Links for 9 February 2010

Postcards from South Africa

A round-up of some recent music discussions

Birmingham Royal Ballet choreographers

Dave Gaskarth in Design Week

New CiB Supporters for Jan 2010

Return of the mac

Fierce set for Platinum relaunch

CiB links for 3 February 2010

Those theatre pledge cards

A Look At 4INFO, The King Of SMS

What The Wii Did For Console Gaming, Glitch Wants To Do For MMOs. And It Just Might.

AOL Integrates Facebook Chat Into AIM

Meebo Eyes A New Market For Its Chat Bar: Online Retailers

Buzzkill: Google Won Disputed Googlebuzz.com Domain A Month Ago

OpenTable Seats 2 Million Diners Via Mobile Apps

Video: Sergey Brin On His Six Months Using Google Buzz, The China Situation, And More

FriendFeed (and Gmail) Founder’s Reaction To Google Buzz: “This Seems Vaguely Familiar”

Baidu Raises Revenue Forecasts In Wake Of Google’s Potential China Exit

Scrapblog’s New App Lets You Make Pretty Scrapbooks From Your Facebook Photos

Games Chatterbox Column Wednesday

The place to talk about games, and just about anything else too.

Wednesday's edition of Chatterbox

MAG for PS3 | Game review

PS3; £44.99; 16+; Sony/Zipper Interactive

So you've bought MAG, taken it home, removed it from the packaging, excitedly placed it in your PS3, and then you discover that it won't work unless your console's connected to the internet.

So you connect your console to the internet, wait more than half an hour for software updates to download and install, agree to a new set of terms and conditions, and then, once you've done all that, and then spent a couple of minutes customising your character, and then slogged through a rather buggy training mission, and THEN spent a good few hours getting to grips with the early levels, (which will mostly involving running around lost for a few minutes before getting shot in the head) – then, finally, you might start actually enjoying MAG. But not all that much.

As online shooters go, it's really nothing special. The battlegrounds, although huge, are all grey and brown industrial blah; the controls and weaponry are fine, but hold no surprises; and the whole concept seems to be a bit of an afterthought – it's the year 2025, and you're a mercenary with a private military company that's at war with some competing private military companies, and that's about it. MAG's sole USP is the sheer number of online players – up to 256 at one time. It's certainly impressive that the game runs so smoothly with so many participating, but unfortunately the huge number of people you're playing alongside is also MAG's biggest drawback.

The aim is to organise into efficient units, with more experienced players getting promoted to leadership roles, giving orders to eight-player squads or four-squad platoons. It's a nice idea but, as anyone with any experience of similar games will know, teamwork is never an easy thing to foster. Most players won't have headsets, and most will follow orders sporadically at best. Some might be entirely useless, or insufferably bossy, or just leave their mic open while they repeatedly scream at their 12-year-old brother to get out of the way of the TV. Others might just shoot their team-mates for a laugh.

MAG is really intended for serious gamers – those who'll think long and hard about their battle strategy, and who won't appreciate team-mates who don't take the game's objectives seriously enough. Unfortunately, most people probably won't be taking it all that seriously, and in the end everyone's just going to get vaguely annoyed with everyone else.

There is fun to be had with MAG. In many ways it's a perfectly serviceable, if unspectacular, online shooter, but for every one of its good points there's a niggling irritation. Zipper Interactive could perhaps have made a much better game had they kept in mind that size isn't everything.

Rating: 3/5

Can Ghost Recon: Future Soldier re-energise the squad-based shooter?

Ubisoft's well-received series is back, but can we return to the days of ordering men about?

Several years ago, you couldn't wander into your local game shop without being visually assaulted by rows of squad-based military shooters, all promising a highly strategic approach to, well, shooting people in the face with guns. It all started in the late nineties with two defining titles: Ubisoft's Rainbow Six and Hidden & Dangerous from Czech developer Illusion Softworks. Both featured small squads of differently skilled operatives, usually sneaking about carrying out fiddly missions behind enemy lines. Players were required to plot waypoints for their AI team-mates and work as a cohesive unit to overcome the mostly rather cerebral mission objectives.

After this came an influx of similar titles, which tweaked and refined the squad-based mechanics. Operation Flashpoint maintained the hardcore tactical approach while the likes of Conflict: Desert Storm and Brothers in Arms took a slightly more intuitive approach, often by grouping the AI soldiers into one controllable gang rather than demanding that you direct them all separately. Later, Ubisoft came to dominate the squad scene with its Ghost Recon and continuing Rainbow Six series'. It was very much the genre to be seen in for developers of shooting simulations.

However, in the wake of the military FPS onslaught captained by Call of Duty, squad-based action has drifted to the periphery. Seduced by the raw emotional immediacy and explosive action of Infinity Wars' creations, mainstream gamers have largely abandoned in-depth, in-the-field strategy, for a combination of heady narrative thrills and weapons management. In the CoD titles, your relationship with allies is fleeting and almost entirely out of your control, you're just subordinate vessels together, reacting to orders and doing your jobs. Maybe, amid the political and military complexity of the Iraq/Afghanistan era, that's all we want.

But now, Ubisoft has announced a new Ghost Recon title, so the squad-based game is back on...

