It’s an odd climate in which to coin such a post title, but a few things I’ve observed have been rattling around recently.

The ongoing economic crisis seems to drive people to more conservative tactics, which aren’t necessarily safe (i.e. retreating to currency in the name of liquidity doesn’t seem like a very sure bet…). The fall of UK retailer Woolworths seemed like a strangely obsessive thing for MCVUK to keep reporting on, until I understood that also meant distributor EUK had gone down and may drag some major publishers and high street retailers down with it. Noone knows at present how far that cascade will go, but things could look very different in a year.

The past few months have been incredible; I never expected anything to get close to the Jehovah’s Witness belief in Armageddon I was raised with and later renounced, but this financial crisis is exactly the kind of disaster porn they get off on. Really, a $50 billion Ponzi scheme? Banks still playing hide the toxic debt? Bailouts for the hard line laissez-fair? I’ve been watching with rising incredulity, fascination and a tiny dash of schnadenfreude for over a year but feel unqualified to commentate. My favorite quote on the lot, from a friend: “I’ve seen an unusually high number of bankers with broken legs on the Docklands Light Rail recently”. I guess they’re jumping out of windows…

Today, I see this list, linked by John Robb.

Any form of crisis seems to drive a conservative response by means of insecurity. For instance, as a single young man with an unusual degree of philsophical detachment and inquisitiveness, I tend to be very liberal about my sex life (up to and including monogamous commitment). However, almost inevitable social/sexual crises drive me from wanting/accommodating more flexible, negotiable models of relationships to more traditional ones. Seeing that list on Amazon, I wonder if present circumstances resound so deep as to cause sections of society to largely renounce products of pop culture where they haven’t before?

(In which the author/typist apologises in a roundabout way for posting less nowadays)

I need more time to sit and think about this, but Jane Pinckard has posted something very good, though preliminary, about emergent trends in entertainment.

There’s definitely something to this:

Facebook status updates are absolutely brilliant ways for expressing an immediate state, and allowing someone else to browse the “immediate states” of friends. Entertainment will increasingly make use of these styles of communication in the backbone of the product itself.

With twitter now a more frequent thing for me than my own blog, I’m seeing a lot of power in this. Facebook allowing comments on status updates is also a great move, offering utility that Twitter distinctly lacks, with @replies being difficult for third parties to follow. Bruce Sterling also spoke about this, most prominently by forecasting what was repeated, and railed against, as the “death of blogs”:

Blogs are a transitional medium built on a highly unstable platform. They won’t suddenly vanish by legislative fiat, but they’re gonna fade into the background like bulletin-board-systems, ARCHIE and USENET.

(Bruce too has a beady, design-centric cultural eye on Twitter).

As means of expression with a much lower cognitive load than wordpress come into being, of course people will move to them instead, rather than writing lengthy missives. Though I’ll keep Functional Autonomy active, pointing to interesting stuff and occasionally writing essays, I’m finding that migration to easier platforms includes me too. You can find me on Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn, the Idle Thumbs Forums, and Facebook, though if I’ve not met you I probably won’t add you at the latter.

(CC image of scores of cell phones at a concert by DeaPeaJay)

For the first 10% of GTA IV, I had a backseat driver. “Go left here!”, “You missed the turn!”, “No not that way”. The most annoying thing about this particular backseat driver was that it was always right, even in times of crisis. It led me from one waypoint to the next flawlessly, but I nonetheless started to resent it. I was told what to do, and I followed. Pining for freedom, I found it in the options menu.

Aesthetically I was overawed by GTA IV, but mechanically there was really something missing until I turned the GPS line off. Until then I’d been vague about the way neighborhoods were laid out, just a visitor passing through. I didn’t need to look at things, remember them, chain them together, because if I ever returned I’d be guided there and out again. I could just look at the tiny radar in the corner of the screen and be led from cutscenes to fights. Missions became tedious; in previous GTA games, had I really enjoyed doing all of this driving to get from one mission to another? Yes, I had enjoyed it very much.

