On Web Culture

In some respects I should be a classic example of someone who is at the high-use end of online computer games. After all, I’m competitive, I adore rich, immersive stories & I find interacting with people online to be fascinating. When I was in high school I played a lot of computer games; I was the target market: male, white, geeky, introverted. A rite of passage perhaps.

And in fact I always thought I would play computer games, I just enjoyed them so much. It seemed to me I would be able to play computer games until I died. The companies would find ways to meet me in the middle, I was busy but there would always be time.

Strangely, maybe sadly, it hasn’t worked out that way. I don’t think it is a comment on the games themselves, because occasionally I’ll read about them or see footage of gameplay online and think “Wow, that looks awesome”. I’ve found it seems to be more how I want to spend my time. There are a lot of things we can do with our time and the idea of investing my hours in a game, for fun, actually ends up feeling really indulgent. I get no sense of accomplishment and the return on investment, if you will, is absurdly low.

It’s kind of bewildering. After all, I know perfectly well the enormous satisfaction of completing a computer game or winning an online match against international opponents. Often the level of strategy & intensity played out in these online battles is epic. Online gaming is a compelling personal experience – it is no wonder computer games are bigger business than motion pictures now. But yet, here I am, not playing games and I’m fine with it.

Why? Well, partly it is that there are other things I find more interesting & important. And another part of me seems to feel some relief at having done away with “wasting my time” on computer games. That social stigma associated with computers games is not something I have completely shaken yet. But mostly, I just don’t see the point. What is making computer games so important that I should prioritise hours of my time towards them over everything else?

Now, like any argument, it is fair to point out some of positive uses of computer games: professional training, exciting entertainment, stimulating experiences for young children (or aging minds), social experiences unhindered by gender, race, body, etc. I have friends who play online computer games as a way of hanging out with friends or as an alternative to TV. There are bound to be lots more examples.

But my central point can be drawn from looking at computer games as an alternative to TV. Just being an alternative doesn’t make it better. And like TV, a lot of online games have “hooks” for you to tune in next week. The next level, the next unlocked power, the tuning out of those other things that are harder, more difficult or make you think & feel things you don’t want to. Indeed, when I was younger computer games were a way for me to use up my free time in an extremely monopolistic fashion that seemed an end unto itself. Games were also a way to shut out the world & control it on my terms.

We live in a world that doesn’t look kindly on mistakes. It is hard sometimes to get back up or to ask for help. But we need to encourage the makers of computer game entertainment to ask the question of what their products should ultimately do: improve the way we are or provide synthetic anaesthesia. Our worth is in who we are & what we will be become. That will never be properly contained or measured by online entertainment.

Auckland International Film Festival
Who made this website? And why does it suck? This happens every year and I don’t understand why. This is not good design, it frustrates my attempts to click on different links and open them in new tabs. Why is only the text and not the whole block clickable? After I opened 15 new tabs of films I was interested in seeing, Firefox 2.0 crashed and then caused my computer to hemorrhage trying to restore the previous session. Website crashes Firefox? Tick!

If you’re going to some festival films drop me a line with what ones you’re seeing.

We are meant to be here
Such a notion often requires an absence of pride. We as a people are not good at doing this. I am human, I know it all.

The Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars
You might have passed over the Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars the first time. I encourage you to give it another go. Watch as we strive for excellence. Watch as the validty of Spyro The Dragon’s inclusion in the Crash Bandicoot article is debated in detail:

* Calm down, kid. As I’ve explained numerous times, those situations are not the same. And if they were, I’d argue for them to be changed too. As for the Pirahna Plants, why do they link to a Mario page? Because they’re Mario in origin. Just like Spyro is, well, Spyro in origin. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be noted on the template. He features in a number of Crash games, therefore he’s part of the Crash “universe”, therefore he should be in the template. It’s that simple.

* And, as WE’VE (all three of us) have explained to you (or tried to), the situations ARE the same, you’re just insisting that they aren’t the same so your opinion can, once again, be portrayed as fact. And the plants in Crash are NOT Mario in origin, they’re a totally different plant. Spyro IS Spyro in original, so he is NOT a Crash character. Yes, we KNOW he’s been IN several Crash games, but that does NOT make him a Crash character. He is STILL a Spyro character. Will you give it up already?