Set for release this winter, there's very little information available yet about Future Soldier. Indeed, the publisher has conspicuously not mentioned which platforms the game will arrive on, although the fact that a multiplayer beta is being offered with the Xbox 360 version of Splinter Cell Conviction suggests that at least Microsoft's machine is on the list.

We know it'll be from the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter team and will feature all the usual high-tech weaponry and prototype gadgets, as well as plenty of multiplayer modes. That's about it. The press release says that the game will, "go beyond the core Ghost Recon franchise and deliver a fresh gameplay experience." Which could mean anything.

So what would be necessary to make squad-based games fashionable again? A substantial co-op mode seems an obvious start-point. I'd also suggest a highly scaleable squad management system, which like the driving set up in Gran Turismo or the Assistant Manager settings in Football Manager give you a sliding scale of direct responsibility for the mechanisms of interaction.

I'd also like to see mission designs that absolutely could not be completed without proper squad tactics. I loved GRAW 2, but often I used my team-members as glorified bullet fodder, shoving them into open spaces ahead of me to test the enemy response. What I certainly don't want is Operation Flashpoint's mind-numbing multiple-menu approach filled with formations, commands and tactical manoeuvres. But that's just me.

Importantly, there's no reason why a good squad game cannot match the gutsy, adrenaline-charged chaos of a decent lone soldier shooter - the co-op mode in Left 4 Dead, and the manic Army of Two: 40th Day, proved that. But what can Ubisoft do to really bring this genre bang up to date?

Six great mobile games of the month

Some miniature marvels to get you through the last of the winter weeks...

It's been a while since our last dip into mobile gaming, so here's a selection of recent iPhone and Java titles for your transportable gaming pleasure. I've been helped by Jon Mundy over on Pocket Gamer, who's suggested his own favourites from the last four weeks. You may have already sampled these, but just in case...

Oh and feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments section!

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (iPhone)
"The same open world crime masterpiece that graced the PSP and DS last year, but for a mere £5.99? It would be a crime not to," says Jon. And I concur - it's a mighty, you may even say, benchmark, App Store offering, a huge, engrossing adventure, that matches its Nintendo DS predecessor in almost every area. Almost? Well, as ever, the virtual d-pad can be fiddly, and driving (via left and right icons on one side of the screen, and accelerate and brake icons on the other) takes time to master and is never as intuitive as the DS system. But honestly, all those GTA-lite titles that have cluttered the iPhone release schedule for the last year have just been brutally gunned down.

Broken Sword: the Director's Cut (iPhone)
Revolution Software's lovingly produced remake of its hit PC adventure title adds a whole new sub-plot, lots of fresh cut-scenes (created by Dave "Watchmen" Gibbons no less) and a range of other tweaks, apparently boosting the play time by 20%. But setting aside the new additions, this is a rich and intriguing mystery with all the globetrotting, Knights Templar-themed action of a Dan Brown novel without the tortuous writing. Fans of the original will already have bought it - everyone else, especially those who've now completed the similarly excellent iPhone version of Monkey Island, should follow them as quickly as possible. Just beautiful.

Vancouver 2010 (Java)
No sports tournament is really complete without a button-mashing mobile tie-in, and Finnish developer Mr Goodliving is the master of the genre, previously responsible for the brilliant Playman Summer Games titles. "A fabulous selection of winter sports mini-games, each of which requires a perfect mix of skill and frenetic button mashing in order to attain those high scores," says Jon.

Jewel Quest 3 (Java)
Yes, it's another match three puzzler, but the Jewel Quest series has really honed this genre, engagingly mixing its main gameplay action with a swooping Indiana Jones-inspired narrative. "It shouldn't really work, but it does," says Jon, and I know what he means.

Battle Blasters (iPhone)
This handy little one-vs-one combat game from Toronto studio Little Guy Games pitches futuristic soldiers against each other in a small arena where they must fight to the death with guns and other weapons. The presentation and sardonic futuristic setting remind me of the Bitmap Brothers during their Chaos Engine pomp, which should be enough to intrigue some of our more mature readers. "The single player mode is fun enough, but Battle Blasters's true worth is in its novel single-handset multiplayer mode," says Jon. Yep, you can play against a pal using opposite ends of the screen - like one of those old table top coin-ops. Smashing.

Funkyball Worlds (iPhone)
Guide a ball through three futuristic landscapes, in this effective platformer, which combines the graphical style of LocoRoco (Funkyball developer Gamelion worked on the mobile conversion of Sony's cult gem) with challenging physics-based action. "By asking you to tilt to move your little ball, touching the screen to jump, Funkyball Worlds manages to feel remarkably fresh. Classic platforming, done the iPhone way," says Jon.

Games Chatterbox Column Tuesday

The place to talk about games, and just about anything else too.

Tuesday's edition of Chatterbox

Yet more Lego Star Wars

Lego Star Wars III due out this Autumn

It's almost hard to remember now but the original Lego Star Wars was a revelation. Cutesy yet cool, hugely playable and a genuine cross-generational experience. Five years on and the excitement is long gone, with numerous and increasingly formulaic Lego titles hitting the shelves since. Actually, Lego Indy had its moments and Lego Harry Potter looks quite promising but you can't help feeling that the Lego games are now very much focussed on the kids market rather than the nostalgia plus family appeal of the Star Wars days. The announcement that Lego Star Wars III will be released this Autumn does little to change this theory, with the game based on the Clone Wars TV show rather than, say, Han Solo's finest moments.

