can go and sell all of it off to....

sorry. Fun secret cosmos fact: The killer app is going to be a game. It'll be a pervasive MMO that allows people to change how they look, interact with interesting narratives and cooperate/compete socially.

How do I know? Because I'm their target audience. Because humans are very simple and we just want to engage in systems of reward. Games are invented systems of want and need. "I NEED TO CHECK FACEBOOK." No you don't, that need was presented by the technology and you have bought into it's system of social rewards. Games. Play. Design. Fun. Discovery.

These people are... mmmf. Don't get me wrong: lot's of cool tech. Surgeons can operate on people who are thousands of miles away by projecting remote visuals. Some of the demo's are mind-blowing.

I tried on some lightweight glasses that perfectly overlay 3D objects: coolest damn thing I've experienced in awhile. $250. And the guys who make them were the most interesting to talk to so far. They're building these things so people will make the kinds of games Nick and I are talking about. This is 100% doable. It'll be tough, but the tech is there. We can get an API dev kit for the glasses. That's all I needed to know.

All the buzz about stepping away from reality... people seem to have lost touch with something. Maybe I have too? We so badly want to just play around somewhere other than the Downtown Orlando Marriot.

But as we chase improvements to reality (make things faster, more beautiful, more immersive, more informative) we improve along lines of human desire that are one-directional. It's a straight road away from physical existence and these kids are sprinting down it. Eventually they'll want to go back. Maybe some of them already do and that's what I'm picking up on. The atmosphere of headlong illusion makes me reassess the things I believe in, the things that tie me to this world and make it worth playing out as a real person.

I miss her.

Recursion.

2009-10-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

I sleep as late as I want to biologically. No stabs from digital alarms, please.

Let go of time for a time.

Spend minutes opening my eyes. Further minutes feeling the sun. I pick up a book kept close and read a chapter slow.

First time in awhile.

Slower, better. I am getting more done by not going as fast.

Then... I open iTunes. Tokyo Police Club? I should download all their stuff. Skype chirps. did you get my email? No, let me check after-Facebook- wall post I'd like to bury under a good link, what can I find that's entertaining enough for my... friends? My breathing shortens. I let the music turn off searching for youtube music videos to share with strangers, hope the strangers like it so they like listening to what I say I listen to...as I sit in my bed in silence. My perfectly long day begins to thin out, but I catch myself.

The things I need to do, need to be done slowly.
The tools I have to manipulate this machine aren't yet in rhythm with my body or my mind.

Maybe someday...
But not now.

I am at the border between two kinds of pace.

[two hours pass, I write again] Am I? Does the tech have anything to do with mental pacing? The mind fractures fine without digital aid. Friends enter the room, a conversation begins, food distracts. Gmail opens in response to a conversation. Fractures.

[an hour passes] when am I going to post this? By now there are enough mental applications running in the background, doing the same things to my sense of time and place as the 23 tabs in firefox that _a part of me knows_ are open on the other side of the room. A phone call with my sister seems jagged because I'm busy making notes to record the sensation later here for....

Rewards Are Like Steroids (If Everyone is Watching.)

2009-10-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

this post is a rant. you will not find many like it here but I mean this one and here it is:

Barack has won the Nobel Prize. The award was given so that he might gain some political clout for future peacekeeping efforts. Why should we care if he doesn't "really deserve it"?

Whatever media you take in defines your reality. By telling us what's going on with our government, the news shapes what we think is going on. No? Yes. We listen! "This happened today, this did not."

Such a system makes it economically advantageous for both sides (CNN, you) to create centralized celebrities like Obama. Making an equally compelling character out of every member of congress would use up too many resources, too many scriptwriters.

So they have fashioned a global hero for us.

We have inadvertently designed our current system of political discourse (power/memetic transfer) in a manner that is more centralized than we can admit. Bush couldn't handle the pressure that comes with it: he folded under our eyes.

Obama now stands in the center of a telecommunicative forum that is only beginning to grow in its power and scope. Every computer screen on the planet sits facing him, eyes wide. He is what we will listen to because he is all that we make time to listen to. By making Obama our only source for _____... we hand him everything.

What does he give us? Hope? Information? Orders?

I'm not one to pick sides, but men are still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. More catch bombs from remote drones in Pakistan than did under Bush. Nothing is being done about the slaughter in Africa. Guantanamo stays open. Rarara... yet we thank our hero for "peacekeeping." Of course these are difficult issues and no one person could possibly fix all of it...

And yet we expect him to. We gave him the award so he would. Our perceptions of real world affairs blurr with the hum of telescreens as important men thank our man for "a new climate in international politics."

That climate only exists in print, between broadband nodes, tweeting out of telephones or flashing across overused laptop screens.

Nothing is being done, but we thank him for playing along with us.

The media hands us stories that are cut and formed like lego bricks. It's what they do. Eye-catching and easily added to our collection we can only nod in agreement and throw what we will into our given "political reality." Hey! Mine's a dinosaur! I need to go buy some more preformed world understandings so I can really delude myself...

(cable gets charged monthly, don't worry)

"Okay okay, whatever, let the masses nod along," you might say, "I'm educated and I know what's going on so that's okay!" Ah, but powerful networks of noddings can be directed anywhere with enough spin; they hold power:

"Iraq caused 9/11!" boom

So who is pointing our eyes toward this new Hero in the first place? Who designs avenues of information trade? They're people trying to make MONEY. Employees at places like CNN.com are hired to build a reality for you to watch and paid to keep you watching.... just scared enough to need a hero, just happy enough not to act.

I feel as though I am no longer involved in what's going on in my country. We're a generation of observers, of watchers. Not doers.

Nod... nod.... nod.

From Satire X of the Roman poet Juvenal (c A.D.200):

"… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses"

bread is still our bread, cable our circus. Obama? He's a famous Lion Tamer standing in the middle of the ring who has yet to place his head anywhere sharp. Who can blame him?

So he stands there between reruns of friends and the weather channel and we listen for a few moments before changing the channel, assured that he's keeping us safe.

We need to get out of our tent and go put out some fires. The Visigoths are coming and no one remembers how to fight. Ask the lion tamer to do something quick or to give you your money back.

Hidden meaning?

2009-10-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

In gaming, this is the symbol for half-life 2, one of the greatest/most popular works in recent years.

In Chinese, this is the character ren (second tone), which stands for "person" or "people." Or just "man" sometimes:
So the HL2 logo is the inverse of the symbol for "man" because the player has to topple an oppressive alien government and free humanity from mental slavery! SEE?!

or... the logo is just a lambda.

Meaning is always an invention.

In short:

2009-10-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

By studying the way in which game systems can be designed to control and influence their users, we should come to better understand how “design,” modern society and new media forms will coalesce into avenues of exclusive power.

Quote me.

!go too fast

2009-10-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

“Doing everything by hand has the advantage that you understand every step. It takes longer, but it gives you the feeling that you understand what you’re doing. A computer relieves you of a lot of the work, but it often takes away the possibility to trace each and every step.”
-DAIM

http://twistedsifter.com/2009/10/3d-letters-daim/

http://www.daimgallery.com/

(good find magstar)

Talkin ISMAR to HASTAC

2009-09-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

So if I post about the AR conference in my new academic group's website I get a badge to wear.

I want the badge:

Submitted by Brendan Scully on Sep 24, 2009, 05:07 PM

Dear HASTAC,

I'm rarely in a conversation for long before "Augmented Reality" comes up; it's a bit of a problem:

"Alternate Realities? What are you talking about?"

"Well you take a QR code and use it to orient a digital camera in real space so that you can lay 3D objects and information over the real world."

"Why would you do that?"

"You can create interactive forms of media, change the aesthetics of your surroundings, access useful location-specific data without..."

"You're crazy!"

I have a dream. I dream of being in a room with people who are not only aware of, but made excited by the prospect of emerging AR and MR technologies.

Luckily for me, such a room will exist October 19th-22nd at The International Symposium on Augmented and Mixed Reality.

I cordially invite all HASTAC members to join me as we represent humanistic and academic interests in a forum traditionally dominated by technological and engineering-oriented discourse. Let's bring some thoughtful concern to this truly exciting branch of interactive media.

For the first time this year, ISMAR will feature an "Arts and Humanities" section in their conference:

"The ISMAR 2009 Arts, Media and Humanities Program will present the breadth and depth of the Mixed and Augmented Reality research and application.

The program will include:

- research presentations,
- discussion panels,
- keynote speakers from Arts, Media and Humanities,
- hands-on demonstrations,
- interactive participation,
etc."

As representatives of HASTAC, we will attend these discussions and demonstrations with a passion to contribute and an eye for academic quality.

Most importantly, we can try to ensure that those intimately involved in AR recognize the potential influences reality modification could have on the arts, our society and human thought over time. This isn't just a fad, it's the internet coming to bear on physical reality.

So join me to ask some questions, or email me if you have any questions or interests that you'd like to have represented at the conference.

So I wasn't really sure how to sell it. I have no idea why I'm going, I have no idea what it will be like or where the tech really is in its development. Giving the academics an opportunity to criticize felt like a good tactic for recruitment...but I also believed it.

We need to ask them questions they can't yet answer. There is no "them." Just us. The tech isn't at a point where it can really be shown as dangerous. We have to dream ahead. How things come together... will determine everything. Is discourse and guesswork part of the development of a new, profit-driven technology?

Only if it affects the market.

-Cos

Like A Needle

2009-09-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

Coding is a nice way to get to know computers. Writing is a better way to know yourself.

I had to submit a long bio to the HASTAC ("haystack") site, which was the usual discussion of "digital humanities" and "warjammers" and might have sounded impressive if I'd ever really done anything.

(have any of these people? or is the whole thing just an idea-grab?)

