Yesterday I watched two things that tied together in my mind. One was Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion. The other was an episode of Handmade Music that was half about making a Cajun accordion, and half about the decades-running jam sessions held at Savoy Music, where the accordions are made.
And now I’m stuck thinking about online community as a result.
I.
The Road
The jungle breathes
with its own rhythms
for its own reasons.
The road is a knife cut
parting the jungle
and no use can claim it
from its source.
Ghosts jabber among the thick-veined leaves
Panthers dream of standing over campfires
Jowls sag over flames and sparks
This road is a gullet
into some animal too vast
to comprehend.
Although we haven’t done it in years, we have a tradition derived from my father: when we have a holiday party, we ask each guest to bring not a gift, but an ornament for the Christmas tree. In this way, our tree has become sort of a living history of holidays in the family.
With the minor downside that we cannot fucking remember who gave us what.
In any case, this naturally enough means that we have a nicely eclectic tree with not one generic shiny ball on it. Instead, we have alot of handicrafts, joke ornaments (we seem to have lost the condom that someone brought one year), and of, course, tributes to geekdom.
I thought I’d share a few.
OK, so that TouchGraph tool is addictive. This time, I used it to find the core books of game development. I started with my own book, of course, and worked outwards. For every new book that popped up, I double-clicked it to expand its links as well, unless it wasn’t actually a game related book in some fashion.
I then went through and color-coded regions of the graph, because it was interesting to me to see where things overlapped and where they didn’t. In the small version here, it can be hard to see some of the regions — I didn’t label them all. But in the big version you can see the many categories I imposed. 🙂
Some things I thought were interesting:
Game studies and serious games, however marginalized it may have seemed over on the blogosphere graph, is well-represented in the publishing world.
Inspired by Jeff Freeman’s list of the top 100 blogs for MMO gamers, I used TouchGraphGoogle to build a map of the immediate vicinity of the MMO gaming blogosphere.
Method: I set the depth fairly low, and also set the minimum inbound links at 5 so that I started with only blogs that have fair amount of other blogs pointing to them. I used here, Zen of Design, Broken Toys, and Psychochild as immediate starting nodes. Then as new nodes appeared, I kept going outwards until they were no longer relevant to MMOs.
Lots of gaming news sites appeared, as did actual game sites and developers. I dropped those from the map as they appeared. If a site wasn’t predominantly “bloggy” I tended to drop it, with the exception of the few remaining all-MMO forum sites. A large chunk of map went away when I dropped links to Joel Spolsky and Lawrence Lessig even though they were “in the orbit” so to speak. Leaving out news blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq cleaned up the graph immensely — just assume that most of the game-centric sites linked to them.
Of interest is the way that the graph quickly gets into game studies as you head northeast. Northwest is where it would link to the rest of the techie web; Many to Many is a social software site, for example, and that’s where Joel on Software, Lessig, and so on lived before I zapped them. Southwest is clearly player land, and devs occupy the center.
A notable feature is the way that the first few Second Life blogs to pop up are clearly off to the side, not tied into the main MMO blog world. They connect via TerraNova, of course. I didn’t dig deeply into the SL side of the family — most likely, it would wrap around to the techie stuff that used to be in the northwest.
It’s clear that finding the “center” of the MMO blogosphere would be impossible. There’s a ton of sites that fell below the minimum # of links threshold.And I bet if Brian, Scott, Damion & I all joined forces for a group blog, we could maybe earn a whole dollar a month off AdSense.