Tom Stone, director at the developer TT games is talking big:

LucasArts is an amazing partner, and working with them on the next iteration of the LEGO Star Wars series continues to be a great experience. The team at TT is working hard at making this simply the best LEGO game ever with all new gameplay and features never before seen in a LEGO game.

According to the release these "all new gameplay and features" include, "brand new battle modes, giving players unique, head-to-head combat and an upgraded level builder, allowing the creation of customised bases and in-game battlefields." Multiplayer seems to be even more key then. But as always the best Lego games have been the ones that have appealed to the both adults and the kids - can a games based on the Clone Wars show really do that?

Anyway, I have to ask. What film/book/whatever would you like to see get the Lego video game treatment? Personally I would love to see a Lego Sopranos, or maybe a Lego-ised version of a gaming brand. Lego Call of Duty or WoW maybe? Anyway, what do you think?

Bioshock 2 for PS3 and Xbox 360 | Game review

PS3/Xbox 360; £49.99; cert 18+; 2K Games

It is difficult to know where to start with a game this perfect, so let's go straight to the headline act: the storyline.

Much has been made of Bioshock 2's narrative, and for good reason: it's glorious. You could watch someone else playing and enjoy it as a movie. At its centre is the ideological battle between free-market individualist Andrew Ryan and proto-Stalinist collectivist Sofia Lamb, and this philosophical conflict affects everything you do. You are moving through the wasteland that they created, trying to find the girl you were charged with protecting, and as you progress you learn more about Ryan – who was the deus ex machina in the first game – and about Lamb, who is a new addition. There is an ongoing argument about whether games can be considered as literature, and this one presents by far the most compelling case yet for "yes".

The dilapidated underwater city of Rapture is rendered so lovingly that simply exploring it is a pleasure. The art deco, jazz-age-meets-Jules-Verne architecture is achingly beautiful, and the environment brims with thoughtful little touches. For example, Splicers (your main enemies, the grunts of Rapture) do not simply stand and wait for you to arrive; instead, they have their own lives, and conversations on which you can eavesdrop. At one point, I crept into a dilapidated bar to see two of them dancing together, one of many genuinely touching moments.

But Bioshock 2 isn't just a pretty face: there is a fundamentally excellent shooter here too, with some of the best combat dynamics in the business. Fans of the first game will understand the significance of playing as a Big Daddy. For the uninitiated, these are the titanic guardians of the vulnerable Little Sisters – half deep-sea diver, half behemoth killing machine. You start with a gigantic rock drill and an industrial-sized rivet gun as your primary weapons. Because you are so big, the combat has become necessarily much grander since the first game, but the combat mechanics are perfectly judged – satisfyingly meaty when you just want to go nuts, but allowing for all sorts of cunning alternatives as well.

There are larger, scarier enemies after you than Splicers, too, including the genuinely unsettling Big Sisters – spiky terrors that come after you when you free their diminutive siblings. Their screeches warn you of their approach, giving you time to prepare, setting traps and choosing the best defensive position from which to meet them. Similarly, Big Daddies do not attack until you attack them, allowing you to prepare yourself before doing battle. This ability to pick your fights is a welcome alternative to the standard boss-fight convention.

The game deserves its 18 rating; it doesn't pull any punches, gore-wise, and is genuinely scary at times – partly because the quality of the writing makes you very quickly invested in the characterisation. But it manages to be vastly rewarding intellectually as well as viscerally satisfying. Bioshock 2 is a modern classic; a 7-star computer game. More than that, it is a powerful answer to anyone that still thinks all computer games are mindless, childish or dull.

Rating: 5/5

Star Ocean: The Last Hope International for PS3 | Game review

PS3; £39.99; cert 12+; Square Enix

The Last Hope is a prequel set around the time of the original Star Ocean, the fourth instalment of the Star Ocean series. Set around 2090, just after the third world war, humanity voyages into the stars in search of a new home and a fresh start.

You take control of the main character, Edge Maverick – a member of the Space Reconnaissance Force (SRF) and crewman of the starship Calnus. It is SRF's maiden voyage and predictably enough you find yourself in a bit of trouble and end up marooned on an alien planet along with the rest of the squadron. Your first challenge is to scout around and see if it's safe, but it's not and you dispatch some familiar looking bugs. This impresses the captain and he sends you on your next mission to look for other survivors.

The Last Hope has a number of stunning environments and elegant cut scenes, but you would expect no less from Square Enix. It's just a shame that the actual gameplay lets it down. My first impression is that the character movement in and out of battle mode is not great and slightly clunky. Considering that there is a lot of running involved you would have hoped that the movement would have been a lot smoother, and it becomes frustrating at times.