So the site is going live soon at http://www.hastac.org/ and they asked me for a "short bio" in addition to my "long bio." So... I gave them this:

Level 21 Digital Humanities Major (Dartmouth)
Level 68 Bear Shaman (Age of Conan)
Level 60 Tauren Warrior (WoW)
Level 35 Fire Blaster (City of Heroes)
Level 79 Ranger (Runescape)

I'm ready to ask hard questions about where the human desire to role-play and the future progress of augmented reality technology will leave thought, society and law.

Any interest in the evolution of gaming into Reality Design or Civic Ludology? Send me a tell at www.twitter.com/bscully.

True, I made up the terms "Reality Design" and "Civic Ludology," but spend enough time playing games and even more time watching the increasing effect of media on public consciousness and you'll begin to realize that governments implement "level design." Guru's strive for "immersion." Every desire-based human system of action can be understood, criticized and improved upon as a game-system.

In short: Political Philosophy and Game Design are close cousins. The former is written to be noticed and heralded if perfect while the latter strives to pass unnoticed by those whom it governs.

HASTAC should be a wonderful step towards educating and connecting the kinds of sociological, anthropological and psychological system designers we will need in the augmented world soon to come.

To be even shorter: let's avoid 1984.

@Copyleft Brendan Scully 2009

Okay so that was a tad rash. Maybe the 1984 comment will lose me some credibility, but I meant it. Big brother was a game designer. Or maybe he was the in-game avatar used by the team of social designers. Maybe using copyleft will make me sound like a tool. I probably misused it and will shortly become subject to lawsuit. Look, I just want credit for my inner demons; I really threw it all out there for these "teachers" to pick at.

To be honest (real talk): I'm fishing for someone who might have a clue as to what I'm talking about. Hopefully they'll find this blog. Hopefully they'll like it. Ideally they'll send a helicopter over to my house, tell me about the global anti-ignorance task force they've been setting up in Amsterdam and ask me to come spend some time telling people what to do.

While playing Champions Online...

Maybe to be an academic you have to be a hypocrite. Spanish professors at Dartmouth love spanish so much they chose... not to live in Spain. I loathe the internet, so that's why I'm here typing...

Anyway let's hope someone at HASTAC can give me a push in a direction. A taskforce can consist of one person, a small task and any sort of action. I'd hate to have to just go into augmented advertising when I graduate... (shh, you know I wouldn't.) God help us all if I go into advertising. I will do well and the world will not.

I meant what I said in that bio though, and through writing (thank you, writing) I realized something new: political philosophy and game design are really the same fight over minds and happiness. Thing is, the philosophers wanted citizens to talk about their issues, their own systems: who should get what, why, how? Game designers would rather you have a good time and ignore the system that gave it to you.

One is driven by scarcity and the other isn't. So I guess we just have to wait for the singularity to do away with scarcity and then we'll just design our own games and.... goodbye world.

We need Real-World Role Playing Games. Where you give people classes and quests that help the world out.

yeah, that'd be cool. Or it'd be bad like a totalitarian nightmare. Depends how we design the thing, depends how we sell it. Plato's Republic was a just game spec:

People made out of gold get to be scholars,

People made out of silver become warriors,

People made out of bronze do the labor,

Plato rules over it all because he knows best (philosopher king status)

The whole thing is a noble lie (an arbitrary rule set built for the purpose of pleasure, a game system)

So which philosopher had the fairest game in mind? The most fun? Maybe different games are more enjoyable for different people. Hmm...

Does there always have to be moderator? (in-game watchdogs who maintain the game system) Does there always have to be a single government, or can different systems exist in the same physical area, with different people taking part in the "roles" they choose?

Augmented reality could give us something like this going on in the same city:

"What game are you playing today, bob?"

"I think I'm gonna go make some horseshoes on my 68 blacksmith in Dragon Land"

"Cool I'm going to go lie on the beach in Commu-topia"

In WoW the mods are human.

In our world, maybe it's G_d. Maybe we err by trying to do H_s job for him. Maybe the only way for our race to become H_m is through trial and error.

Maturity?

2009-09-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

So I've been sitting around and doing a lot of drugs.

The newest high is called Champions Online.

Thing is, my tolerance is starting to build up. I enjoy my friend who I play with, I love the fantasy of being a superhero (although who knows what sorts of power complexes that satisfies)

Playing these games, hour after hour... I can see now how the creators lock their players into a chain of goals. One quest leads to another, success never achievable but always within a players grasp.

It's frustrating. On its most basic, bottom level playing these games leaves me frustrated with myself and with the world I have to return to.

I am not really helping anyone through my actions. My dogs remain unwalked. I forgot. I didn't care. It would be one thing if I could actually escape into another world, one that I could taste and feel, and exercise there with my friends.

But these are just poor simulations. My body is stiff from sitting. I can tell that I have not been breathing fully. I am tired and sad to go to work (as a food runner from 5 to midnight).

Thing is: being hollowed out feels good when they make us hold such weights within.

Warjamming / Realityjamming

2009-07-17T06:39:00.000-07:00

The documentary we shot during the Warjammers MMORPG addiction experiment has been put up on youtube (thanks anna). Looking back, I REALLY value what we did.

Didn't get much support, didn't succeed in becoming addicted,

...learned a lot about the way things work in academia and the un-force-able nature of play.

I took a good two weeks off from touching a computer. Again, the effect was profound. I slept better, thought better and felt better when I wasn't wired in. Computers accelerate the mind and split it into a thousand places (if you know how to find the information and how to scan it fast enough). Useless garbage...

Yet without a laptop I also do about 5% as much. I am trained to write / research / think with this tablet as a guiding force. Way fast, very extensive.... incredibly limited in ways I am only beginning to realize. So What's the next step?

Learning how to program.

haha. yeah, close the window. Who the hell cares about programming? People turn away from it, laugh at it. They fear it. But that's why I'm going in. "I am a designer" is often just an excuse for not being willing to figure out how things work on a basic level. NO ONE in our society has any idea how their computers are really working.

This whole time spent looking at a Digital Humanity and I never took coding seriously, never thought I could. I was scared away from it by a hostile intro to compsci prof, by the stigma. I spent 2 years studying that fear, looking at what computers were doing to me.

So now I'm getting my hands dirty, seeing what I can do to it. Logic logic logic. It's beautifully different from how I am used to thinking. It seems like every programmer I've met has let go of a certain degree of flexibility (spiritual?). I hope I don't lose touch. But I don't think I have to. Programming is the newest artform, and only a certain kind of person has been willing to engage with it. As the forward in "Foundation ActionScript 3.0" explains:

"Today, we look upon programming as a purely technical pursuit. We talk of a divide between the creative and the technical, and lump programmers in the latter. The programmer is today as the filmmaker was early last century: an artist toiling in relative obscurity, awaiting a code-literate society to appreciate the nuances of her art. Will it take a century to happen? I don't think so."

Design = Creating "There"

2009-05-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

[Originally posted on www.tiltfactor.org]

The word "design" comes from the German "da", meaning there, and "sein", which means being. So design is simply the way of "there-being" that all humans have.

We see it more as an activity now, the steps that one can take toward improving or strengthening the human condition.

Game designers go a step further.

We are people who construct situations which remodel the human way of "there-being" around new goal structures. We evoke the human sense of being within fictional, simulated environments. We let people fly, swim and build on scales that reality does not permit.

Yet these experiences fail if they do not remain loyal to the basic human sense of being that each player brings to a designed world. Game designers get to build the "there" so as to evoke being, and the "there" we build can be sculpted in ways that evoke certain aspects of the human mind or influence a subtle shift in the human way of being.

External circumstances have a direct influence on human conceptions of the self. Thus many basic aspects of humanity (murder, violence, destruction....) become enhanced and rewarded when the goals within a system are mainly combative or competitive. The goal structures that comprise games can be tailored to attract escapism, hallucination, and gamer compulsion for the sake of corporate profit. These experiences can evoke lower aspects of human "being" while repressing higher functions like creativity, community or thoughtfulness. Many games evoke both.

But at Tilt we choose goals that foster education and inspiration.

Sounds simple but it's pretty hard. It actually might be impossible to build a "there" without it's own bias, it's own tailored agenda that leaves out certain aspects of human "being".

Is it okay to design only for the aspects of human "there-being" with which we agree?

Or does doing so just lead to repression?

Adderall and Hyper-Cognition

2009-05-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Diana emailed out to a short list of students and professors quoting this article.

"But it's not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus."

(I emailed back)

"Unfortunately there's a direct correlation. Computers give us the ability to do too much. The drugs introduce a compelling form of anxiety, a helpful (false?) sense of purpose in the face of infinite possibility (firefox).

It's like coffee and confidence. English papers become as interesting as dinosaurs in 4th grade.

YET they leave people completely dependent. I've heard speeches from graduating seniors warning against use: "I just can't bring myself to work without it anymore."

But i guess I would say the same about my laptop."

-Cos

Bionics, human vulnerability and the media

2009-05-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

Take a look at how radical new technologies are being presented to us: digestible, friendly. Like some vegan cooking how-to videos.

Robot penguins.

Robot snakes.

Robot us.

"Oh yeah don't mind us, just re-crafting nature to suit our needs. Please invest!"

My new media-immunities are down: I'm actually worried about the swine flu but I'm cool with simulated animals.

The media has a vicegrip on my emotions with this one. The fear is the real contagion. If it meant not having to worry about getting sick, I'd let the biotechnicians do whatever they please, make robot viruses that keep away the ones we didn't create. On one end they have us too scared to ask questions, on the other, too complacent.

We are overpopulated, and the crash is just going to get worse the further we push it away with technology. Five people were diagnosed on campus with swine flu today. They're being given some magical treatment. People are on edge.

And in response to this fear you get people saying, "yeah well, no one cares about AIDS," or "no one talks about Cholera!" Well, no one cares about technology either. I... can't even say for sure what it is about these links that moves me. There's something. Something we're after. Perfection. Self-simulation. Invulnerability. Scary I-Robot kinds of questions should be asked, but when you dress it up like a penguin... who cares?

I'd buy an air-penguin and let it float around my yard. The snake, maybe not. It's all about how things are presented, and that makes me susceptible to infection.