Once I’d banished the GPS line from my radar, the city came to life. I began to understand it as an entity, know its passages, the character of each area and the ways they related. Shortcuts the GPS couldn’t show me became burned into my memory along with the locations of weapon shops and vehicles. I was navigating the city with my wits, building a mental map and feeling the same competency the other games had built up in me.

After chipping away at it for 2 months, I hit 100% and haven’t been back. For most of those 80 hours, I felt like a native, but for the first few I was a perpetual tourist, outsourcing my thinking and memory to a gadget.

CC Image: GPS sucks in Manhattan, by alex.lines

Some friends and I once invented a game while working together in a night club. It’s called One-Behindmanship, and basically turns good door etiquette into a competitive game. By being the last of a group through a door without anyone realising, you earn gloating rights. “After you” is a perfect way to telegraph and cause a stalemate, and we did it all the time by accident at first, but pretty soon we’d devised all kinds of cunning tricks to distract people.

I want to make more games like this: Mundane ones that take a common personal or social experience and turn it into an opportunity for people to amuse themselves and each other. For now, One-Behindmanship has been long overdue some tweaks, and the revised website is up here.

One-Behindmanship is also now the official game of Playful, since my employer, Pixel-Lab, is running the event next week :)

(CC image by mad paul)

“I think that people have learned that money is not made in banks. It is made by real people working hard at real jobs. Actually, deep down we knew that all along. We just have to learn it again.”

- Asbjorn Jonsson, third-generation Icelandic fisherman

source

Irresponsible people tied the shoelaces of many societies in the name of optimisation and enrichment, and it fell flat on its face this year. Charlie Brooker is also very good :

All of it was a dream. All that crap we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years - none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living.

John Robb remains a good source on resilient communities, which I find more interesting and enriching than his previous work. Open Source warfare is fascinating, but much like watching Wall St. for the past few weeks, it has an air of disaster porn and apocaphilia about it too.

(About time I cleaned this place up and started posting again, eh?)

I am currently at Barcamp Brighton 3. I am kind of rubbish at werewolf; last time I was too quiet, this barcamp I’m too lairy. Keep getting hung/eaten.

In the morning, I will be running a session entitled “Crowdsourced haircut”. Wish me luck…

Amazing glitch music visual tracker:

Open source, runs on Linux with PS2 pads. More details over at Planet Damage, he doesn’t seem to link the project website, but it’s fijuu.com.

(via The Day They Tried To Kill Me)

I used to have something called a “league of greed”. It detailed every single thing I wanted, and put them in the order I wanted with the price next to everything. At the bottom was a total, which at times was unattainable, and at other times just represented a hell of a lot of potential credit card debt. I never took that plunge because it didn’t seem wise, especially as many of the things were electronics or transport, both of which tend to depreciate much faster than debts.

A side effect of having league of greed was that it made me unhappy when it reached into the unattainable - either I was looking too many years ahead, my income had just gone down for a while, or I was putting things on the list that were a little bit crazy. Eventually I tore it up, forgot about most of the things on it, and found that I was much happier as a result.

At several points in my life I’ve learned that having a comfortable income means being able to easily buy shit I don’t need. That lesson needed hitting home a lot harder in my late teens, nowadays even a t-shirt I don’t wear often makes me think about it. I like to travel very light nowadays too (i.e. a change of clothes, money and a camera phone if I can get away with so little), but used to carry large heavy bags everywhere and have trouble closing them.

In the past few months I’ve been on a major stuff purge, because the less I have, the happier I get. Owning stuff has cognitive overheads, mainly in various ways of remembering and maintaining it. Even getting rid of things is difficult unless you just dump them in the bin. I basically still have 1.5 cubic metres of stuff that has to be apportioned to charity shops, ebayed, given away, and chucked. Getting rid of things properly is effort, though luckily I’ve never been over the event horizon some hoarders I’ve known have passed, where getting rid of stuff seems like more trouble than living with clutter.

I’m becoming the exact opposite of a hoarder.

In the era of the web, being able to look at something online is often enough for me. The existence of something as media can be sufficient. To have and to hold is not something I require of most things, and this has drastically changed my buying patterns over the past few years. Every time I consider buying a thing, I contemplate the overheads of owning it. I wonder if I really want it. I wonder if I’ll still want it in a month. Like a window shopper, I repeatedly go back to look at it, but each repeat visit is more likely to reduce my desire than increase it.