The Last Hope sees the return of the real-time combat system that broke away from the classic turn-based RPG; in other words, the main difference is that there is no waiting between turns. You, your party members and enemies all fight at the same time. In battle you're able to toggle between other party members at any time, but when not in control, the characters' AI takes over. They stick to a battle plan set in the menu screen and this keeps them out of trouble. Toggling between characters and their abilities increase the overall speed of the battles. This is great fun and makes the game very entertaining. There is something satisfying about catching an angry wasp off guard with a swift but firm blindside attack.

Like previous Star Oceans and other RPGs, you can gain experience points after you have completed each battle. These scores improve your health points, mental points, attack, defence and most of your other abilities. There are other skills which can be acquired, not just to be used in battle mode, but are also useful for exploring worlds and creating and refining items. Battle mode includes some sweet combos, which are activated by the shoulder triggers. You can link basic attacks which adds more hits and racks up the damage and your skill points. This becomes quite an effective offence as it just about doubles your hit bonuses. You also receive board bonuses on winning battles or by certain objectives within battle, which improves your characters' abilities. One thing you might want to do is to turn off the in-battle voices, as they can become pretty annoying.

Throughout your quest you will come across various beautiful and detailed landscapes to explore. You can collect raw materials to use for refining and upgrading your weapons, armour and items. Along the way you will recruit new companions, who have their own special skills, in and out of battle. Along with the main storyline, there are side quests to keep you occupied. These can involve finding someone or something, or fighting a beast. So there is something to occupy you if you get bored smashing your way through battle after battle. 

After playing the game for a good few hours, I gradually started to see past the clunky character movement, dialogue, annoying camera angles and cut scenes, and began to play the game for real. For a while I was collecting, refining and going through the story, but the biggest problem for me was that I couldn't take the characters or the storyline seriously. There was just no drive to find out what happens next. I'd never played the other Star Ocean games, and wanted to become involved with it like I did when I first played Final Fantasy VII and VIII. Unfortunately, this didn't happen so I found myself just running round looking for fights, which became a bit repetitive.

Taking all of this into account, I feel that The Last Hope is a very average game; it's not a proper RPG and it's not a pure button basher. It's a shame because when I played on Final Fantasy I always wanted to be able to run around and fight my own way like you can in Star Ocean but, it's just not as good as I'd hoped. If you're new to the Star Ocean series you might be a little disappointed, but if you've been a fan for a while you might think differently. It was fun for a while, but it would really benefit from an online co-op mode. Back to Modern Warfare 2 it is, then.

Rating: 2/5

Star Trek Online for PC | Game review

PC; £34.99 (then £8.99 per month); cert 12+; Atari/Cryptic

After a protracted beta test, Star Trek Online finally makes it out of space dock. So is it set to live long and prosper?

Initial impressions are promising, with Cryptic's usual flair for deep characterisation allowing you to define just about every aspect of your character. You can choose your species (including human, Vulcan, Liberated Borg or your own customised alien breed), career, gender and a wide range of body and head shapes. Each of these has two preset attributes and two more to pick yourself. After this, it's straight down to business, familiarising yourself with moving around, using standard WASD controls and the right mouse button to look around.

Set a few decades after the plot of Star Trek Nemesis, the universe is once again at war, between the Federation and Klingons (your two playable factions) and the Borg back to its usual aggressive tendencies. Missions usually involve picking a star system, planet or mobile target which triggers the attached events. These can be solo, group or public, but they're always linear in nature and if you return to them once completed, exactly the same events will play out. Successful missions are rewarded with experience points, currency or equipment, with points to be spent either on yourself or your crew of which you can unlock up to three other bridge officers to command as you level up.

The trouble is, whether you choose space or planetary missions, combat lies at the heart of them all. On land, this involves stabbing the number keys or left mouse button, whereas from the Bridge the Spacebar fires phasers and CTRL launches torpedoes. As for interaction, hitting the F key takes care of almost every object and although there are plenty of NPCs hanging around, disappointingly few of them could be communicated with. Ultimately, STO's concentration on combat seems to overlook half the appeal of Star Trek. Where is the exploration, the moral dilemmas, the sense of the unexpected? Perhaps hiding in some later mission but certainly not adequately displayed in the bulk of the game.

In fairness, as this review was based on the beta test, we're missing the human factor which can make all the difference between a good and a doomed MMO. However, it's hard to see how even a server full of passionate Trekkers will compensate for the linear missions and the fact that, impressive though the space battles are, there's precious little to do other than fight.

Rating: 3/5

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat for PC | Game review

PC; £29.99; cert 16+; GSC/Koch

The Stalker series (of which this is the third instalment) has always had its standout moments counterbalanced by irritating lapses in translation and play testing. Call of Pripyat may not shed that inconsistency entirely, but it is the best of the bunch so far.

For a start, few games have made better use of lighting – including areas when only torchlight punctuates the total darkness, and not just the murky, semi-gloom so often used for shock-value alone. All this forces you to rely on your instincts in a way horror games have long understood but first-person shooters have largely neglected. Pripyat is one of the bleakest games you'll ever come across – both in the drab, fetid wastelands you traverse and the mood swings you experience when at last you see a friendly face in the distance, only to discover it will rip your limbs off at the first opportunity. Combine this with the underground levels swarming with mutants and the weather which, when it's not raining, will periodically sear your flesh to the bone, and light relief is certainly not a phrase you'll ever have cause to use.