But now that we've built it, now that society is there to be sustained and the technology is so easy to mess around with, we're going to sprint to the end. Till viruses don't matter. Till mortality, pain, hunger... till every fear has been mastered and streamlined with shiny chrome labels and gadget-laden life preservers. Until that point, the media had better keep our hands and feet inside the tram.

"But why? it's more fun with your hands in the air, it's more scary!"
"Hey kid look its the swine flu!"

you got me.
scared and stupid.

-Cos

Twitter =

2009-04-22T13:58:00.001-07:00

[a draft I found, posting it finally jan 2010]

Why is twitter valuable? Because if you use it the right way, if you don't talk about yourself and succinctly post good ideas over time, then future employers will have a record of your creative identity. They'll be able to look into the memories your perceptions have bothered to record (the pictures, the articles, the "ah-ha" moments) and assemble an accurate understanding of your personality.

Racism Against Robots (Quickpost)

2009-04-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

Sitting in my Philosophy and Computers class. People arguing that computers (AI) will never be creative like humans are. "Computers can't come up with a new way of seeing..."

Going to ask if there's a word for racism against robots. Here we go.

Talked about the infant in a white room experiment: child dies due to lack of stimulus. talked about creativity, my inability to communicate ultraviolet in art because I can't see it. Lamented that we are holding on to identity and authorship. Asked the racism question. Answer I recieve: something like Specism. (species-ism?) Carbon-centrism?

People laugh, but i got the prof's attention. He goes on to read poems written by A.I. and poems written by humans. No one gets them all right.

No one is trying to let go of their self-importance. It's hard, like pushups. We've gotta try harder to accept how cool our existence is even though we might not be IT.

And god damnit, when AI shows up my "wired" generation might not be willing to lighten up.

-Cos?

Text-Based Graphics

2009-04-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

D+D has me thinking about visualization; it's just a better way to build fictive space. So here's some interactive fiction Nick Montfort suggested which plays off the same effect:

Varicella by Adam Cadre

Bronze by Emily Short

Aisle by Sam Barlow

Book and Volume by Montfort

Then if you're looking for a multiplayer experience, I've been messing around on DARTmud, which is Everquest meets.... a really good book. I like it more than the single player experiences, but sadly the world is a bit empty now that graphics have taken over:
www.dartmud.com

As if any of us have time for this stuff.

-Cos

Probably a bad thing to say.

2009-04-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

I Played Dungeons and Dragons last night till 4am.

(Stop, wait, listen.... really. It's okay.)

Woke up this morning and the power /electricity had been turned off at my house in the middle of the woods.

The first experience was mind-opening. D+D, at it's best, is more immersive than World of Warcraft or Age of Conan could ever hope to be. You visualize everything: Subjectively perfect graphics and more mental exercise than computer based interactions. We need to retool online experiences to make more positive use of individual personality, humor and identity.

The entire thing also revolves around the group of REAL people you play with, and how willing they are to joke, play-act and openly enjoy the absurd splendor of what they are doing.

People scoff at Dungeons and Dragons, but it is by far the greatest play experience I have had since.... Jail Dodgeball in 7th grade? Yeah, that good.

What's going on in D+D under the hood is so complicated / beautiful. The narrative is controlled by a player, the "Dungeon Master," and our DM enjoyed his experience showing us "what was going on" as much as we did acting it out for him. Both sides relied on each other. Laughter! Personalities! Real life!

It was a glorious revival of oral tradition, old school storytelling with perfectly structured rulesets made the experience honest; things depended on chance but the DM held the final say like a God whose chief interest is good drama.

Sounds like ours...

Anyway, I played as a human paladin... yeah. He rocks. I bought into the narrative, built my character's background as I went. People can be "good" at D+D only to the extent that they add to the story in creative and legitimate ways.

I know I sound like a ranting fanboy, but there really is something profound at work here. Everything that my game design class is stressing, every nuance that I have seen escapist media attempt to cultivate through "coop" modes and "immersion," is pointed towards the effects generated by IRL role-playing.

There's a catch: it was all about the people I played with. Without those social ties, the narrative might have gone differently. I look forward to bringing more people into the circle, but there is a good chance that their presence might pull the rest into self-consciousness, self- doubt: the enemies of good storytelling.

So we wake up and the power and electricity are off. Reality. Had we not paid the rent? What if things stayed like this? What about drinking water, bathrooms, the internet? Suddenly every skill I have becomes useless without electricity. A fear of self preservation filled me, and things became clearer.... literally. My senses became heightened, as if the resolution of my existence came into focus: what did I need to do to survive? what did I need to see?

Now the power and water are back. Maintenance. I can feel myself falling back into the comfort of toilets, electric music, email. But for a moment all I had was my car and the remaining charge in my cell phone.

Luddite adrenaline.

A few days ago I confronted a protesting veteran on the campus green. The audio below reveals some distinct issues that stand between my generation and his (Obama stole the election? Not having a gun license is unconstitutional, retirement taxes are destroying much of the middle class?)

His most useful/legitimate observation: a single EMP could wipe out electronics in the US if you deonated a nuclear device in orbit? Likely or not, we'd be thoroughly hosed. His advice: stock up on food, water, bullets. Apparently since 9/11 bullet factories in the US have been unable to meet demand? All I know is that I'm not prepared. We need to memorize books (which ones?). We need to shield our electronics.We need to build latrines. We need to think about the possibility that this system might just keel over without its blackberries and ethernet cables.

Of course I sound like so many conspiracy nutjobs, maybe I just bought this old guy's story too quickly. OR, maybe thinking about the worst outcome sucks because you aren't ready. I experienced life without tech this morning. It's scary and real and it looks much clearer than this world does.

(I'll post the audio I recorded during his conversation later.)

Suddenly D+D seemed... silly? I have to register my car. I need to pay my cable bill. I need to do work for class.

Nah. I need guns and friends, and good stories to get us through the chaos that might erupt.

So now... I guess I just need guns.

The DM in the real world isn't willing to blur the rules to make things work (thanks will). To the same extent that storytelling and role playing have been numbed and abstracted by digital technology, so too have our real world skills.

Who farms anymore? Who hunts? If the grid goes dark your cities will become dungeons and your party had better be ready for some dragons.

Play a role. Stay open minded.

-Cos

"Remediation" Is Lame

2009-03-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

Rather than call something just a "remix" or a "remediation," go ahead and use something more refined:

pas⋅tiche

–noun

1.	a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.

Jung with a computer: #1 and #2

2009-02-23T11:07:00.000-08:00

(Disclaimer: forgive the discussion of self angst here, be patient)

So Jung understood the duality of his personality in terms of two distinct characters: "#1" and "#2."

#1 was mainstream, productive in the everyday world. Logical and ambitious for academic success, #1 pursued a prestigious lifestyle in relationship to Jung's surrounding society.

#2's personality was much more troubled, concerned more with ontological questions (God, the supernatural, truth) than the goings-on of physical society. #2 liked to brood, to comment, to lament.

Though identifying two personalities helps some people, it often oversimplifies mental conflicts within the individual and can encourage schizophrenia as a crutch for poor performance. Some people can handle it. Either way, this particular distinction is useful because I FEEL THE SAME WAY, and the split is caused by my lifetime use of computers.

If I have a #1 and a #2, the first is concerned with love, the outdoors, food and eastern spirituality: he chills, laughs. #2 is much more ambitious, worried about ontology, angry at society/ arbitrary authority structures and MAINLY EXISTS/SURVIVES ON THE INTERNET.

Now people have had different internet avatars for quite some time, early interactive fiction encouraged the formation of a "screen identity" from the start. But what is happening right now is something different, something more profoundly causal to real life, and I'm not the only one being affected. Not even close.

So I could throw out my laptop and live as #1 and go into teaching or finance and be healthy and happy, drink wine watch movies and be ignorant. Fck that. I have lived more as #2: complaining, thinking about biopolitics and ontology in relation to everything I do. Drug use encourages this perspective. #2 wants to be a savior of society, a more profound Cory Doctorow: Dr. Cosmos the seer. What a jamoke.

People are multifaceted, yet the conflicts that stand between personas can cause discomfort. I'm not going to slip into psychosis like Jung, but the ignorance=bliss split is made especially painful when computers are our main source of information (non-ignorance).

non-linear, non-authorial, non-finite knowledge

If computer use = non-ignorance, must it must also = non-bliss?

If using a computer for long enough (socially) creates a new personality, then MUST any human create a #2 if they want to take part in discourse online?* Who is Cory Doctorow? Who is Perez Hilton? If i let #2 run free, I think he could become a part of that world. I think I would suffer as a person for it.

I am.

Stayed up till 5am scanning websites about virtual reality, talking with a friend in Boston, listening to newly downloaded music... this is how I lived in highschool: perpetually tired, perpetually apathetic about reality and fully engaged in the internet. MMORPG's, 4chan, web comics, web sites, pod casts ---> there's enough to keep me satisfied forever. Hell I never even started hacking or fcking with proxies! I spent my hours in my mind/in front of a computer and I am... smarter for it? Maybe, I know some of sht.

Yet I have little use for the information I've soaked up in my drunken thirst for _____. I woke up at 11 and missed the sunrise.

So who's it going to be? Can we control them both? I highly doubt that everyone is this way, but if you have read this far: ask yourself who/what/why your #2 is. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, tell me how you manage your consumption of information and go for a nice walk. I need a break from academia.

-Cos/#2

Haha we're so spoiled, so ignorant here.

-#1

*(we don't really interact in physical space, making our bodies and our "#1" natural personalities obsolete.)