There are of course still things I want and will have to save for, and it’s not like I never make impulse buys or have indulgences. I don’t keep track of unfulfilled material desires with a “league of greed” anymore though. What I do have is a constantly shifting “league of contemplation”; bookmarks for things I might buy but probably won’t waste my money on. The things I do buy are tending to be a small number of things I love, rather than more things I like or many I just find acceptable. Things are much better this way.

(CC image by Holla, It’s Jillian)

I went to the Hide and Seek Festival last weekend. It was great and I’ll be writing about it soon, both here and at Pixel-Love. It’ll be a little while yet though since I’ve been laid up with a fever for the past few days.

For now, here are the photos I took there.

“This feels like the climax of Act 1 of the internet.”
- Torquill, Neogaf forums.

We may not have found the Citizen Kane of games yet, but this is definitely their Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Limbo of The Lost is a point and click adventure game developed by Majestic, an outfit of three English geezers. Definitely geezers. After it was published by Tri Synergy, it didn’t take long for anyone to notice that many of the backdrops were screenshots from Bethesda’s Oblivion… along with more from Silent Hill, Diablo, UT2004, Thief 3, and so on.

GamePlasma broke the story, then this Neogaf thread catalogued the different games ripped off. Many of the screenshots are photoshopped with assets from other games, such as this screen from Thief: Deadly Shadows that includes skulls from Diablo.

As this trailer shows, the game itself is appallingly poor:

It was quickly withdrawn from sale after the lifting was noticed, but copies have of course been showing up on ebay and torrent sites. In the run up to its release and just after, Majestic ran an astroturf campaign of fake reviews and forum posts. Of course, the internet turned over every stone, with some hilarious results.

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I’ve been sceptical of CDs and optical media since I last moved house and had to carry them. I’m purging my possessions of extraneous stuff at the moment, and last night ripped and tagged all of my remaining CDs. The pile came out to about 4 gigabytes of MP3s, which is the size of the USB key you can see in the photo.

If my entire digital music collection was turned back into CDs, it would fill about 4 square metres of wall space with one layer of CD shelves. I’d rather have a hard disk or three and paint something nice on the wall.

As far as I’m concerned now, CDs are an inconvenience, like floppy discs, VHS tapes and packaging. I don’t even know what to do with all of these except give them away. The last second hand CD shop in my city closed down over a year ago, and tended not to need much stock from anyone. Ebaying them would be more hassle than they’re worth, even if I was on minimum wage.

These are going to friends who still love CDs. I certainly don’t. I’m finding that the less stuff I have, the happier I get.

While 3D printing will remain the territory of geeks and tinkerers for quite a while to come, an impressive step was achieved with the RepRap last week: It can now print its own components. Not quite full self replication, in the sense of a second, fully assembled printer appearing end on out of a first, but an important step on the way there. I’d like to know how durable their components are.

After the jump there’s a written version of the keynote talk I gave at Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer on Saturday the 7th of June. You can find slides to go with it here, an embedded version with image credits here, links to most of the things I’m talking about here, the conference website here, and slides with transcript on the Pixel-Lab site.

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Here are the slides for the Game Culture Talk I did last Saturday at Under The Mask:

These are also mirrored with transcript on the Pixel-Lab site.

If the embed doesn’t work for you, here’s a link to the slide page.

Photo credits after the jump. Most images were used under creative commons, others I “stole”, some were taken by me, and most others were screenshots, etc. I also unfortunately lost the links for about 8 of the creative commons ones from Flickr - if you see your image here uncredited, let me know and I’ll fix it. The section on my social network is redacted from the slides, as I’m not sure all those people would want their images displayed *this* publicly.

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I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote at Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer. Provided everything goes to plan, this post will be automatically published while I’m giving the talk.

Slides and a written version of the talk can be found at the Pixel-Lab site or a few entires on in this blog. For now, after the jump there are links to most of the things mentioned:

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