Pripyat is also rock hard to play, both from your initial vulnerability to the harsh conditions until you pick up better suits, armour and weapons and the unnervingly accurate AI that sees enemies pick you off at distance or in total darkness, apparently without needing any of the gear you need to pull off the same tricks. Upgrades come in numerous forms, from the usual reactive healthpacks and weapons to pre-emptive measures that protect you against the environment. And although friendly human NPC's are relatively few, they always have something useful to contribute, whether it's information, weapon repairs or quests. On the downside, with so many of these sub-quests and such a featureless landscape, it's incredibly easy to get lost, which makes it tempting to simply abandon quests rather than push on to receive the often disappointing reward at the end. The single-player storyline, however, is stuffed with atmospheric set pieces, even if the game's ultimate location, the city of Pripyat, is something of a letdown after all the build up.

If you enjoyed Far Cry and want a nightmarish twist on the same kind of open-ended gameplay, then Call of Pripyat is definitely worth checking out. And even if you've tried the previous Stalker games and found them wanting (usually for technical rather than gameplay reasons) then this one more than justifies a second look.

Rating: 4/5

TV scrobbling and attention data – What’s Dale been watching?

I love it when people take control of their own attention data. Dale Lane has set up a lovely TV scrobbling service in his house, allowing him to capture and share what he watches on TV.

The overlap between rich information visualisations, attention data and television is fascinating. I’m not surprised to see Dale doing it based on his impressive track record with visualising home power consumption.

I’ve been running MeeTimer on my laptop for about 9 months now to spy on my own browsing habits (and had a stab at visualising that data last year), which I continue to find very useful. Did you know that in the past month I’ve spent an average 15 minutes visiting Gmail every day, but only 9 minutes using Google Reader? Nor did I.

Dale’s project brings the same sort of self-analysis to his TV viewing, and there are plenty of interesting discoveries. He cuts the data by channel, by time, by day, whether it was recorded or live and so on.

Publishing not only what he (and his family) watches, when and for how long is an astonishing amount of self-revelation and probably more than most people would be comfortable with. On the other hand, I now know that he’s watched the lastest Never Mind the Buzzcocks for less than 10 minutes and I now want to ask him about that. In the same way that sharing travel plans on Dopplr leads to more opportunities to meet with friends and hence more beer, sharing your viewing with your friends creates lots of conversation starters (useful for you), plus a chance for social discovery to uncover new gems his friends would otherwise have missed (useful for the broadcasters).

Be sure to also read his explanation of why he wanted this system, how it works, and future plans, which include thoughts on how to detect who is watching what.

For Dale, this is all made possible because his home entertainment system is also a computer. That and the fact that he’s a very talented hacker of course. For most people, this automatic capture would be a difficult thing to set up and it raises some interesting questions about the future for personal attention data. Should YouTube, iPlayer or 4oD provide me with a list of what I’ve watched, or is it up to me to capture that? Will Canvas allow users to make use of their own attention data?

Imagine if future set top boxes spat out convenient XML of exactly what we’d watched, so we could all decide ourselves what we do with our data. Wouldn’t that be useful?

Update: Tristan Ferne has done a similar (though more manual) thing for nearly all of his radio listening in 2009. Meanwhile, Matt Locke points out some work he commissioned in 2005 from live|work for the BBC about user data.

“The unanimous decision was that the BBC shouldn’t use personal data solely as a source for marketing information, but that they had a responsibility to enable the public, as individuals, to own, and get value from, the data trails we all leave behind”.

Hurrah. I also know I’m not the only person at the BBC who is excited about continuing to build on that kind of thinking.

BeeBCamp 3

The first BeeBCamp was about 14 months ago (here’s what it’s all about and here’s what happened at that first one).

Today’s was the third such event, and opened up not only to more non-BBC guests than the previous one, but also to people who don’t happen to work in London. We had live video link-ups with Manchester and throughout the day, one of the tables in London had remote guests from The North virtually joining us at the end of the table. It was a great way of bringing the two locations together for fun, creativity and getting to know our colleagues and guests. These events serve to get people together from across the BBC (and beyond), build our networks, let us spend a day away from the normal work and think a bit differently about things.

Why do this sort of thing? As Philip Trippenbach, who produced todays event, says,

It’s not just the number of brain cells you’ve got; it’s the connections between them, and the strength of those connections, that makes intelligence and creativity possible. The metaphor applies to an organization like the BBC, with its thousands of employees in different fields. … Ideas and solutions that may be obvious to one team might be revolutionary to another. The trick is to get people together to talk about those ideas.

What are people saying about it?…

• Paul Murphy (BBC Internet blog Editor) wrote that “the two sessions I attended, the first on social media and news stories and the second on story-telling online, were quite inspiring and served to remind me that there are a lot of very very smart people around the place.”
• Charlie Beckett wrote up Joanna Geary’s session on ‘moderating Comments: taming trolls and banning the bores‘ and Chris Thorpe’s on ‘mining value in the digital data dump‘.
• Andrew Bowden has blogged detailed notes about the sessions he attended.
• Philip Trippenbach wrote a wrap-up post summarising the day.

