Academia

AoIR8 Day1: Thursday morning: Academics, blogs, and blogging

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So, I’m at the Association of Internet Researchers conference up in Vancouver this week. There was a kick-off reception co-hosted by UW’s Communication Dept. and Information School. But I forgot to take photos of that. I met a ton of people, though. I’ll post a follow-up at the end of the conference about all the folks I’ve met.

For now, here’s my bed. (Also the photos from this set are mostly blurry… šŸ™ Aaron, hurry up and release a tool for consumers to unblur photos.)

bed.jpg

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Academia, Games Research, Life

Vancouver next week

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I’m going to the Association of Internet Researchers conference up in Vancouver next week (Oct 17-20).Ā  Any restaurants I should hit?Ā  Other than Chinatown, that is.Ā  šŸ™‚

I’ll try to live blog it.Ā  We’ll see…

Life

glTail.rb – realtime logfile visualization

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glTail.rb – realtime logfile visualization

This is a really neat way to visualize website hits.Ā  I woulda been all over it back when I was webmaster for OMSI…

Games Research

The Night Journey

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The Night Journey

Heard about this indie game that Bill Viola (a pretty well known video artist) has a hand in.Ā  I remember watching a video of his back in college… hmm about 13 years ago.Ā  Anyway, it was really a lot of nothing yet entrancing at the same time.Ā  Like watching fire.

Games Research

Tabula Rasa’s Ethical Parables – Kotaku

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Dev Diary: Tabula Rasa’s Ethical Parables – Kotaku

Kotaku shared the “essay” a Tabula Rasa dev wrote about the ethical decisions in the upcoming MMOG.Ā  I sure hope they do it well.Ā  Richard Garriot has a big name to live up to.Ā  I wonder if there is some sort of reputation system with monetary or loot rewards for ethical choices or if it is completely left to players to value intangibles.Ā  Let’s say an unethical choice gives you the best loot.Ā  How does someone instill a sense of value for the intangibles that make up for lesser loot?Ā  I suppose some sort of marker or flag or reputation system without tangible rewards might be enough…Ā  the community of players would need to be rich or big enough or whatever to support that sort of rep system.

See also previous posts on games and ethics and what MMOGs need.

Games Research, Life

Two cool new sites

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Indiegames.com

and

the Dirk Gently BBC Radio site

Games Research

A bunch of cool sites and news

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Pop Cosmopolitanism and the Terra Nova post

First off, Constance and her folk at the U of Wisc-Madison started a blog about learning in virtual worlds.Ā  Obviously, lots of cross-over with some of the stuff I’m trying to do.Ā  I wonder how they collect and analyze data and whether I should try to collaborate/share my data with them…

We also have in recent games news the announcement of Metaplace (via an email from Joey Lee and a post at Terra Nova), Raph Koster’s new big work.Ā  As far as I can tell, kind of like Second Life except that it is even more open and flexible for user generated content and that the tools for making content is specifically geared toward making games (so one would assume rules and goals factor in there somehow unlike with Second Life).Ā  Alice, as usual, has a nice write-up about Metaplace.

Lee Wilson posted his article about the Myths About Video Games In School.

And Richard Carey has a nice post about Games and Web 2.0.

Life

Twitter, Facebook, WordPress… OMG!

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Wordbook logoI’m messing around with Facebook and WordPress plugins today. I think I can get a feed from my self-hosted WordPress blog onto Facebook with a plugin called Wordbook!

Speaking of addons/plugins… it amazes me how many there are for Facebook. How do certain ones rise to the top? It’s even more Wild Westy than World of Warcraft addons because at least with WoW you could argue that the successful ones are the ones that most manage players’ cognitive load or whatever… With Facebook, it’s all so whimsical.

I have been contemplating getting rid of my MySpace account because of the spam friend invites I get (about 2 a week). But then someone out of the blue found me there and posted about Bill Winn.

Games

Bioshock: why is it so engaging?

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Robin kept asking me why I was playing Bioshock last week (after Grey had left and I repartitioned my hard drive and all that stuff so I could play it).

Well, the art was amazing (you can get a sense of it at the Cult of Rapture downloads section. Also scroll down the Updates page for download links for the soundtrack and the artbook.). The enemy AI was pretty good. Hacking is always cool (and done in Bioshock through a neat mini-game which is probably what caught Robin’s eye).

But at the same time, I didn’t really have a good answer for Robin… It was engaging but still felt a little lacking in something. I don’t know what. System Shock 2 and Deus Ex seemed at the time to be more fully engaging (though I probably can’t go back to those graphics these days, sadly). I wonder if it has to do with Bioshock being released on a console (Xbox 360) at the same time–whether that caused the team to “dumb down” the game mechanics at all?

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Games

Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition Review

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So, while I was uncharacteristically sick earlier this week I played a relatively unknown game called Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition by Cypron Studios. It is a strange mix between Western themes and Japanese style turn-based combat with a dose of space flight-sim style trading thrown in. Maybe a love child from the marriage of Betrayal at Krondor or Final Fantasy and Elite. But then cover it up with the always slightly odd aesthetics of Eastern European developers.

Ok, if that sounds rather esoteric, well… yeah. I’m guessing no one who actually reads my blog will have any idea what I just said. šŸ˜› Kudos if you do. For the rest of you (all 2 of you), I’ll try to tease that out a bit.

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sporadic ramblings of a gamer in academia