Bombs away

2009-02-22T23:12:00.000-08:00

Flight simulator players have killed 250 people in Pakistan without leaving the ground http://tinyurl.com/bl59ew

"For some Air Force pilots, that means climbing out of the cockpit and heading to places such as Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where they can remotely fly the Predators ... About 120 Air Force pilots were recently transferred to staff the drones ... Some National Guard members were also called up ... more will be doing that in the coming months, as the Air Force adds bases where pilots can remotely fly the aircraft. Locations include North Dakota, Texas, Arizona and California, and some are already operating."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/04/flyboy_equals_drone_boy/

Unformatted data table:
Table 1. Drones Lost in Afghan Theater, 2001-2002
Unit cost # deployed # crashed % destroyed
Global Hawk $ 15 million 2 2 100%
Predator $ 4.5 million 12 6 50%

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/EquipmentAndLogistics/NewCombatHelmetIsAVisionOfTheFuture.htm

Huxley beards Wilberforce

2009-02-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

(So the blog is going to take an academic lean, becoming my notebook as I have very few readers. My thoughts at the moment are... chaotic. Biopolitics everywhere I look. Cyborg - humans walking relaxedly into symbiosis with their ipods. To ground myself, I will turn to the books:)

1860: Huxley, champion of Darwin's materialism beards (pwn's) jackass Bishop after monkey comment. read:

"I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. There were so many of us that were eager to hear that we had to adjourn to the great library of the Museum. I can still hear the American accents of Dr Draper's opening address, when he asked `Air we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?' and his discourse I seem to remember somewhat dry. Then the Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words - words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat; and when in the evening we met at Dr Daubeney's, every one was eager to congratulate the hero of the day. I remember that some naive person wished it could come over again; and Mr Huxley, with the look on his face of the victor who feels the cost of victory, put us aside saying, `Once in a life-time is enough, if not too much.' "

So Huxley grabbed a transcendent moment of human-monkey relative acceptance. Who will do the same for robots? Is that relationship equally as evolutionary?

-Cos

Drunken email to friends

2009-02-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

Here's why "Yo, have a beer, chill out" doesn't always work for me:

"i just want some frozen pizzas. Bob. pizzas. what the f@ck? why don't i have pizzas? why do
other people have pizzas right now and i don't?

If I could, I would have a pizza delivered to my door. I don't care how it gets here. Delivery, robot, teleportation, just make pizza happen. now. f@ck.

whatever. once those b!tches exist. once I can have pizza right here right now, ANYTHING right here right now...

I'll never leave my house. I'll stay here, and the cities will die because no one will go to them. community will take to the cables, and "space" as we use and understand it will change forever.
-Open Sky, Paul Virilio."

I'd like to disagree with myself/Virilio here. If we can manage society's transition into to digital space with an emphasis on nature/ the outdoors/ enjoyment of physical activity, then people might "journey in space" all the time! They might even preserve and cherish it more than we do now, with the dissolution of infrastructure making way for some pretty killer public venues (who really likes highways / streets / buildings? )

I'd be a park ranger forever if I didn't have to pay for stuff.

Sidenote: people here drink too much, they do it to get out of themselves. One glass of wine, people.

En Vino Veritas

-Cos

Melon Balls

2009-02-03T21:50:00.001-08:00

(Check previous post for link.)

I think that advertisement producers are smart guys. Self-aware, cynical, critical... it's their job to understand how media and human cognition work.

So in a move to grab viewer attention and explain an entirely new product to AMERICA in thirty seconds... they told the truth? Sarcastically? Human mental vegetation will increase due to this product, and they jokingly advertise it as doing so...

OR, hulu.com will allow people to watch what they want, cutting out captive viewing (being forced to watch shows you don't like) while increasing enjoyment and thus stimulating/economizing thought during media consumption.

OR, they used the popular theme of T.V.'s "brain melting" capability without being aware of the real threat posed by their new methods of communicative saturation.

hmm...

I think they knew what they were saying, and I think that this half-step toward corporate reflexive criticism or self reference in advertising might be a very, very positive thing.

Or just been the best way to humorously explain new tech.

Compare this new brand of honesty, for interests sake, with the MANIPULATIONS at work in this bay area news broadcast. Fatez looked the guy up, his avatar is nothing, the dude is terrible and he sounds like an idiot. The entire thing is concocted to make ignorant people go LOL in the face of misrepresented new media.

"what?"

-cos

The wrong way(more of the same)

2009-02-03T07:26:00.000-08:00

This is the first thing I have written on a machine that was not connected to the internet in quite some time. In fact, it is the first thing I have written FOR MYSELF in quite some time.

What is the relationship?

If I was wired, I would most likely be... what was I going to do again? I think I was about to update my facebook status, perhaps even my twitter status to: "I belong in a Cafe..."

Because at the moment I am sitting in a cafe I like, thinking, writing and feeling for the first time in quite awhile. I always feel this way when I am cut off.
So I'm writing writing this paper on native Tlingit being and place as understood through stick-based gambling games. These guys sat there in the woods, played for hours and hours and believed in the superstition that surrounded them. They were THERE, yet in a fictional world inhabited and influenced by spirits. Today: kids sit for hours doing the same, just indoors(?) Where the hell are we? How has the internet partitioned or accelerated my sense of place in time? Well..not much at the moment, actually.

Hence the fondness for cafes without wifi.

Hold up: overheard discussion between two rabbi's and cafe owner:
*reference to superbowl ads, joking and commentary on godaddy.com spokeswoman.*

One 'rabbi': hey did you see the Hulu.com ad, they just came right out there and played off the brains-to-mush thing! They admitted it! Said you could check it on your computer if your tv didn't work!

*Long silence.*

Owner of cafe, standing, looking out window: "We're going the wrong way, guys."

Couldn't agree more, bro. Thanks for the concrete.

Conversation with elderly man in cafe

2009-01-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

Old Man: "How do you like your computer?"
Cos: "I hate it, haha"
"Yeah? I love my mac book air"
~"I like the machine, I just don't like what it does to me, you know?"
"Yeah! I had this problem with my printer, I have a kodak printer and i installed the 10.2.5 update and the thing no longer runs with it!"
~"Yeah... they're fragile"
"I gave two computers to my grandsons for christmas, and when they came to visit i didn't see them for a whole weekend, haha"
~*nod* "haha"
"They just played on the computers! They love it!"
~"Well that's the problem I'm talking about, I hate these things" *pats laptop*
"Well yeah I carried my macbook air over here and it didn't feel like it weighed a thing!"
~"yeap"
*walking away* "and my grandsons said to me, 'grandpa for an old geezer you're the coolest!'"
~"hahaha!"

Cool.

The greatest generation handing out laptops like lead-painted toys to so many blind nintoddlers. Maybe if grandpa played WoW with them and limited it to a few hours... I'd be less cynical. Hey grandpa: Who plays a board game for an entire weekend? Why can't anyone moderate themselves with these things?

But he doesn't know any better, he can't. In his day they fought a real enemy and played with very real death penalties.

Now we fight digital Nazis just to feel ______.

I'm concerned about the lack of guidance being offered from our tribal elders regarding digital technology. Tell the kids to turn it off...

Why can't I?

-Cos

Apple Store Meltdown / Personal spiritual rebirth

2008-12-28T22:17:00.000-08:00

I went out in the rain with my laptop during a night of significant fun.

The thing is dead.

All my copy-written itunes music, all my memory-heavy videos for future projects, every meaningless/ful picture in my jpeg folder.

gone.

And I have never felt this kind of freedom.

Trust me, at first I was pissed. All that work! All those saved ichat conversations!

Every preparation I had made to explain digital humanity/philosophy/ spirituality = wasted.

Yet, before undertaking a great spiritual journey, is it not fitting to "purge" oneself?

(Digital spirituality remedy = clean hard drive)

I am going to mexico in 4 hours, where I was planning on writing a proposal for A REVOLUTIONARY DIGITAL HUMANITIES MAJOR.

But now all of my notes have been rendered inert silicon.

my grandfather died, my family is a wreck, I'm still stressed from school and in-all, our "spirits" are low. I will not be bringing a computer to the aztec ruins. I plan on having an awakening. I do not need to check on the rest of the world through a screen. I will feel it through my feet. Laugh, but I'm serious.

When I return, I invite you all to help me monitor human technophilia, moderate our detrimental digital habits, perfect college-level new media education and... slow down our overclocked society so as to improve the quality of life for all.

She was a great laptop, I'm going to miss her.

See you in 2009.

Escaping into the Digital

2008-12-25T15:02:00.001-08:00

My Grandfather died. My friends' grandmother is dying. Both families are freaking out.

So, we played Gears of War 2 for a week straight, and escaped into the digital.

Fallout 3 has since taken its place for me. Family infighting and my responsibilities to work/myself can be conveniently set aside and replaced with AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WORLD.

Trick is, you can't stop playing or the problems come back worse. It's like drinking. And I would have drank myself silly with Fallout 3 and GTA4, but I haven't.

Now that I was a new media theorist (yeah, alright,hah) I couldn't help realizing what I was doing: immersing myself in a fiction so as to avoid the negative aspects of reality.

But isn't Christianity the same thing?

Attentive Momentum Perfected

2008-11-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.neave.com/television/

Neave T.V. is a half-hour long stream of video clips claiming to be a T.V. station. It's a good thing it isn't.

I couldn't look away. This is the stuff of the future, the digital mind-opium that our generation has been trained to salivate over. Memes, sparkling and perplexing in their ____, hold your attention at bay. A perfect speed is maintained, keeping the viewer in a state of not-knowing while peaking interest throughout.

It's almost like a gothic horror scene, over and over and over and over and over. Something is presented, then made to seem not quite right. Incredibly affective. Tasty, addicting, glorious.

God dammit we are so screwed when they make this a 24/7 thing. The Conformists are gonna eat it up.

THIS IS A TASTE OF WHAT IS TO COME. A SOMA-LIKE DREAM STATE PRE-PROGRAMMED BY OTHER LIVING PEOPLE. You thought prime time T.V. was bad.

or...

Wow look how well they have assembled these interesting visual media artifacts into a non-cohesive but affectively similar thread. Way to deconstruct the linear nature of popular media and provide a thoroughly enjoyable experience!