New podcast: Shift Run Stop

I’ve been working with Leila Johnston on a new thing. It’s a fortnightly podcast called Shift Run Stop and as she explains it’s “an ambient soundscape sort of production, an undulation of chatter and noise, ideas, games and food”. Editing it is a lot of fun, as are the weekly recording sessions.

It lives at shiftrunstop.co.uk and in iTunes for your subscribing pleasure. Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Playful ‘09

Playful 09 was great.

I really enjoyed Playful 08 so was delighted to be asked back. Last year I demoed my Rock Band MIDI guitar hack. This year, rather than extend my P5 Glove project into another MIDI instrument, I decided to set myself the challenge of talking about games and films. This was perhaps a little foolish, as I know only a little bit about games and barely anything about films. However, the audience were mercifully forgiving of my ill-prepared nonsense and laughed in all the right places.

In case you missed it, here are my slides, complete with dodgy audio recording of the talk.

Thankfully for all concerned, the rest of the day was much better. Here’s some of what happened:

• Leila Johnston talked about Enemy of Chaos (“something for the aging nerd market…”).
• Kareem Ettouney (Media Molecule Art Director) talked about being a servant rather than a director, and the importance of letting people pursue personal projects.
• Daniel Soltis talked about physical computing and games.
• Lucy Wurstlin talked about 4iP.
• Matt Locke interviewed Robin Burkinshaw about his amazing creation Alice and Kev: the story of being homeless in The Sims 3.
• James Bridle not only described but actually showed us a working version of MENACE, Donald Michie’s Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine, a physical computer made of 304 matchboxes. (A similar machine for ‘Go’ would be “about the size of the crab nebula”.) His excellent presentation is now online.
• Katy Lindemann showed us how fun and play drive change with some lovely examples (including Vinspired Voicebox, Chore Wars, Didget glucose monitor for DS, Fiat Eco:Drive, Thefuntheory (including the Piano Staircase, Bottle Bank Arcade Machine) and more.
• Tassos Stevens talked about cricket.
• Russell Davies made us agree the Four Square conventions for London (Parks: in, Outdoor markets: in, Small shops: out, Train stations: in, Tube stations: out, Supermarkets: out, Your home: out) and talked about and prototyped ‘barely games’. His presentation is here.
• Molly Range talked about the serious games scene in Scandanavia.
• Duncan Gough wondered what it would be like to play a game of ‘Kes’ (or ‘The Wire’…), and imagined fictive worlds which are somewhere between fantasy and casual games. He also pointed out the ‘the golden age of children’s story-telling’ (Press Gang, Running Scared) was at a time when broadcasters didn’t keep everything. Where’s the archive of those TV programmes? Lost forever?
• Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu talked about Bus-Tops.
• Rex Crowle did live scribblings on an Over Head Projetor and talked about selling his flock of sheep to buy an Amiga.
• Simon Oliver explained that designing games is hard but you can discover the fun through prototyping.
• Tim Wright talked about his Kidmapper project which involved following the route of Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped in real time.
• Chris O’Shea finished the day by sharing a portfolio of his work.

A great day with lots to take home and think about. Thanks to Toby Barnes and everyone else at Pixel-Lab for making Playful happen.

More people who have written about it: Suw Charman-Anderson, Leila Johnston, Howard Pull, Adam Davis, Lawrence Chiles, Libby Davy, Daniel Soltis, Priyanka Kanse, Melinda Seckington and more, plus the official record: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

‘Enemy of Chaos’ walkthrough

Spoiler alert: when viewed large, this is a complete map and walkthrough of the wonderfully geeky ‘choose your own adventure‘ meets ‘Fighting Fantasy‘ style interactive book/game, Enemy of Chaos by Leila Johnston.

You might have read her previous book, How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People. More recently, Leila’s reading from Enemy of Chaos was one of the forty very interesting things that happened at Interesting 2009. If you were foolish enough to miss that, I hope you’ve at least read Cory Doctorow’s review of the book on Boing Boing.

Earlier this week, Leila was kind enough to give me a copy. I loved it, and within a day I’d decided I absolutely needed to see what a map of every possible path through the book would look like.

I made this using the `dot` renderer from GraphViz, which does all the hard work of drawing the graph and laying it out. The source file only took about 20 minutes to create. I quickly flicked through the book from beginning to end, documenting all the ‘now turn to page x’ choices like so:

digraph g { node [ shape = plaintext, fontname = Tahoma ] 1 -> 166 1 -> 37 23 -> 201 24 -> 48 24 -> 178 31 -> 110 31 -> 191 // ... (etc)}

Viewed as a graph, it also acts a walkthrough, revealing the dead ends and the various paths to the final page. It also highlights a few interesting things about the structure:

• A six page loop between pages 201 and 23.
• A glitch which means page 227 can’t ever be reached except by flicking randomly to it; it’s a reverse dead-end.
• There are quite a few ways to reach the end, but a lot more ways not to. It’s very hard to win, and gets increasingly hard towards the end.

Below is the same map, laid out horizontally. As Leila points out, it “looks like a big Romulan ship”, which is quite appropriate for what must be one of the geekiest books of the year.