* All three of you? The only person to comment here (other then you, myself and Klaus Kratchet) agreed with me. As I’ve said, those situations are not the same, with the possible exception of Nights and Sonic, and if that’s the case, I think that should be changed too. What’s your point?If the Pirahana Plants are not taken from Mario, why does the link go to a Mario page? Obviously they’re considered to be a ‘cameo” or a reference to Mario, or whatever. The point is, they appear in several games, like Spyro, they’re recognised as coming from another series, like Spyro, and they should be in the template, like Spyro.

* Further proof that you ae incapable of reading. We’ve repeated this information numerous times…they are NOT the same flipping plant! Sheesh! You’re a rock, you know that? It’s impossile to get blood out of you. (more)

Source: Time

What The World Eats feels like one of those ‘click-or-miss’ links that you quickly read, go “…huh” and move on. But it takes a little while to get through the photos and then you find yourself looking at the people wondering who they are, what they do. What the world eats is amazing.

Source: Baraskit

The random collections.

I got Photosynth to go at work but at home it refuses to work on Firefox 2.0 (.xpi) or Internet Explorer 6 (ActiveX). I don’t know why, I don’t completely blame them because Flash doesn’t work on my Firefox either so there might be ghosts in the machine. Check it out though, it may work for you. When I was playing with it at work I was thinking “Yeah, but it is as useful as Street Maps?”

I’m also using a couple new plug-ins that I picked up over at technosailor. If you’re a WordPress user the Subscribe To Comments and Popularity Contest plugins seem robust.

climb on the back and we’ll go for a ride in the sky.

Lawrence Lessig on The Differences Between Culture And Code [video.google.com] at German conference 23C3. I think this footage runs well over 100MB when it has fully downloaded so you may want to start it loading and come back to it. It is well worth the wait especially for the exchange between Lessig and John Perry Barlow at the very end.

Via BoingBoing.

I’m a sucker for these things. And go Slate’s crazy new Javascript nav menu, not sure what to make of it.

The Movie I’ve Seen the Most?

Firstly I think it is fair to discount kids movies your family owned that got thrashed in the VCR player, i.e. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or that movie about some dinosaurs that don’t die. I know I saw Return of the Jedi far too many times.

Then there were a number of films I watched many, many times as part of my film studies paper’s at university which would have been difficult not to watch and try to write essays about.

I’ll get the ironic one out of the way, I have seen Most – The Bridge about 5 or 6 times. The last time I was privileged to play it to an audience of about 40 people. And that was like watching it all over again, observing the way others responded. Most is a fantastic film.

I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption again about 5 or 6 times. These were more spread out though because I think the first time I saw this was in the middle of high school. Those English classes were awesome, I’d get lost in 50 minutes chunks of the movie before the period ended. “Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free”

I’ve seen Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times each. I thought Eternal Sunshine was a terrific film before I read an alternate draft of the script and went “Whoah, they could have gone to these places in the movie as well?” and well impressed, I had to watch it again.

As far as movies go, I’m happy to watch a good movie again but I can’t match 30 or 40 times for movie I’ve seen the most. For the most part I think of good movies like good books, it’s nice for some time to pass between viewings so you forget the details a little bit and the movie has some magic next time you see it.

Aha! is an exclamation for finding a link I wanted to blog that I thought I had lost.

The lost-but-found link in question is to B List’s Let’s talk about frameworks which adds ‘big belly’ to your web vocabulary. It brings up Ruby on Rails which Penny-Arcade is based on. I heard a little about Ruby on Rails at Webstock 2006 from Michael Koziarski. My impression was it seemed accessible kind of in the same way PHP is. I don’t know massive amounts about PHP but it always seemed something that I could learn if I needed to.

2Advanced’s “Attractor” website is a pretty spectacular effort for a completely Flash-based website. I think it has a pretty big download so dial-up users may want to open this one in a separate tab and come back to it. I’m particularly interested in the effort to have ‘pages’ in a Flash site so you can bookmark pages and use your back and forward browser buttons. It doesn’t happen all the time, for example when you click to download the wallpaper that opens in a Flash window, but it’s still impressive nonetheless.