Okay it's cool now, but it'll be dangerous later.

Or will we be ready for it? Is the age of linearity and structure and meaning over? Rhizomatic entertainment?

I rushed this post, gave an unstructured commentary. I want you to go and watch it. Wait. Uh oh.
-Cos

Hitting the maya wall

2008-11-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

Cs 22, 3D Digital Modeling project, "create a room". got a bit carried away with things going on outside the room (mountains, aqueduct, underground pool, asteroids) while everyone else focused on precise details (watches, chess boards, plants). I guess that's how it goes, I can't stay inside the room/code/assignment. I originally made the waterfall by creating one tiny, crunched up, transparent-blue rectangular polygon and reproducing it several times to represent droplets and experiment with our beloved particle lighting refraction blablabla. Turned on particle lighting effects, final gathering, mental ray ...the computer stopped working; the file became un-openable. The class had a long laugh when our instructor (Lorie Loeb is a legend) turned on the polygon counter: over three million objects (ha,ha,ha). My first test drive with a new technology and I'd already hit the computational wall. Whatever, it would have looked really, really cool.

But my computers aren't fast enough. (YET.)

Modeling a character from "The Assemblage" now, video comming soon.

Warhammer is dead to me.

2008-11-17T15:29:00.001-08:00

It was flashy, funny, and better (better?) at player vs. player combat than any MMO I've played.

But I don't care anymore. The rest of the warjammers are apathetic, and I think I know why. We approached the game as scientists (overly scheduled scientitsts) and tried to force meaning out of a game designed to minimize meaningful thought. Here's some notes from my most recent post on warjammers.blogspot.com:

"I mean YES the game is beautiful and complicated and they insert humor at some choice moments but the overall feeling falls short of my expectations. I started to grow tired of the place, tired of the game. I turned off the Warhammer sound and put on my own music, it helped. Strange.

... SO: exploring felt pretty shallow. RvR/PvP was engaging and fun. The two experiences combined... feel strange. The gap between an un-fulfilling game world and a hugely entertaining combat system makes the overall game experience a fragmented, chaotic blur. I guess we should have believed Paul Burnett: imagination is the goal, immersion really isn't.

So I have to use my imagination to fill in the gaps of disbelief forming between me and my avatar? No, Paul. The game doesn't facilitate OR encourage imagination. It bottles it, making digital hallucination fast and easy. Quick, streamlined player vs. player combat IS the central aim, and they nail it; I appreciate the game for the things it has introduced. Yet to have A+ PvP in a world that can't convince me that it matters feels shallow somehow, repetitive. It's just counter-strike from a third person perspective.

Wasteland, our server, suffered a mass exodus and we have been instructed to transfer our characters to Iron Rock. Doesn't matter too much, just another chip at the magic circle.
It's the right game for certain people. But Warhammer isn't heading in the direction I want MMORPG's to go. It's pulling the genre toward a more easily digestible, effortlessly repeatable kind of play. Bring back death penalties. Expand the game world. Give me an identity. Make things more difficult. You'll impress me, but lose a lot of your market. People like easy things. Especially easy killing."

What I haven't told them:
I signed onto Age of Conan after hitting level 18 in War. I felt: calmed, serene, beautiful, excited. No one was around, which is sad, but my avatar seemed to feel... right? Like a shower at the perfect temperature. (yes really). This game is so much better. Not because the programming is more advanced or the designers any more talented... It feels right mainly because of the way I approached and experienced it. I built a magic circle for it, made the world my own. I'll admit, I like the aesthetics better. Nothing looks as good as AOC right now. I preferred the combat.

Preferred. It seems that Age of Conan's beloved three-button combo system has been replaced with a faster, more simple 1-button system... making things easier for the masses. God damnit.
I'll be playing conan now once microsoft fixes directx 10, (you guys should be embarassed), and I'll enjoy it. I'll play.

We made Warhammer into a job. Play is beyond that sh*t. Harder to get to, harder to feel.

-Khosmos

Left 4 Dead

2008-11-12T23:08:00.001-08:00

Oh man.

Simply amazing. Played the demo four times with Peck. Simple play mechanics (based off half life 2) and straightforward objectives. There are zombies. You have guns. Up to three friends can play along with you.

It feels like middle school when you'd spawn 99 bots in CS and give them all knives just for the sensation of being overwhelmed. Everyone did that, right?

This game holds some serious affective power. I was scared, by a game. What?! Why? Well JPN 61 tells us that fear of zombies stems from a fear of society at large, of the majority's influence over the individual and the human tendency to conform. With modern society becoming increasingly self-aware and, in my opinion, over-systematized... it just feels good to mow down zombies. You know? I think there's something meaningful here but once again, i need to think about it more.

JPN 61, Japanese Art Horror (great class) also claims that Zombies represent the border between life and death, signifying the inconceivable void of not-death(?). Whatever. The game made me FEEL my mortality, prize my individuality and value whatever social ties i held within the game (thanks peck and mike). If you get pinned down by a zombie your teammate has to free you. Players have to heal each other to survive. The cooperative element really made it what it was: WE were scared.

Counterpoint: In the game I'm not mortal. I'm not individual. I played as a retired army vet. When I left the keyboard for 30 seconds the computer started controlling him for me and my friends didn't notice. Made me feel like...

a zombie?

Holy unholiness this game is good. Simple, fun, and playing off of real societal pressures. A+

-Cos

(Oprah vs. Anonymous)

2008-10-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

So Oprah said something that revealed a lot about poplar culture, internet culture, and the digital divide that exists between the two.

I’m going to try to recount this as best I can, and while I don’t claim to fully understand what happened, Oprah has highlighted the gap between those who are systematically terrified by popular media (everyone), and those who have been separated from society by the internet (4chan).

A few weeks ago she had a special on internet child pornography. Concerned for the children whom are harmed by the despicable, violence-inspiring sickness that is pedophilia, her program attempted to expose unseen dangers. Her concerns are more than warranted.

Yet in her efforts she “uncovered” child pornography on a site called 711chan.org, a self-proclaimed headquarters for Anonymous.

Anonymous is an internet-based group, spawned from the 711chan/4chan message boards, that has been trying to destroy Scientology by holding protests and disseminating information about the cult’s questionable endeavors to protect itself. Scientology is a whole other story, google it.

There was illegal content on 711chan, and Oprah accused them of them being child pornographers on national television with good reason.

During the show, Oprah read aloud an email from a member of Anonymous, who told her that:

“He doesn’t forgive, he does not forget, his group has over nine thousand penis’s, and they’re all raping children.”

Woah.

I’ll explain:

Here are two popular memes / inside jokes treasured by 4chan.org.
1) “Over 9000!” A sound blurb from Dragonball Z.
a. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBtpyeLxVkI
2) Replacing any word in a sentence with the highlighted word PENIS.

So we have the common Anonymous motto “we do not forgive we do not forget,” followed by a double-meme/inside joke composed of Dragonball Z’s “over 9000” quote and the popular PENIS reference. The “all raping children” comment is what interests me here, if you can get over the graphic nature of the comment.

He’s being sarcastic. The group has its sicko’s, but there are hundreds of thousands of “members.” Of course Oprah is going to believe that they are all violent pedophiles, he told her what she was already going to assume. Yet in doing so he is mocking not only Oprah, but the entire media for their use of fear to entertain.

However, understandably, the masses believed him. 99% of people have never been to an Anonymous message board. The don't understand that these sites are places of completely unmediated commentary, where anonymous posters can say whatever they want, post whatever pictures they want. Their comments are erased within a few hours as new posts fill the page’s memory and because no one on the site can identify anyone else, they communicate through memes, inside jokes and a shared lean toward moral relativism.

But Oprah found some screwed up pictures and blew the whistle. It needed to be blown.

Sometimes people post disgusting photographs for ironic or satirical purposes, sometimes they really are just mentally sick. Thing is, when everyone is anonymous certain individuals can fit through the cracks, and truly free speech may have doomed the impressive social experiment that once was Anonymous. They need to clean up their act. Can they?

The sites are vulgar, yet there for everyone to watch: a perfect stream-of-consciousness representation of today’s internet-addicted, alienated, isolated, anomie-suffering believers in… the internet? relative normlessness? War on ignorance? Cynical and wired, many Anonymous users are the keepers of our communicative future and yet seem to be falling out of public grace before they can even get started.

So I spent time on 4chan way before Oprah did. Some posters are strange. Some post child pornography. Some are racist. The general feeling is that everyone is “kidding.” But many aren’t. If the group wants to survive it will need to figure out how to purge itself of unwanted individuals. They claim that scientology-backed agents began posting on 711chan in order to blackmail the group.

Maybe… Scientology is a motivated little bugger. With ties in Hollywood. And Oprah is a part of Hollywood. I'd say there was a phone call made.

But fifty million women now believe that there is really such a network. Anonymous is not what America now thinks it is, and if the general population cannot understand the intricate obstacles Anonymous faces… maybe Scientology/fear has won(?).

I’m not trying to be dramatic, we just need to realize that there has never been an organization like this, it cannot be classified. It has no real rules, no real leader, and almost no set agenda other than the dissemination of information.

In what was likely it’s dying breath in the eyes of popular reception, however, a member of Anonymous made the greatest pop-culture prank of the past 5 minutes. They punked Oprah, mocking her for the fear her “reporting” creates and admitting defeat in the form of a brilliant inside joke.

Why should you care? Because the two groups of people involved here do not understand one another. Anonymous will not explain what it is going through, and the general population wouldn’t listen if they did. An entire generation of well educated athiest web users are losing touch with the country that spawned them.

Ban the kiddie porn Anonymous, some things aren’t funny. Chill the fuck out America, transparency is the only way forward.

-Dr. Cosmos.

Final Proposal Reactions

2008-10-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

We are being stonewalled by the Engineering Dept, but I just hit them with this 10 page experiment proposal that should silence the naysayers.

