Brian Kerr

Cupcakes — processing time-lapse — words. You can thank me later.

(tags: games images pac-man remediation vocabulary wakka)

I habitually miss out on meetings in Second Life because I don’t have the client installed, etc. — so this afternoon I took that bold step, and ended up spending a solid few hours exploring.

Liana took me to some cheerfully Victorian environment; I figured out that you could create and shape objects, so I made a donut.

Later on, after I’d acquired some menswear, Liana showed me the way to the Black Lodge. (There’s always a Black Lodge. Seems to be a real White Lodge shortage — but, that’s life, first or second or otherwise.)

In a moment of nostalgic weakness, I honored the Ministry of Information by visiting the Michigan Library Consortium in Second Life and picking up a free MLC t-shirt. It’s about as crappy as it sounds: a set of empty buildings where you can use laggy computer objects to search the catalogs.

The nicest area I found was ZERO POINT, a sculpture park which cheerfully remediates a generation’s worth of Radio Shack attract mode VHS crap, early nineties computer animation meatloaf c/o dead-ender Silicon Graphics overspill, except that instead of blurry rotating goblet composites and morphing quicksilver faces and sharp-jointed glassy bugs, you have a truly awesome mouselook trudge through tunnels that approximate Tranquility levels being sucked into toothless black holes. The pictures don’t do it justice, since everything is moving, or at least palette-shifting.

I played around with the object building kit, fantastic chunky 3D modeling fun, but you have to get involved with the game economy to do anything serious (i.e. huge, persistent, or using your own textures and media).

The key fact about Second Life is this: most places are empty, and the places that aren’t are running some scammy popularity-contest almighty one-eyed Linden dollar angle. In Second Life, the streets find their own uses for things, but it’s an attention economy, and there aren’t that many streets — why walk when you can fly or teleport? So the choice is, for the most part, between half-baked, mostly-empty built environments, or hugely overcrowded XXX nudie fashion beaches, where bulked-up or slimmed-down avatars brandish their anatomically correct, hilariously outsized prostheses and/or mega sparkling lens-flaring silver and gold, tops low-cut or not at all. You can buy clothing and you can buy junk trinket objects. You can make boring objects really easily, but — but. In my case, I had a lovely little roughshod statue garden going, singing Adam West Batman cubes and all, but then a litter of cigarette-smoking furries walked through and that was that. Why would I build my stuff in a desolate sandbox where nobody would see it? Why build it there, where it’d disappear after I was gone (much, presumably, to the relief of the narcotic-puffing mammal pride). So, I picked up my objects and went home: ⌘Q.

All the above to note that (1) my handle in Second Life is ExoMicroBioUnitAlpha Raymaker and please say hello if you see me, although (2) today was probably the greatest amount of time I’m going to spend with this hollow thing.

(tags: games maps media photos remediation visual)

(A full-size version of this image.)

I’m too busy not to play Shadow of the Colossus. Sixteen days left in the semester, sixteen colossi. Coincidence, or life following ludology? You can learn a lot by watching that kid fall off a colossus, shaking it off, and climbing up it again. Even if it’s maybe a mistake, don’t give up; keep climbing. That’s the lesson.

Regardless, it’s very likely that I’ll see you on the other side; del.icio.us links will continue to entertain you until then.

(tags: games umsi)

Following are some recent searches that brought people to this blog, with some answers and pointers from me. Thanks Ed for the format. Games are always a popular topic in the search logs, even though I post about them sparingly.

animal crossing music

Good luck finding it online. The music is pretty good, better than you’ll appreciate through the Nintendo DS’s tiny speakers. I really like the guitar work on the title song — it’s worth plugging into your normal sound system at least once. I don’t play Animal Crossing so much any more, but I really enjoy traveling over wifi: here’s where to find me if you’d like to visit or entertain a visitor.

ann arbor warhammer

Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop wargame. (I’ve never played it.) If you want to play this in Ann Arbor, you’re probably out of luck. For several years, there were play groups at The Underworld, a comics and gaming shop on South University. After The Underworld closed, Phoenix Games set up tables, but it opened and closed in less than a year; they were on Fourth Street, in the spot just north of Eastern Accents, now occupied by the Washtenaw Democrats. The Vault of Midnight is going strong on Main Street, but they focus on comics — good for me, bad for persons seeking Warhammer.

