The Wild Rumpus02.08.11
So pleased to finally announce the Wild Rumpus, a multiplayer indie games night I’m organising alongside a few others that takes place in London, Sept 15th. The night aims to be a pure and simple dedication to the joys of playing indie games with a hope to bring some of these insanely creative and fun games to a new audience.
If you help spread the word then I promise you eternal hugs and kisses and and maybe a few kittens. Hope to see you on the 15th!
Super Friendship Club: Justice Pageant03.07.11
The Cambridge Indie Super Friendship Club have scrubbed up nicely with a spiffy new logo (it is new isn’t it?) and indie developer forum. You should go visit.
They’re also going to be running games pageants every 2 months. The first one is on the theme of Justice and is running from 1st July to 1st August. Details on the pageant and how to submit them are of course over on their forum this way —->
(image c/o Super Friendship Club)
Google+ and Labels01.07.11
I like Google+. I’m surprised. I’m also surprised that a lot of other frequently sceptical (but often rightfully so) people also like Google+.
It works on a lot of levels that have been lacking in other networks. One in particular that I find interesting is the personalisation of labels. It understands that people you wanted to be connected with don’t all sit in one homogeneous blob of ‘friends’. Consequently it doesn’t make the assumption that people you want to be connected with also share the same perception of you as a ‘friend’ let alone hold the same interpretation of the label ‘friend’. Instead you define what a relationship is to you, and I define what it is to me, and we both share what we feel is relevant with each other based on those definitions.
But Google + doesn’t just stop at removing the labels on relationships with people, it does it with any content shared through it. You don’t like or favourite posts or comments, you simply ‘+1′. +1 is an ambiguous relationship that I can take to mean whatever I take it to mean, whether its an endorsement, a like or a bookmark.
It reminds me of something I heard Eli Pariser talking about the other week whilst promoting The Filter Bubble. How Facebook’s ‘like’ by its very nature inhibits and affects the content carried by it. If I post a picture of a kitten, you can like it, but if I post a link to an article on war breaking out you’re probably less inclined to ‘like’ it. Subsequently the news which gets carried across the network fastest by the weight of ‘likes’ is affected. (I’m also super keen to hear Eli’s thoughts on the network and its potential impact)
I realised the effect of predefined labels had also impacted the way I reacted to bookmareting on Last.fm & Spotify. I reacted differently to the ‘heart’ functionality on Last.fm as opposed to the ‘star’ on Spotify. For me to heart a track I understood I was telling myself and others that I didn’t just like the track, I loved it. With a star, I just had to like it. It carried less weight and subsequently I used it as a bookmarking tool more.
I guess to make a rash unresearched statement this is something what has helped reddit be such a good aggregator, a simple ambiguous up or down of posts. Just remove the labels, stop dictating what a relationship needs to be and allow people to do this. Twitter has used ambiguous labelling for years, which is why I will always ‘follow’ more people there than I will ever ‘friend’ on Facebook. But unlike Google+ Twitter has not offered anyone the capacity to then personalise and define a relationship and consequently control the nature of the information shared in relation to this.
There’s a really interesting slideshare presentation from one of Google’s UX researchers that was passed around on Google +, which despite not being directly about Google + discusses the gap between how ‘real world’ social relationships and their uniquely personalised labelling are simply not reflected within most social networks including facebook. Its interesting so you should spare a few minutes to read it.
In the meantime, like I said, I like Google+. I just hope I don’t end up laughing hysterically back at that statement a year from now, or fearing it.
Fascinating Social Engineering21.06.11
We had a talk from Eli Pariser today at work as we’re publishing his book The Filter Bubble on Thursday. The whole talk was fascinating but the following two things have stayed with me the most…
1) On a brand new computer, no login, browser history or cookies, Google already has 57 different variations on search engine results it will select for you. These are defined by things such as make of computer, OS System, Browser, Font size, location, how long you hover over links for. Jesus, 57!
2) Facebook knows that… if a girl’s friend uploads a picture of herself, subsequently she is more likely to also upload a picture of herself in the next month… a guy is then proportiantly more likely to comment on this picture and subsequently be active on the site for the next 2 months. Facebook therefore have backward engineered this so if they want to keep you, a guy, on facebook for longer they will show one of your preferred female friends news information about a friend of theirs uploading a picture of herself.