Recent Reading

Here’s what I read in September:

• The Pythons’ Autobiography By The Pythons, Monty Python and Bob McCabe – pulled together by McCabe with care and loving attention to detail. Wonderful to see the personalities revealed via the history, the disagreements and differing perspectives. A rare thing: a top notch autobiography.
• The Other Hand, Chris Cleave – the first book I’ve read for a while which I didn’t want to put down. I was instantly hooked (although not, I should mention, but the rather vomitous introduction by the editor) and wanted to eat it all in one go. I then lent it to my wife, who also, one she’d started, read it one day and had to finish it before she went to sleep. ‘Page turner’ isn’t the right term for it, but it begs to be finished and the characters are fascinating, three-dimensional and ambiguous as they get.
• Incendiary, Chris Cleave – While it doesn’t quite match The Other Hand, it’s still an intriguing read which makes some interesting (if sometimes blunt) political points. Not quite a post-9/11 Nineteen Eighty-Four, but worth picking up. I will be keeping an eye out for more stuff by Cleave. I hope he gets some film deals too.
• Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell – Meh. As always with Gladwell, there are a few central point here which can be made quickly, but he manages to labour them into pages of anecdote strews essays without the sense of any real underlying purpose. The essays that are interesting enough, but fail to really make you care. A bit better than Blink. (How’s that for faint praise?)
• If it Bleeds, Duncan Campbell – Double meh. Laboured in so many ways. If you like good crime fiction you’ll probably want to avoid it. I wondered, more than once, how many times Campbell was going to use the is-that-my-heart-oh-no-it’s-just-my-mobile-phone-going-off thing.
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller – Yay, yay and twice yay. I’d forgotten how good Heller is, at his best. This is it.

P5 Glove – Rock Paper Scissors and other fun

The P5 Glove is a consumer wired glove (tactile but not haptic). I bought one boxed as-new on eBay a while ago for not very much, and I’m glad I did as they now seem to be increasingly hard (and expensive) to get hold of.

It contains five analog bend sensors, 3 buttons plus in theory x, y and z coordinates and yaw, pitch and roll (it emits IR which is picked up by a big USB IR tower so it knows where your hand is in space).

Here’s the P5 Glove intro movie…

I say in theory because while the p5osc Mac drivers handle the bend sensors very well the x/y/z output is jittery and yaw/pitch/roll sadly non-existent.

I’ve been experimenting with bridging the outputs for the buttons, fingers and thumb into MIDI custom controls so that I mess around with them in ControllerMate. Here’s a demo of a simple setup which detects whether each digit is straight or bent, and uses that to determine whether your hand is describing a rock, paper or scissors shape. For now, it just displays ‘Rock’, ‘Paper’ or ‘Scissors’ in large type on the screen but it would be pretty straightforward to turn this into a simple game.

P5 Glove – MIDI Rock Paper Scissors from rooreynolds on Vimeo.

Here’s the ControllerMate patch I made to do it (click through for the annotated version on Flickr).

Lots more fun to be had here with virtual pianos and guitar strings too; arpeggiating the MIDI guitar, for example.

Too Thine Own Self Be True – Keep Wire In Correct Groove, Man

Conway Hall has a couple of iconic photographs that everyone seems to take…

Interesting 2009 – forty even more interesting things

As is becoming traditional (2007, 2008), I’ve made a very brief list of what happened at this year’s Interesting