Quote from the SysAdmin:

"At this point, I cannot say whether this will work out or not. Any of the following could stop it:

* Policy decision that this will be too much of an intrusion/distraction/resource drag in our lab.
* Finding that it takes too much of my team's time to set it up (technical difficulties).
* Thayer School students finding it too disruptive (we'd have to ask you to stop)."

I mean i get where the guy is coming from. But, warhammer is pretty damn easy to install, the kids in the lab aren't going to stop their homework just because we're playing, and they have more than enough space. Its interesting that our department is currently guerrilla in nature; they can tell us to f*ck off without having to answer to anyone.

However, 2 years ago this discussion wouldn't even take place. "Games? Get the hell out of here kid."
But I'm in the gaming lab right now. Sure its an empty room (a few bookshelves and a coffee table) but we're here. I just might be jumping the gun with the warjammers.blogspot thing.

Interestingly the same guy said at the beginning of the letter:

"Thank you for sending this proposal. I am impressed by your concept, by your ideas, and by your ambitious goals."

Cool, thanks SysAdmin, now let us use 6 of your 50+ computers for a few nights a week.

LARPing

2008-10-01T10:19:00.001-07:00

Brought up hosting a Live Action Role-Playing Game as a possible side "experiment" for the class to carry out today. Also ran across a documentary on the hobby directed by Christopher Pleass that presents the obscure practise in a reasonable, positive light. In fact, I now think that adults rediscovering meaningless, childish "play" is not only interesting, but increasingly necessary in our hectic world.

An interviewed LARP'er discusses his fear that future online-games will dominate the role-playing hobby market, driving live-action into further obscurity.

With my concerns about the addictive, anti-corporeal nature of MMORPG's, I must say I am interested in trying, well, "play." Outdoors. With rubber swords. I think I'd be a minotaur.

How many of you would come to a tournament if I organized it? How many of you are laughing?

Experiment Proposal

2008-09-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking a class on Digital Game Studies, we dont have a syllabus but we do have a cool prof and the ability to do whatever experiments we want.

So here's the idea as I submitted it:

"I propose we pool our resources and assign a portion of the class (those interested in addiction, gamer sociology/demographics or escapism) to play an MMORPG together. This needs to be refined, but here are the main steps:

1. Form a team in an online game (Warhammer Online/Age of Conan) made up of class members and potentially other Dartmouth gamers.
a. Develop and test team dynamics through interaction (as suggested by Linden)
b. Hold various experiments in-game:
i. Anti-WAR protests or demonstrations
ii. Player vs. player raids
iii. Provide support for MMO Addiction in-game
iv. Gain contacts and profile them
v. Add to the game narrative
vi. Suggest improvements to publisher…

c. Record what happens (voice, audio, statistics, screen capture, digital video) and edit into either a:
i. Report with a message for the gaming community at large.
ii. Entertaining narrative (machinima perhaps, as Thomas suggested)
iii. Documentary analyzing what happens to the team as they become more and more involved with the game. Health deteriorating? Social changes? Addiction?
iv. All three, hosted on a website.

2. Questions/Goals
a. Do massively multiplayer online role-playing games have a negative impact on the individual over the long run? Is moderation attainable? What happens when people live in two realities at once?
b. Possible End Goal --> Propose an alternative, non-addictive digital experience, or suggest modifications to the existing ones.
c. (Far-flung) Perhaps report our findings to the group that is creating a game, help them create a psychologically beneficial experience

Notes:
- We would need a room, and hardware. I think both are attainable. I also think corporate sponsorship/support a possibility, and could provide us with much-needed information (statistics)
- I have Age of Conan accounts (5 or 6 around level 60) that we could use, but the game is slowing down and hard to run on most computers. That said, studying the death of a digital world would be interesting. We don’t necessarily have to limit ourselves to one game."

So yea, if this happens, things are going to get pretty interesting. STAY TUNED TRUE BELIEVERS!

500,000 People

2008-09-26T21:30:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: WARHAMMER HAS JUST PASSED THE 750,000 PLAYER MARK. Still growing...

500,000 people have signed up for Warhammer Online in its first week. This beats out Age of Conan's 400k, setting a new standard for the efficient distribution of spiritual opium(?).

This means that there are 500,000 people 1) equipped to run the game 2) willing to pay 50 bucks + the monthly fee 3) excited / enticed by either warhammer's ad campaign or someone playing the game. Well done Paul! (skip ahead to 5:00 if short on time)

It was the trailers that sold me:
Trailer 1 Trailer 2

I ordered my version from IGN's Direct2Drive, but i think they sent it to the wrong email address. Thing is, I'm better off without the game.

More interestingly, check out how they describe the war they have created. Dubbed the "Realm War," Warhammer online appears to value all in-game events as one large, historically valuable event/object. It's pretty impressive how hype for this virtual war has been cultivated. The game creators add value to in-game actions through the use of leaderboards, in-game chroniclers... Just click the box:

Anyway, I'd love to become a "watchful chronicler" for them. Sounds like the best job in the world.

Here's the main site if you're interested. These (This / this) are terribly shot in-game propaganda videos... I have to believe something cooler could be done with the Order vs. Chaos theme.

What E-gaming should/will be.

2008-09-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

Competitive video gaming is growing rapidly, but rarely receives appropriate coverage.

By appropriate I mean...

1) The commentators are, well, lame. I watched the most recent ESL/MLG World of Warcraft 3v3 tournament online; the guys calling it were worse than McLovin. They need real commentators who can actually get the average viewer excited about what is happening.

(hey MLG, I have radio experience, LFG)

2) Better Camera Angles! There should be people in-game, ghosts, recording these matches with professional precision. Can you imagine a well-shot Battlefield 2142 battle or one where an unlimited number of spectators could ghost through the map at once? People could literally follow their favorite players.

It'll happen, but we don't have the technology (bandwidth) yet.

Here's where I say something meaningful:
Professional gaming is currently less popular than actual sports only because digital technology has yet to reach a certain point. This point, this change, ((singularity?)) will present digital games smooth enough to enjoyed by spectators, cheap enough for the general population to actually play or understand and complex enough to provide a few, talented professionals with opportunities to excel beyond those offered by the physical world. Pushing their minds beyond the limitations of their bodies, future e-gaming stars should attain broadly appreciable levels of skill, and due fame. Actually we touch on this in The Assemblage, but more on that later

So yeah, e-gaming is something to watch. If virtual reality becomes popular and affordable, I'd much rather watch darkfall-like castle warfare in 3D from my house than watch dudes throw a football miles away.

(That said, with the coming technological progress personal fitness will be of the utmost importance. Long-live corporeal sport!)

THE POINT IS:

Watch this if you want to see the potential for e-gaming greatness (58 seconds of it)

or Watch this if you want to see the whole match (3:00)

E-Ink

2008-09-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

*UPDATE*
/Link to video of the cover. I was going to buy a copy myself but they didnt distribute the e-ink version this far north. strange /
* *

Another hint at where popular art/media is going.

October 2008 and Esquire has published the first magazine with an lcd embedded in its cover. They call it "E-ink." I want to buy a few hundred, tuck them away in storage for awhile and ebay them as new media artifacts. I'm not going to, but it would work; this is pretty huge.

Look! --> The beginning of a new type of print media. Blinky lcd e-ink print media.

1) This must now be affordable.
2) It looks amazing, so it'll be imitated.

Funny thing is, I'm going to buy a copy now. I wouldn't have otherwise. Are there enough new media geeks out there for the move to be profitable? Yes, because we are all attracted to these sorts of media. It's unavoidable, the stuff looks like, well... magic.

Magic = $$$

MASS EFFECT MOVIE? Be gentle.

2008-09-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

The producer for Ironman/spiderman/x-men movie has optioned the rights to Mass Effect.

Cheers Hollywood, this could be the movie that changes everything. If you carefully translate the experience to film... it'll be mind-blowing. I say hire the guys from Square Enix who produced the CGI Spirits Within and just hand them the Mass Effect character models... the market is ready.

Maybe even incorporate some RPG style moments for the fans by focusing on important in-game decisions (Display the character options as subtitles, have option highlighted, clicked, and plot continues?). OR release a few different versions, one where Commander Shepard is from Earth, one where he is from a space colony... you'd just have to change a few lines here and there and you can have a cool gimmick to inspire multiple viewings.

This could be the first GOOD digital game crossover into popular film media, the plot is perfect.

Please don't frack this up.

Dramatic MMO Legal Pad Scribblings: 2am

2008-09-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

I find myself to be…

Unable to put my computer together.

(tower, monitor, power cord, monitor cable, monitor power cord, mouse, keyboard, mic…)

My syringes. My pipes. I can feel the machine pull at me. It wants me to go exploring. My mind wants to go exploring because I AM AFRAID TO STAY HERE / NOW.

Label this fear as boredom, ADD, curiosity, whatever. Playing is all I want to do. Are they really my friends if we'd rather converse through wires and pixels? Yes. We slaughter deamons. Something better than alchohol against which to do battle(?)

I want to duel on mountains and slay frost worms as a Bear Shaman, not sit and…and...what the hell else would I do?

All the pieces are here. More narcotic hardware than 99% of the world could afford: GTS 8800, 4 gigs of RAM 38 inch plasma, the works. It would practically assemble itself, five minutes tops. Instead, I hold a legal pad. I’m hiding from something. What?

Here in my room, next to a dog soon to be given away, I wonder why I left a friends’ house 20 minutes ago. We were relaxing, the three of us. But the conversation faltered. “Remember that time in City of Heroes?” We need MORE THAN REALITY CAN OFFER.

More than it offers.

It’s quiet in here. I turn on a fan because I can’t stand the silence. Mind wanders without it. Sleep? Family? Dog? Girlfriend? No: Porn and Videogames.

I assemble her lovingly, as if adjusting a sleeping bag before a long-awaited nap. Water cooled.

And then I can’t do it. I can’t go back in like I used to. It was so easy when I was young. Spend awhile on the internet instead, reading about the games I am now unable to play. Firefox, (the lobby between reality and hallucination) swallows early morning hours.

