musings of a social architect

A Being of Indescribable Power

Love this comic from Penny Arcade about the folly of levelling up ahead of your pals. I've been there :-)

Board Games Go Mobile

I noticed that Monopoly is the Top Java download for November, according to ELSPA. I'm heartened to see simple, popular family-oriented board games being translated to mobile phones - and continuing this trend, here comes Trivial Pursuit! This should be a very popular title - I'll look forward to following the download stats over the next few months.

iPod Groove Bag

I have this great 'background tunes to stimulate creativity' playlist that I've put together. Now, if I can only get my hands on this great-looking bag/boombox combo, I can jazz up my next business meeting :-)

Leapfrog's 'Magic Pen'

As reported in Popgadget - a magic pen from Leapfrog. I'd love to try this out.

Leapfrog, makers of the LeapPad and iQuest, will release a new type of interactive learning toy for kids in Fall 2005. The Fly Pentop Computer uses special "fly" paper for playing games, translating words, and other learning applications. The handwriting recognition will let you draw a calculator on the special paper, and the pen will audibly announce the answers when you perform a function. You could draw a piano and then play the keys. A word can be translated into various languages just by running the pen over it. There is also a journal application.

The Fly Pentop will cost about $99, but applications (Leapfrog calls it "paper software") will be available separately and run from $8 - $30. No word on how much the paper will cost.

From Rock Stardom to Street Theatre

I love this story about a "street theatre" percussion collective formed by a group of punk/rock drummers. Sounds like so much fun!

No Doubt drummer Adrian Young has a gig on January 20th -- at Chain Reaction in Anaheim, California -- but no idea what instrument he'll be playing. "It's going to be a little bit of a spontaneous thing," he says. "I could drive there and pull a hubcap off my Cadillac and bring a drumstick and be a participant."

Young will be performing as part of Bang!, a percussion collective that leans heavily on alternate forms of percussion crafted from recycled aluminum and plastic materials. Items used as instruments include oil drums, garbage cans, paint buckets, satellite dishes, fire hydrants, kitchenware and car parts. Bang! is the brainchild of the Start drummer Frank Zummo and got underway after an late-night, impromptu, all-percussion jam session. "My friend said, 'I want all of us to jam right now,' but there was only a DJ in the bar -- there was no band," says Zummo. "So he tells the staff we all wanna jam, and the staff brings out buckets, kegs, et cetera. They cut the music off, and we started playing to this packed bar for a half-hour. It was amazing! People went crazy!"

The members of Bang! -- which also includes Jamie Miller of Snot, Bobby Alt of S.T.U.N. and Adam Alt of Circus Minor -- pride themselves on being street performers, and the crew recently completed a four-month engagement at the Los Angeles-area amusement park Magic Mountain. They've also launched their own merchandise line, filmed an episode of the A&E network's reality show Ink'd and hope to open a street-performer-themed show in Las Vegas.

Data-driven Wallpaper

Now this is something I'd love to get my hands on: data-driven dyanmic wallpaper!.

The prototype analyzes audio from a café setting, accounting for various characteristics of the current activity level, such as the number of people speaking or the amount of background noise. The more the color diverts from the background, the noisier the café is. The number of 'dots' in each row represents the crowd, so that the more dots, the bigger the crowd was at that point. With a look at the projection, patrons can see how the activity level at the café has fluctuated over the week.

Too Much Gaming, Anyone?

I enjoyed this Slashdot post about what happens when your gaming reality blurs with your physical reality. This was in response to a Wired Story about what happens when you play a videogame for a BIT too long. CmdrTaco says:

For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work. Katamari Damacy has been a problem too. I'm fairly certain my car is large enough to pick up the railings on the overpass near my house. I'm even more certain that these thoughts are bad.

I've been there, man -- immersive experiences can really mess with your head. I remember when I first learned programming, back in the early 80s. After an intense 8-hour programming stint, I'd have vivid dreams that took place completely in code. I also remember playing Myst for the first time, and noticing that hazy afternoon how well-rendered and high-resolution the mountains looked in the distance. Sheesh :-)

Brand obsession vs. micro-brands

Great post on the Guardian Games Blog by Keith Stuart about the plethora of brand-obsessed games being released. Keith offers a glimmer or hope that we'll move beyond this by describing two fascinating new games:

1) Pippa Funnell: The Stud Farm Inheritance, an equestrian sim sponsored by the eponymous Olympic horse rider. You play as budding young starlet Estelle, who competes in a series of riding events, through ten different environments. Special feature: customizable horses.

2) Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, a graffiti sim set in an oppressive near-future distopia. Marc Ecko is a fashion pioneer and ex-graffiti artist who wants to ask the vital question, "What if graffiti could change the world?". To help him answer, you must take on the role of a young graffiti brat as he hones his tagging style, fights bad guys, sneaks into prime graffiti locations and eventually becomes an "All City King," the most reputable of all graffiti artists.

It's gratifying to see these types of titles being released. As Keith says:

Take your retro cop shows, your life-draining summer blockbusters, your idiot millionaire sportsmen. The future is the micro-brand, designed to expertly target a small group of dedicated enthusiasts. TV has fractured into a thousand channels, videogame licensing may well be going the same way.

Cameraphones continue to proliferate

More data about the proliferation of cameraphones. Some key findings:

* InfoTrends predicts that 860 million camera phones will be sold in 2009, comprising  89 percent of all handsets shipped.

*  12.5% of Japanese consumers with a camera phone indicate that it is their primary camera that they use most frequently, the highest percentage of any region.

*  Consumers in North America and China are taking about 20 pictures per month with their camera phones, compared to only 5 per month in Japan.

*  Consumers are printing around 8% to 10% of their camera phone pictures, except in Japan where they are only printing 1% or 2%. Image sharing rates are about twice that of printing rates.

Sims 2 Hacks

Gamasutra reports on an interesting development in the Sims 2 world - hacked objects that are downloaded via shared houses on the Sims website.

...players have found objects acting abnormally and certain expected mechanics of the game behaving strangely -- or not working at all. A magic espresso machine that fills all a Sim's Needs meters to the brim will appear out of nowhere, for instance, or social workers will stop intervening in poor parenting situations.

The cause of the confusion lies in the way the game inherits objects included in ready-to-use houses that players can upload and download from EA's Lot Exchange site.

If a player who's created or installed the hack in his or her own game contributes a house to the Exchange, anyone who downloads that house is unwittingly installing every hack its creator was using. Then any houses they upload to the lot will be similarly "infected," allowing the modifications to pass from player to player unknown.