1. Tom Loosemore on the race to sail faster than 50 knots.
2. Jessica Greenwood on why the least interesting things about sport is the score (football, with all its attendant drama, is a $500B industry).
3. Robert Brook spoke on being a gentleman (by birth, costume or behaviour).
4. Toby Barnes on a brief history of cheating in video-games (cheating, when it involves other people, is wrong).
5. Leila Johnston read some snippets from her very funny book, ‘The Enemy of Chaos‘
6. Cait Hurley talked about Arthur Jefferson (Stan Laurel’s dad and an awesome guy).
7. Alby Reid told us that everything we knew about nuclear power was wrong (How many people died as a result of Chernobyl? 56.)
8. Katy Lindemann enthused about robots (Tweenbots are especially adorable).
9. The very cute Bubblino made an appearance on stage (blowing bubbles across the stage every time ‘interesting’ was mentioned on twitter).
10. Dominic Tinley explained why we don’t see the colour violet on our computers and cameras, as well as what Radio 4 would look like if we could see sound.
11. Andy Huntington took us on a tour of keyboard instruments and explained ‘equal temperament’.
12. Alice Taylor talked about ‘merchants vs craftants’ (give some love back to the crafters).
13. Tim Duckett kindly taught us morse code in 10 minutes. For example: Z = Zinc Zoo kee-per = - – . .
14. Michal Migurski talked about maps and paper and a much-photocopied intersection map of San Francisco (paper wiki).
15. Josie Fraser talked about psychological violence in UK 1970s and 80s girls comics (’it can be dangerous to mock a monkey’).
16. Dan Maier talked about Sir Francis Galton (I now really want to read Galton’s book ‘The Art of Travel‘, and to a lesser extent his thoughts on ‘Africa for the Chinese’ (”one of the 5 most racist things I’ve ever read”, according to Dan) and ‘Arithmetic by Smell‘).
17. Asi Sharabi showed us 6-8 year old children’s ideas of interestingness (which centered around technology, friends, motors and animals).
18. Meg Pickard taught us about drinking rituals and associated customs (toast, cheers, your good health, chin chin, rule of thumb).
19. Alex Deschamps-Sonsino got us to make a very complicated origami box.
20. Tuur Van Balen talked about yoghurt and DNA synthesis (”I’ve never done bio-technology under such time pressure!”)
21. Jon Gisby taught us how to conduct a symphony orchestra (”It’s like riding a horse at speed; fun, but with a significant risk of abject and public failure”).
22. Jessica Bigarel discussed, and beautifully presented, her meta meta data data (capturing each flight of stairs travelled up or down was “an arduous dataset and it was very disruptive to my life”).
23. Craig Smith talked about his dad (”he sharpens a drill bit better than any man in Huddersfield”) and showed us the types of water wheels (under shot, breast shot, over shot and pitch back).
24. Tom Fishburne talked about innovation and cartoons.
25. Anab Jain talked about her Indian superpowers.
26. Naomi Alderman talked about greek tragedy and goats.
27. Gavin Bell talked about the writing of his new ‘Social Web Applications’ book (wifi is a blessing and a curse).
28. Emma Marsland shared the ponies she has loved, real and imagined, from since 1970
29. Nick Hand shared his ongoing journey around the coast of mainland Britain (5000 miles in 100 days).
30. We heard about the ‘BIL‘ unconference in Oxford next summer (BIL is to TED as Bar camp is to Foo camp).
31. Mark Earls and his Darwinian Display Team demonstrated random drift.
32. Robert Thomas demonstrated RjDj (’Music as Software’).
33. Gem Spear talked about electric trains and underground creeks (GM’s inglorious part in killing off the inter-urban railway systems in the US, and a rather nice discussion of running surface runoff water through gardens rather then through underground culverts).
34. Paul Hammond showed us how to win at Monopoly (if you can buy it, buy it; trade up to a full colour group asap; go for the oranges (stats!); unless it’s early in the game, stay in jail; create a housing shortage; don’t play house rules, as they’ll only make the game take too long; don’t play it at all, it’s a rubbish game. Instead, play German board games, which are not all German and not all board games).
35. David Smith gave a touching and powerful talk about teaching (you can’t teach children well unless you love children).
36. Richard Reynolds mentioned his Guerilla Gardening book and told a lovely story about planting sunflowers opposite Parliament.
37. We watched Jim Le Fevre’s beautiful astrotagging film.
38. Claire Margetts told us about the ‘Do’ lectures.
39. Matt Ward showed us why frivolity is important by showing his plans for watching a bullet reach the top of its trajectory (”Understanding comes through doing”).
40. Dan Germain talked about sunsets (”basically, when the sun disappears”, by which time it has apparently already happened) and asked why we persist in taking bad photos of them, pondering whether it’s because they remind us of death).

Another great job from Russell. Three years in a row, Interesting continues to live up to its name.

EZi Entertainment Zone

Simon Lumb recently spotted an amazing(ly bad) looking games console in a motorway service station which, shall we say, borrows heavily from the design of of the Wii.

I couldn’t resist trying it for myself, and picked one up on eBay for a little bit less than £20 including delivery. Quite a bit less than the RRP you’ll see quoted in some places online. A games console, complete with 87 games, for £20. Bargain. Right? Well, almost.

Observations:

• The graphics are sub-SNES quality and many of the games are barely playable. The knock-off design is laughable and the bargain basement price reveals itself at every opportunity.
• The two stick controllers each include four red flashing lights at the bottom, a-la the blue lights on the Wiimote, but these ones don’t do anything except flash irritatingly and constantly.
• The stick controllers do include a very crude motion control. Certainly nothing like the Wiimote of course, but simply a basic (and flaky) movement detection, presumably through something like a mercury tilt switch. It just about works for the Tennis and Pingpong games but it it painful in the extreme for any of the others, especially baseball and golf where it’s practically unusable. You can turn ’sport’ mode off to disable the motion control and use the buttons instead (or just use the other game controller which you only get one of but is a much better bet for most of the games).

I have not tried all 87 games yet, but here are some highlights

Tennis

Bowling

Little Indian

While many of the other games I’ve tried so far have been predictably awful, other have turned out to be quite playable in a retro generation-before-last sort of way. Especially with the volume muted. The quality of the (18) games on the sports cartridge, while still quite mixed, is markedly higher than the (69) games on the arcade cartridge.

Some of the names are amazing. How can you not love a console that ships with titles including Cross Strert, Assart, Aimless, Polk, Grot Kid, Knocking, Ramming, Fish Journey and Girl.

I’ll try to continue to capture and review more of the games in detail. Rather than do it here, I’ve started an owners wiki where I’ve begun to document the EZi’s various games and hardware. It already includes the photos and videos used above, plus Pingpong, Boxing and others, and I’m sure it will grow as I (and others?) add more. I do hope anyone else who is brave/mad/foolish enough to buy an EZi Entertainment Zone will join me there.