Eventually I tire myself out enough to sleep; there has to be a better way.

I decide that I need to moderate my relationship with the digital, because the technology will never moderate itself.

Perhaps the kids should learn to moderate. To hesitate before leaving this world compeltely.

They aren’t going to. They’re online right now. Smoking "spiritual opium."

Out-leveling me.

Conan Guild Page

2008-09-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

exists.
send me content guys.
Known Issue

$100,000 Grant to Study WOW (+ thoughts)

2008-09-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Shacknews has reported that a professor at the University of California is going to receive a grant to study WOW game modifications in the US and China. ("Mods" are extra installations usually made by 3rd party developers to improve aesthetics or data retrieval).

basically, +1 For Digital Anthropology.

It's about time we took a closer look at digital events and gaming phenomena. I'm trying to figure out how to ask the right questions myself... if anyone has some decent ideas, let me know.

So far, I think that the most important affect has to be the emotional/spiritual/lifestyle changes gamers endure in return for their expanded horizons of personal experience. While gamers see and do things normal people could never imagine, they end up spending less time in the real world. According to another study out today (thanks Shacknews) Everquest 2 players:

"...reported more cases of depression and substance abuse than their compatriots. 'They may be drawn to use the game to help deal with emotional distress,' says team member Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware."

So what the hell is going on? We need to watch this more closely. I've played several MMO's religiously as you all know, and there is something there... something undefinable is happening to the human mind. A broadening? An addiction? I'll tell you when I figure it out.

Dream Job

2008-09-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

"G4tv / G4tv.com is seeking a highly motivated individual to join the games editorial team...

The Director of Games Editorial will be responsible for establishing an editorial calendar as well as building and managing a team of editors and producers who will generate game reviews, previews, trailers, custom videos, recurring non-linear shows and screenshots. This hire will also be responsible for building and maintaining relationships with publishers and developers to ensure a constant stream of editorial opportunities for both the network and the website. The position requires accountability, productivity, excellent communication skills, a vast knowledge of gaming and gaming culture and the ability to manage a team of creative individuals..."

Unfortunately:

"QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:
3+ years experience managing editorial team / senior editor experience
Minimum 5 years experience in videogame industry
Deep understanding of interactive publishing including timelines, development cycles and best practices / Deep Rolodex of existing gaming contacts" =

Whatever man, I've got time. By the time the Dr. graduates these jobs will be even bigger, shinier, and more in need of my outstanding people skills.

Right? Guys?
oh...

The Future of Renewable Energy

2008-09-17T20:35:00.000-07:00

Is single-celled organisms.

It's not a new tactic really, the little guys spent a few million years figuring out how to harness solar power and now we have the ability to create them from genetic scratch. By taking the world's most simple genome and playing legos with it, researchers can now produce designer organisms. A few acres of phytoplankton making jet fuel from sunlight, and we're in business.

It's not science fiction man; it's here:

Not-so-new Industry Startup

Most interestingly, the guys pioneering the tech speaking at TED

Biomass into hydrocarbons (Ars)

June/July

2008-07-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

I refuse to let this blog die.
To let this idea float away like so much netsam before it, I'd feel like a jackass.
Just have to stay constant, improve my timing, my pace.

Speaking of pace:

The first few lines from Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher:
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was — but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me — upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain — upon the bleak walls — upon the vacant eye-like windows — upon a few rank sedges — and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees — with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

Whether or not you dig victorian gothic horror, you can't deny how hypnotizing the effect is. This kind of pacing is important, especially when text is separated into panels or divided by visually intense images. The reader's senses (hallucinating through reading) should be in a constant state of FEAST. Poe was a god; try not to flinch reading this.

If a graphic novel were presented in a public setting, displayed on a huge projector, could it be read aloud? To what extent do you hear comic text? Does the pacing NEED to be more fragmented than traditional prose to achieve desired graphic pauses? I'd like to find an example of some frames that have the flow I'm trying looking for.

I think dictated (orator-accompanied projection) sequential art would be pretty cool.

Oh wait, that's called a movie...?

MASS EFFECT

2008-05-26T20:53:00.000-07:00

I bought a book the other day: "The Art of Mass Effect." As this is one of my top 5 games and a very real influence on The Assemblage, I thought I would put piclens to work and find some concept art that will help us paint our future world.

I should probably take a drawing class.

Gundams

2008-05-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

Are awesome, I need to learn how to draw them. So many works have ripped off the idea: the matrix, power rangers, lego watever-the-hell -things. Large bipedal suits piloted by a human inside... Hell yes. Ultimate coolest thing possible. While these more traditional robo-heroes are interesting and WILL be featured in The Assemblage (USA) our main characters should be more believable (hah!). But I posit: if you had the technology to pull off a gundam, wouldn't human/mecha hybrid units be the way to go? Throw in some human-flesh-replacing nanobots for realism's sake and you have the idea behind our (three) heros: the gray border between man and machine, the chaos that emerges from synergy. Yes it has been done to death, everything has.

Why not? Robots are awesome.

I pulled this image off of deviantart, couldn't find a source to site. He's (she's?) just an idea, a marker in the direction that we need to go.

Oh and this is a gundam:

word.

alessonislearned

2008-05-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

A Lesson is Learned has picked up its game recently. The strip started out mildly, but has developed into something pretty cool (Note: sticking to something pays off!). Jagged graphics, powerful coloring and carefully placed panels create an incredibly affective media:

The emotions that David Hellman and Dale Beran play with are powerful, they produce the most moving web-based single page graphic works I have ever encountered. It's fantastic. This particular comic's use of color to highlight moments in both time and emotion is pretty impressive; fight scenes in The Assemblage could use this tactic to highlight the three combatants' perspectives (view screens?).

Yes, our creative work has been titled "The Assemblage" and yes, we are going to try and throw in as much Mille Plateaux as possible. There will be fighting. A lot of it.

Anyway, Hellman/Beran started out pretty slow:
Picked up speed / learned about perspective blending and placement:
And now have a wonderfully developed style of their own. I would consider these guys (along with DresdenCodak) some of the greatest webcomic artists working today. Their creations indulge our senses visually and play with us emotionally at the same time. It's really the same effect, one brings about the other:
What if I Joomlaed their use of color in text bubbles/panels into my own stuff? Aren't they just copying Marvel (Deadpool does the same thing, or did for awhile). Opinions?

Photoshop

2008-05-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

Apparently take more than a day to learn how to use. I also don't understand coda, or CSS. My Joomla page is a joke. We will be using this website until further notice. God damnit.

XKCD love

2008-05-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

Our boy Munroe is getting some attention in the New York Times today, check out the article, they do him some service, but focus a bit too much (for my liking) on the programming aspects of his work. Yeah yeah, that's his shtick, but there is a deeper communication going on underneath the Unix jargon. So yeah check it out, and also take a look at these rad photos from Mars picked up by our buddy Pheonix.

www.doctorcosmos.com

2008-05-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

So I am the official web editor for two different organizations... but I don't have my own site. So i went and bought doctorcosmos.com and prepared to make it a kickin version on this site with room for creative works to be posted along with more detailed message boards, etc.

Then I remembered that I do not know how to code. And I despaired.
then I remembered content management systems, which allow you to pull in components from other sites and put together a professional-grade site piecemeal.

I loaded Joomla onto the site, and that took over my life for awhile. Needed a program to upload/ edit/explain code: coda. Needed a really expensive way to edit images: photoshop. I wrote an essay on Joomla and the ways in which it effects authorship and creativity on the internet, heres an excerpt:

"Automating the tedious processes involved is not always a great idea, however. Van Gough was a “master” because he started with a blank canvas and created everything himself. Further abstraction and automation, while making user interaction easier and inciting communicative progression, further hides the discrete binary code (the actual happenings of the computer) from human understanding. Many users, myself included, will now be able to write professional-grade websites by looking up the few lines of necessary code. We will be able to understand what the CSS and HTML are doing, but only so far as it affects the finished product. Any questions or concerns can be submitted to the Joomla! community; with enough time and research most projects can be completed without any "mastery". Digital literacy is expanding, but the works are largely plagiarized. It will be up to the next generation of truly literate web designers to push coding methods to the next plateau. Once they have, it will be their responsibility to teach the rest of us how to copy/paste their work."

So I can't really take credit for it's creative design, but feel free to visit "my" site www.doctorcosmos.com. I guess I'll transfer all of these articles over there. Then again, I kindof like this layout better. It's standardized, simple and clean. But hey, gotta get that internet street-cred up with my own domain name you know?

What do you guys think, which layout is better!?!?! OMG INTERACTIVITY.

Dresden Codak

2008-05-26T13:02:00.001-07:00

My favorite web comic site. Hands down. But only because I am so lame. Which is awesome.

Continental philosophy + futurism + robot ethics + geek culture/video games + anthropology / sociology + THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COMIC LAYOUT ON THE INTERNET = Dresden Codak.

Notice how the frames seem to blend together? Aaron Diaz (Dresden is a pseudonym) plays games with the viewer's gaze by taking advantage of perspective, suggestion, and the blank space between panels. The blank space?! Yes, the reader's mind fills in the gaps between one panel and the next. Set up a good beginning and a good end, and the middle is filled by imagery perhaps more powerful than that found in novels. Not convinced? Let's see what McCloud has to say about this one, as well as more examples of how layout can affect the reader.

By plotting out graphic sequences with care, Diaz leads the reader to create their own "closure" on a epic scale. The art is soft and detailed, allowing the eye to feast as it is subtly guided through the panels. Go here for more examples of Diaz's work.

Ray Kurzweil shout-outs aside, I am also a fan of Dresden's cast, which features "tiny carl jung" as a reoccurring character : "One of the fathers of modern tiny psychology. Famous for the development of tiny dream analysis, as well as the concepts of the tiny shadow half, tiny archetype, and tiny collective unconscious." (All of the other characters are Myers-Briggs labeled of course).

