Brian Kerr

I set up del.icio.us blog posting so that, once daily, things I post to del.icio.us/bkerr will show up here. Although I started using del.icio.us in March 2004, recently I have relied on the tool quite heavily; hence this change.

If you are reading from an RSS feed

I set up my blogging software such that it will not include these del.icio.us postings in its RSS feeds. However, the initial posting (for October 30) did spend a few hours in the feed. Depending on your setup, you may have seen that first posting, but should not see any more of them in the future.

(tags: metacrap)

Someone recently asked me to recommend some interactive fiction (henceforth “IF”) games to play. IF is great because most games are freely available, and because it is in several ways the last bastion of the truly independent, individual game developer. I don’t think the subject gets nearly enough attention.

The easiest way to get started is to download an interpreter for your computer — Cugel is a great choice for Mac OS X, or WinFrotz for Windows — and a game called Galatea.

Galatea

Galatea is a short game about an art critic and a sculpture. It takes less than thirty minutes to play through, and is both a simulation and a projective test. What Galatea is — and what you take from the game — depends on you. It is also a demonstration of a nicely modeled physical environment and a very strong NPC (non-player character — e.g. a computer-controlled character in the game whom you can interact with in some way) in IF.

Galatea rewards careful exploration and replay. However, once you have reached the end of Galatea several times, you may want to try some other games out.

Finding other interesting games

Baf’s Guide to the IF Archive is the de facto authority for finding IF stuff online. You can search by genre or rating, and also look for titles that explicitly include hints and help — good things to have around when exploring what is admittedly a confusing kind of video game.

Also, IF authors tend to maintain listings or reviews of games they find interesting. Emily Short (author of Galatea) has an IF literacy page, which organizes many important interactive fiction titles according to their notable features and/or gimmicks, and Nick Montfort (author of paper book Twisty Little Passages) keeps a list of IF recommendations, along with playing suggestions, for newcomers.

(tags: games narratives)

I had the good fortune to catch up with MarkDilley tonight. He just got back from WikiSym — an ACM conference on wiki in San Diego — and it sounds like he got some good ideas and personal connections from the trip.

Lately, my own interest in wiki stuff has been in watching wiki rhetoric and interaction design spill over into other genres of software. (And I’m not only thinking of stuff like VoodooPad or wiki-modes for existing editors, though this is not a bad place to begin.) There is something about the meat activity of typing out tags in a tagging system, or typing out WikiNames in a wiki — of typing a word on the keyboard — which acts as an empowerment (perhaps due to lowered transaction costs) and an aid to memory. Why is that? What do we we do with it?

One of the big ideas behind particular flavors of hypertext (such as that on the World Wide Web) is that of overloading content words, so that they become document structure in a more overt way than we are typically used to seeing. Another big idea behind hypertext in general is this utopian, Californian vision of democratic or open access. There are other big ideas, some sketchy, some idealistic, some technical. So which of these big ideas are essential to wiki? After wiki passes into dust like gopher did or after wiki culture atrophies like usenet culture, something will be left, and it’ll have more to do with Ted Nelson and Doug Englebart than anything else.

Mark and some of the folks he travelled with to WikiSym have started a blog called RecentChanges: all things wiki. I hope it can develop into an interesting discussion of some of these issues. Also, if anyone can suggest coursework at SI or elsewhere at the University of Michigan which might address some of these issues directly or obliquely, I’m listening.

(tags: collective design web wiki)

→ New York Times | Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers

Noted without comment, except to say that the phrases “unseen, sweet-smelling cloud” and “syrupy cloud” fit tidily into the scheme presented in chapter 21 of DeLillo’s White Noise:

“The radio calls it a feathery plume,” he said. “But it’s not a plume.”

“What is it?”

“Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?”

“Air time is valuable. They can’t go into long tortured descriptions.”

So Michigan Radio superstar Todd Mundt is signing up for all the services popular amongst the youth these days:

→ del.icio.us/toddmundt
→ upcoming.org/user/27631/
→ flickr.com/people/toddmundt

This makes up a little bit for how badly we all miss the Todd Show. I wonder how long until he starts a ToddCast?

(tags: annarbor weblogs)

Local user experience superstar Peter Morville’s new book — Ambient Findability — has just been released. Since it’s an O’Reilly publication, there is a funky lemur on the cover.

Peter has celebrated the release of this lemur-literature into the wild (e.g. downtown Ann Arbor Borders) by posting the following photos:

→ Flickr | Peter Morville’s photos / Tags / lemur

(Dear lazyweb: just ship a copy of the book to my apartment, thanks!)

(tags: books design web)

Four months ago, I wrote about how much I was looking forwards to the release of The Complete New Yorker — a DVD set of eighty years’ worth of scanned New Yorker magazines.

The collection has now been released, and is getting some really poor reviews out in the bloglands. Apparently, the collection shipped with a lousy interface and a half-assed attempt at DRM. Some people are having performance issues (such as the author of the review above), but others are doing fine.

Oh well — old magazines are more fun (if less accessible) to read at the library, anyways.

An interesting aside: there are some open legal issues concerning republication which caused National Geographic to trash a similar collection a few years ago. This observation brought to you by the letter K.

(tags: design narratives weblogs)