“perhaps the same could be said of all religions”

Dracula’s erudite retort in the opening sequence of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a 1997 Playstation game. Although Symphony of the Night was an excellent, instant-classic video game, it had a pretty lousy/nonsensical English translation, made even worse by half-baked voice acting. Here’s an MP3 of the opening dialogue, if you want to assess the damage.

rich text wiki

You probably want a wiki without the ugly wiki markup. I have some notes on installing a rich text wiki using Oddmuse. Fancy wiki vendors have low-cost or open-source versions to look into as well.

umich si logo

You can get the SI logo in a couple of formats at the School of Information intranet. Here a direct link. The SI logo is a galaxy/sphincter image (tastefully called the “swirl”) plus the name of the department in uppercase Bembo.

weirdest interactive fiction

It’s a pretty crowded field. I am biased towards games that are (a) short (b) intense and (c) more focused on storytelling than puzzles. A few candidates, ordered roughly from weirdness of content to weirdness of format:

• 9:05 — short, elegant slice-of-life story which you will definitely enjoy the second time around;
• Book and Volume — the less you know about this before you play it, the better; if you must know something about it, here’s my Book and Volume post from about a year ago;
• The Gostak — internally consistent text adventure written in its own language (here’s one player’s attempt at a dictionary);
• Aisle — a very short game: in fact, it’s exactly one move long, and you’ll be surprised at how much breadth and character development you can unpack in a single turn.

(tags: animalcrossing annarbor feedback-loop games narratives umsi wiki)

A quick plug for thedaniel’s excellent Dashers unite — in which the ubiquitous video game quick-dash becomes a lifestyle choice.

(tags: games urbanranger)

The situation: you’re on a closed wireless network (often encountered in a conference center, hotel, or .edu environment) and want to share it without paying, or don’t have enough access codes to go around.

The solution: two Macs, one ethernet cable, three minutes of your time. What’s nice about this recipe is that as you are virtually guaranteed to have all the ingredients on hand.

Under the ‘Internet’ tab of the Sharing pane in System Preferences, you can share your internet connection. That’s really all you need to know.

1. Connect the first Mac to the wireless network. (Sign in or pay up, so this one can actually get online.)
2. Share the first Mac’s connection from Airport to Ethernet.
3. Connect the second Mac to the first Mac via the ethernet cable. At this point, the second Mac should be able to get online.
4. Share the second Mac’s connection from Ethernet to Airport. (The ‘Airport Options’ button in the sharing pane will let you name the network.)

Once this is done, others can connect their devices to the network you’ve just created.

I’ve done this with an iBook G4 + Macbook, and with two Macbooks.

Make sure that both laptops are plugged in, or otherwise won’t go to sleep. In particular, if the second Mac goes to sleep, upon waking, its Airport is likely to go into a weird state where it’ll report out as running an ad-hoc network, but in fact be totally unresponsive until you restart the Mac. (Harsh, but true.)

Incidentally, this is also a good way to get your Nintendo DS online: the DS can connect to some encrypted networks, but can’t handle the stupid web-based authentication or payment form so often encountered.

(tags: games mac umich)

Some days, keyboard shortcuts are not enough. On these days, what you need is a button. In particular, a USB button or gamepad.

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) say that “buttons initiate an immediate action.” More about the history of the button, including a peek at the original HIG’s take on GUI buttons.

Equipment

Button candidates:

1. Self Destruction Button DX (~$35)
2. PowerMate ($45)
3. Old Gravis Gamepad Pro (cheap; what I am using)

If you’re running OS X, you need additional software to map buttons to keyboard shortcuts, mouse motions, etc.:

1. USB Overdrive (shareware; recommended)
2. Gamepad Companion (shareware; decrepit)

Also, weird branded versions of USB Overdrive may be included with game controllers, or you may also get some other crappy System Preferences panel which may let you map keyboard shortcuts.

Actions

Combine two of the above with (say) your web browser’s keyboard navigation, and you’re in a good spot.

Here’s how I have been reading feeds in Google Reader:

1. a button for the “Next” bookmarklet (⌘2)
2. a button for OmniWeb’s “Next page” keyboard shortcut (⌅), which does a good job of paging through multi-page articles
3. a button to post the page to del.icio.us (⌘1)
4. a button to save the page as a PDF (⌥⇧⌘S)
5. a button to press ↩ (needed for #3 and #4 above)
6. shoulder buttons to scroll up and down

Now you know why so many untagged links in my del.icio.us lately.

So what?

There’s not really any point to all this. But I’m finding it actually easier to focus on reading with the controller, without temptation to fiddle with iTunes, IRC, or whatever else. It’s the ungodly collision of several metaphors: game-playing, RSS/news reading, and television channel-surfing. It’s the future of RSI, closing the feedback loop.

(tags: design games web)