Blog posts I didn’t write lately
(Visited 7442 times) Game talk
May 132011
I have been very lazy about blogging lately. So I thought I would share the posts you’re not going to see.
- Speculation on whether a game can effectively portray the umwelt of another species given the double mediation of digital gaming and the human senses.
- Thoughts on whether the mini-furors over each elimination of popular contestants on American Idol are revealing of the nature of voting bloc systems, and whether there is any difference between political parties and VoteForTheWorst.com.
- A response to Tadhg Kelly’s commentary on my GDC talk.
- A response to Dan Cook’s controversial piece on game criticism; as someone both mentioned in the article’s original draft as a role model, and someone who has written plenty of “soft” non-mechanics-driven criticism of games (here, here, here, here and more), I don’t really agree with where he landed.
- Musings on collaboration, overcollaboration, and vision-holding, also driven by a tweet of Dan’s.
- Stuff that turned into tweets instead: social games killing soap operas, and what that and GagaVille mean; the notion that cognitive science could figure out the precise neurochemical triggers present in stories and publicize them, resulting in all books being written to maximize market share based on hitting specific buttons
- The process of adding and tuning feedback to a game in order to better the experience
- Rough thoughts on the architecture of a Singularity operating system, and what the implications of full brain simulation are on the then-simulated mass media
Sorry! Maybe I’ll get to these someday. 🙂
8 Responses to “Blog posts I didn’t write lately”
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While all of these sound like great posts that could have been (or even might be), I’d definitely love to read your thoughts on that second to last bullet point.
(What are the links that goes with ‘here, here, here, here and more’?)
Happy to listen to your disagreement offline if you want to ping me with a quick note.
take care
Danc.
Whoops, the links are missing. 🙂 Will add them back now.
You just gotta learn to delegate! I could totally handle that first one, easy. ;D
“what the implications of full brain simulation are on the then-simulated mass media”
no need to ever post… since all given access will just pull the thoughts directly from your mind. 🙂
We’re really not ready for something like this: “the notion that cognitive science could figure out the precise neurochemical triggers present in stories and publicize them, resulting in all books being written to maximize market share based on hitting specific buttons”
That’s a lot more far-reaching than it sounds. In order to figure that out, you’d need to figure out enough about how we work that it’d do a lot more than just mess with how novels are written and marketed. Really getting into singularity territory there. Not that that will stop us from figuring it out before we have any idea how to cope with the implications of having that knowledge.
In actuality, Jane Austen already figured out these precise triggers; that’s why all best selling novels and films are actually variants of Pride and Prejudice in somewhat different periods, locations and dress.
My blog suffers from chronic neglect (apologies to all seven of my readers). It means nothing more dire than the fact that I’m happily immersed in playing the games that I pick apart elsewhere. Or I’m being noisily inept on my new guitar (please tell me the numbness in the fingertips goes away eventually). Or I’m spending time with my family. Or I’ve got some other project monopolizing my attention.
I’m intrigued by that first point. With current consumer technology, we’re limited to presenting sight and sound (and touch, on a very limited basis). So if I wanted to give the players the perception of a bloodhound, I could do it with a visual overlay representing smell traces and trails as washes of color of varying intensity. That might be fun to play with.
But I think getting deep into the umwelt is going to require tech we don’t have yet (or which is too clumsy and expensive for widespread adoption). I just hope that by the time we have the technology to fly like an eagle, we have some real eagles left to emulate.