Earth: Mostly Harmless

Lunch at ETech

Lunch at ETech

Originally uploaded by BigRedBall.

This was the scene yesterday.

ETech notes from Day Two (so far)

ETech 2007 continues to roll along. We managed to catch up with Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage today - some nice collaborations could happen there. Also continued discussions with Jeff Parsons and Jerry Goldman on some OYEZ stuff that we’re planning to work on.

Two amazing things to note:

#1: The talk mentioned in the post below. It was very stimulating - and eminently relevant to teaching and learning. Well presented too.

#2: Watching Cory Doctorow compose the post below. Randall Munroe’s xkcd cartoon about him wasn’t inaccurate.

Raph Koster describes a “fun Amazon”:

Cory Doctorow:
Alice from the Wonderland blog is at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference and she blogged her extensive notes from Raph “Theory of Fun” Koster’s amazing talk on game design’s lessons for web applications. Raph took us through what Amazon would look like if it was designed to maximize fun. It was mind-blowing.

If people don’t care to come to it over and over, then it will fail.

It has to involve skill. You need to be able to do it better or worse. Purchasing on eBay is compelling - you figure out tricks! Sniping. Evaluation. In order to learn, you have to feel like you’re growing more competent.

Fun comes from a growth in competence.

As you come to accomplish it, there need to be variant challenges. Connecting to a CEO on LinkedIn vs. connecting to the pr dude = different.

What you want is for the game to acknowledge the fact that it’s tougher to get on Reed Hoffman’s linkedin rather than someone who sells ads.

Social media is about cooperation, but the core of games is competitive. As soon as you give people a ladder to climb, they’ll climb it.

Ratings. Metrics of contribution. Other people need to see it to measure against it.

Link

See also:
Koster’s amazing “What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?”
Koster’s keynote from Game Developers Conference
Areae: online world startup from “Theory of Fun” Koster
Mudflation: inflation in virtual worlds
Destiny of Games: what will become of fun?
Theory of Fun PDF - UPDATED
Theory of Fun: Understanding Comics for games
Civil liberties in gamespace
Star Wars Galaxies economy laid bare
What would an MMORPG about healing be like?

(Via BoingBoing).

ETech Sessions Day #1

ETech’s first day of sessions was today, and by all accounts seemed to go down well.

Major highlights for us included BBC über-hacker Tom Loosemore’s presentation, “No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral“; Numenta’s machine learning presentation and keynote; and rounded off by the very entertaining EFF Pioneer Awards.

The concentration of both money and brain power here is just amazing. This isn’t a big conference by any manner of means. There are perhaps four to six hundred attendees. But their names in aggregate make up a substantial portion of the modern technorati: Tim O’Reilly; Mitch Kapor; Jeff Hawkins; Bruce Schneier; Mark Cuban; Fred von Lohmann and the rest of the EFF crowd; and countless corporate representatives. It was announced at the EFF event that Mitch Kapor and his wife had made a donation to the organisation of $1m. There are a great many rich former hackers here, and the opulence of the surroundings (the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego) reflects the fact that this is (unfortunately) an elite conference.

So far though, the EFF event has been the highlight. Last night’s Mathemagics was entertaining (ever seen someone square a five-digit number in their head? Rain-main stuff), but hearing Bruce Schneier conceptualise the problem of “data shadows”, his term for the mountain of data that our everyday lives generate, was very enjoyable.

Also very surprising was how remarkably ill-informed Mark Cuban was about the DMCA and copyright protection issues online. He was clearly sent to play devil’s advocate to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF during their debate, but he’s a curious character who appears to display a dualist attitude to the EFF’s positions on these issues. On the one hand, he paid their way through the MGM vs. Grokster Supreme Court case, but on the other he’s also a Big Content owner without an obvious Internet strategy.

There were occasional groans from the audience when Cuban accused web hosts of “hiding and cowering” beneath the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. He appeared to be suggesting some sort of mandatory identity verification for web hosts in order to track down copyright infringers, but wasn’t happy with its logical consequence, which von Lohmann put to him, of limiting the right to free speech by making anonymity impossible. However, at least he’s engaging with new media technologies in some meaningful way.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the EFF’s acquiescence to the DMCA’s takedown system in the argument with Cuban, either. Von Lohmann seemed to be suggesting that the takedown notice procedure struck a balance of equity. It does, but just not the one that should be struck. As Walt Mossberg argued eloquently last week, the DMCA allows technology companies’ interests of self-preservation to be reconciled with content owners’ desire for enforcement - but there’s no provision for protecting the user from false claims and the like. Just see the Michael Crook Fox News affair.

About Time.

MPs probe ’surveillance society’

Quicksilver tip

Quicksilver has many uses. It’s the all-powerful grammatical navigation and manipulation utility for Mac OS X.

A nice trick is to allow you to run shell commands from within the QS window. You can do this in text mode (hit ‘ and type your commands, then select “Run A Text Command in Terminal”).

But you can also get access to any of your command-line utilities in a different way - by adding their directories to the QS catalogue.

Normally you can’t add ‘invisible’ folders to your custom catalogue (through the + icon in the Custom screen of the Catalogue), but QS lets you drag invisible folders into the Catalogue window directly.

So, if you want a quick vim window, add /usr/bin to your Catalogue, and you’ll be able to enter QS, hit ‘vi’, tab and select ‘Run in Terminal’. Note that ‘Run as Shell Script’ will fail in most cases unless it’s a command that exits cleanly.