Diaz knows what he's doing. He's a genius. You know that something is worth reading when it constantly inspires readers to wikipedia niche philosophers. Every comic takes 1.5-3 weeks to come out; the quality shows, and you have to respect the guy for resisting the usual format of (consumerism-driven) tri-weekly updates. I'll leave you with something beautiful:

Creative Limits

2008-05-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

I cannot hope to ever create anything as beautiful, hilarious, or long lasting as Achewood.

Simple, complicated and built firmly upon itself, the comic uses character development to humorously point out flaws in modern society. Here's a recent strip:
Read that, then read this and then this. Now you have an idea, kindof. I have to admit I haven't read all of it, theres so much to go back and consume. I am told that the series is 100x better if read from the beginning, as the humor is reoccurring. What can we learn from achewood? Persistence matters. Start with an idea, carry it out well, rewards will come.

Ah how fear of failure strangles the mind...

Dino Comix

2008-05-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

DINOSAUR COMICS is a deconstructionist, post-modern web comic written by Ryan North. Why po-mo? Basically because they use the same images over and over again to tell a different story every time. The only variable is the text! The humor is pretty tame, and uses a pretty common statement--> comment --> statement --> counter-argument --> statement -->punchline formula.Go here if that's too small to read. Anyway the three main characters play off of t-rex's absurd realizations. Whats amazing is the amount of content that North has been able to generate; his creativity works within these set boundaries and doesn;t seem to miss a beat. If this much story, meaning and mildly entertaining humor can be translated in simple reiterations of the same media......then there must not be any limitation to the number of stories, interpretations, and truths that can be communicated through literary works (simple comics and novels alike). What I'm saying is that Dinosaur Comics inspires me: there is no limit.
I don't think I will use any of the methods from this one in my work, the meta-comic thing is cool, but can only communicate in short snippets. I want to write an epic.

Age Of Conan

2008-05-26T11:04:00.001-07:00

So our web comic story thing is going to function as a video-game script. There, I said it. It is important to set parameters within which the story can be refined. To continue my research in the field, my obsession will become Funcom's new massively multiplayer online role-playing game Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

The game features pretty impressive graphics (closer and closer to reality every day), an interesting combat system and enough storyline to play around with for years to come as the game is based on Robert E. Howard's fantasy novels from the 1930's. Also interesting will be the cultural undertones featured in the game, as Funcom's team is based in Norway (their PR guys are terrible to listen to, god thing they have these guys:)

I am most curious about two aspects of the game:

First, combat has been changed from the traditional runescape-esque click and hit format to a more dynamic blocking/counter-attack system coupled with first-person views for ranged classes. If you don't know what this means, basically the extent to which you are able to interact with combat scenarios has been improved significantly. Or has it? We'll see. (what does this have to do with a web comic?! very little directly, except that the same plot devices and uses of digital media will apply, as I believe many digital media genres will merge in new and beautiful ways in the future).

Second, the game is very, very adult. Rated M, it features nudity, gore and depravity in concentrations never before seen in a massivley multiplayer game. Their world is dark, dseased and sexy. Perhaps they are making the world more "real" by allowing vice. Will this attract a lot more players (adult males being the target) as they see their friends slaughtering topless amazons in dynamic combat? Yes. Is that a good thing? Hmmmm...

I will play the game (as a ranger), but Dragonlord is still out of commission. More about this alternate world soon.

Computer Games

2008-05-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

I am going to play Age of Conan, and I am going to take notes. One of my essay topics this finals period is to figure out how mature content adds to AOC's immersive qualities (cleavage+fatalitites = profit). Dragonlord, my computer, is still less than functional. I built him so that I could play vanguard, the beautifully failed World of Warcraft competitor, and now I am ready for the next game...

As this blog is about the creation of a graphic novel / video game sotryline ,I guess I should explain my history as a gamer:

City of Heroes:

It started with the terrible family pc and a little java-powered game known as Runescape. I joined the game when there were three servers, brought my friends in and we summarily killed people. The game had a magnificent quality about it: the "wildy", an area filled with treasure, rare creatures and people to kill. The catch: Everyone was allowed to kill everyone. The screwing around that the wildy facilitated has defined my idea of enjoyable gaming. Remind me to talk about the "wildy" some more, as the same system should be used in our project.

Then there was Acheron's Call for a bit, CS, Halo pc, battlefield 2, BF 2142... but non matched COH:

City of Heroes is an MMO in which you and a group of ventrillo-enabled friends become superheroes and beat on villany. The game featured amazing costume creation, no itemization (focus on gameplay) and the coolest travel powers I have ever used. (You can fly, 2nd life is a cheap immitation).

Anyway the point is that I lost myself. I was lifeguarding and playing this game, all day, every day. My social life remained stable; my best friends played with me... AS SUPERHEROES. This is what people fail to understand: MMORPG's, played with people you know from reality (or not, takes longer to make friends) are almost as viable a social interaction as reality-based conversation. Sure body language isn't there, but (generalization) males tend to function better in group-based activities. Like saving the world. World of Warcraft soon followed, I played a Tauren Warrior and had a blast executing gnomes.

My year spent without a computer was good for me. I hung out a lot, I enjoyed the MMO that is reality. Life has been enjoyable. Yet I crave the drug that is immersion. I miss exploration on a scale that this world can't quite provide. More than anything, I miss the team.

So is Dragonlord holding me back from playing Age of Conan? Can I afford to live two lives again? What will happen if I gain free access to my drug of choice?:

No, Yes, and I will make full use of the little time I have to enjoy myself.

Dragonlord

2008-05-26T09:48:00.000-07:00

This post is written for me, forgive the lack of pizazz.
When I was very small, all I wanted was a Nintendo 64. My parents bought a family computer instead, with which I dominated Dark Forces 2, Red Alert, Tribes 2, Sim Copter and a variety of other semi-classics. But then games started requiring faster graphics and sturdier memory. Tie Fighter lagged. All I wanted was to seamlessly merge with the media I was consuming. Lag was my reality, but Dragonlord was my dream.

Dragonlord is my computer, I named him six years before he was built. He was assembled from pieces while I was in Europe and the manufacturer sent his monitor to the States. Six months of staring at my glowing, GTS 8800 powered, water-cooled fantasy followed. The monitor was eventually shipped over, and seized by customs. Another couple months. I went home for the summer, left him, decided to stay in the states and only collected him this may. (I still have yet to play a game on this damn computer).

The story is actually pretty good if you're still with me. FedEx dropkicked my glorious machine, stripping every screw in the case and allowing everything to bounce around on its way across the Atlantic. I opened the package and despaired. Then I went to work.

All the pieces were structurally sound, the coolant hadn't leaked, all was well. I assembled it, he eventually turned on.... but no video output. Took another computer, swapped graphics cards, swapped power supplies, ended up swapping motherboards to find out that not only were both sticks of RAM toast, the motherboard was as well.

And now I sit here, Dragonlord complete with parts amputated from a lesser machine, and it appears that I have forgotten the administrative password.
I don't know the password. I have been struggling for 2 days to bring Dlord back to speed and now only a password holds me back. All I want to do is play AGE OF CONAN, all I have ever wanted to do was immerse myself in an alternate reality for awhile (after finals), but somehow I remain happily tethered to this reality.

I'll get the keys and open him up, it's just the ironic reality of reality that gets me sometimes.

Avatar

2008-04-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is just another online Avatar, I am signing up for the "Truth and Beauty Bombs" forums, going to try to familiarize myself with webcomic culture, get some info... they're funny, I want friends.

Anyway the site makes you link your avatar picture, and I'm too lazy to use photobucket, so "TADA!" that Turian Council member from Mass Effect, the greatest game of all time ! (?).

This is how I would look if we were all plugged into the matrix and we could choose our physical self-representations. Yeah I know you don't care, but this could be important when we start talking about futurism; how will we represent ourselves when physicality no longer matters?

You have my answer.

Flavor

2008-04-01T23:08:00.000-07:00

Every well thought out sequential artwork uses language, graphic representation and space to communicate a certain "flavor" to its readers. To find my own flavor before I start writing, I thought I'd taste a bit of everything. www.xkcd.com is a webcomic about "romance, sarcasm, math and language" written by Randall Munroe:

His ideas concerning romance, mathematics and self-observation blend together into a distinct flavor as Munroe becomes more confident in his ideas. I'm impressed by the power behind this comic considering the lack of artistic talent expressed:

Munroe's recepie? He appears to take his daily thoughts (girls, math, truth of reality) and simply communicate them at will. The themes are random, but the delivery and central message hold constant. The images become less detailed, with the latest, most flavored comics limited to 2 demensional stick figures.
One reason why we are able to process and appreciate these absurd statements is because the characters are easy to associate with. As Scott McCloud explains in his work, "Understanding Comics":

Universality vs realism, where do I want to place my work? Do I want to use stick figures? No, but I would like my characters to be universal. I'm thinking my heroes could have their facial features hidden behind some sort of mask or visor as heroes often do(ex: master chief, samus, iron man). Attention to detail and can be limiting when the ideas being communicated are what's important.

I also appreciate Munroe's perspective on things in general; the guy worked at NASA and knows his sorting algorithms. Interestingly, it seems that this level of mathematical know-how (shared by one of my main characters) does not hinder real expressions of love or meaning but makes emotional communication clearer, less verbose.

Speaking of which, this post was too long and didn't make much of a point. It's too wordy, but it's a start.

Also, I will be referring to my comic/creative piece as "2045" until I tell you about it / come up with a name. It'll come together, I promise.
-Cos

Goals

2008-03-31T00:07:00.000-07:00

Step 1) Discover how comics work as a medium, how they effect us as readers and figure out how technology can help improve that effect.
2) Research what has been done before in web-based sequential art/anime, take what is good, and emulate.
3) Write my own graphic novel.
4) Profit.

All else fails, we'll learn a lot about sequential art, image editing and the labors through which heroes are made.