FASCINATING
Receipt Racer20.06.11
receipt racer from d_effekt on Vimeo.
Again in the same fantastic vein as Room Racers – except this time with more paper wasteage. Ties in well also to the video lecture I posted below by Berg on Immaterials. Strangely the part in the Berg lecture where they were talking about Starbucks receipts my brain was wandering about analogue/digital play on these…and then as if by magic this pops up the next day.
Found via indiegames.com
Immaterials Berg Spring Lecture19.06.11
Spring Lecture Series: Matt Jones & Jack Schulze, “Immaterials” from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.
Room Racers22.05.11
Room Racers – Gameplay Trailer (November 2010 version) from Lieven van Velthoven on Vimeo.
Room Racers by Lieven van Velthoven (discovered c/o zo-ii). Digital racing cars projected onto physical racing track. Everything really is always that little bit more amazing when it mixes physical with digital.
London Gamejam21.05.11
Hark there is a London Gamejam taking place at the London Hackspace in Hoxton on 11-12th June. They’ll be making games for the London Winnitron which is slowly coming into existence. More details are on the hackspace site and you can sign up this a-way…
“A gamejam is like a hackweekend for videogames. You arrive and spend 2 days or so making a necessarily limited videogame, often with other people. It’s welcome to beginners – there are plenty of drag-and-drop tools for making videogames – for old broken platformers, there’s klik’n'play, for visual novels there’s ren’py, and there’s a Flash visual gamemaking tool a friend has been working on he’ll almost certain bring. The focus is on making some kind of interesting gameplay rather than technical brilliance. Or at least, something “interesting”.
The theme of this jam will be making games for our very own Hackspace arcade machine. On a side note, if anyone wants to help renovate an arcade machine, please get in touch. It’s the shell of an original Neo-Geo machine, but we shall jam new games inside.
People will be there from 10am on the Saturday until the evening on the Sunday. There will be a pub trip organized for the Saturday evening, and there will no doubt be forays to some of the excellent Vietnamese places nearby for lunch. There’s also a Tesco nearby for casual snacking, and a full kitchen in the space, if you’re feeling frugal. If you’re coming from outside London, get in touch – there will be places to crash.”
The 4am Project vs Project Brutal25.04.11
I think I’ve finally overcome my 4am Project, Brutal Library tour jet lag enough to pull together a blog post. Wow what an event, and if I do say so myself it was a resounding success.
Photo Credit: Bounder
At 4am on Sunday April 24th, Project Brutal joined forces with the 4am Project to curate a 4am photography tour of the library. Whilst the tour gave those already won round by the library’s Brutalist charm a chance to explore the building in a new way, others have proclaimed a new found appreciation of the building since the event.
Photo Credit: Nikki Pugh
Even though this was a one off event for a select group of photographers the legacy of this is a lasting one that is currently spreading across flickr, blogs and social networks as people share the images they captured.
I am truly astounded by the quality and breadth of the images I’ve seen so far. I’ve posted a sample of them here, but urge you to take a gander at the recent 4amproject tagged images on Flickr.
Photo Credit: Nick Lockey
But then it doesn’t stop at photographs as people collected video and most interestingly sounds. To be honest archiving the sounds of the library isn’t something which occurred to me until Sam Underwood utilised the 4am tour to do so. But of course sound is so important in defining an environment and one which could easily be overlooked and lost especially when dealing with such a visually dominating space.
Photo Credit: Nikki Pugh
I’m still a little overwhelmed by all that has come out of the event, but even now it feels a little wasteful leaving the visuals, videos and soundscapes dotted and isolated across the internet, and am thinking what can happen next. So if anyone has any thoughts of ideas on what we can do with these outputs (either digitally, or even IRL) then please get in touch.
Photo Credit: Nick Lockey
Many thanks to Karen Strunks for joining forces with Project Brutal for this event and all her hard work in making it a reality. Many thanks to all those at the library who were amazingly well organised, eager and willing to make this event happen from Keith, Arthur and Danny (our security guard guides during the tour), to Lee, Barry, Brian and Teresa. And finally thanks to everyone who made the wake up call to join us and help make the event such a success.
Photo Credit: 4am Project
Project Brutal vs 4am Project 24 Hours23.04.11
Yeah, so I scheduled this to post at 4am….but my wordpress was working on US time. So its more like 19.5 hrs to go now.
