Alien Architecture: The Building/s of Extra-terrestrial Species - Pre-twentieth Century is a Georgia Leigh McGregor's Honours Thesis from UTS. It deals with what kind of architecture is portrayed by pre-20th century "extra-terrestrial literature". It's basically a study of architectural imagination...
Space Time Play book
Space Time Play Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level, edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger (Birkhäuser/Springer Online bookstore). A big compendium of 140 writers, the book "explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of lud...
Sci-fi futures on hiatus
"What happened to the science-fiction future?" by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user's pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked: "Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve acc...
Social software and gaming
Having work recently on implications of web/web2.0 practices for the video game industry, I was interested in the relationships between social software and video games. Trying to have a quiet look into things (as usual), I tried to make a sort of typology of the different directions at stake here: ...
Lack of innovation in the game industry
It's been now 6 years that I am in the video game industry (I worked part time as a user experience and foresight researcher during my masters and Phd and am still doing that) and I have always been amazed by the lack of innovation. Part of the reasons for that are covered in are interestingly desc...
Sabbath, technological automation and control
My interest in "automation" and how technologies enables it through sensors and so-called computational "intelligence" has been attracted to a paper called "Sabbath Day Home Automation: “It’s Like Mixing Technology and Religion” by Allison Woodruff, Sally Augustin and Brooke Foucault. It basically ...
Digital/physical interlinkage
"Copier coller" in french means "Copy paste". Digital actions that spilled over the material world, seen in Lyon at lunchtime. ...
Audio interactions in Nintendo DS games
Beyond blowing at your DS to inflate bubbles in Nintendogs, other games make interesting uses of the microphones: Spectrobes: "dark energy creatures called the Krawl, and they're now invading your system. The only way to defeat them is to excavate and reawaken ancient creatures that are buried deep...
"A city is not a tree"
Read in A city is not a tree: "Each of these structures, then, is a tree. Each unit in each tree that I have described, moreover, is the fixed, unchanging residue of some system in the living city (just as a house is the residue of the interactions between the members of a family, their emotions an...
Level design and folk representations of the world
In lessons from first-person shooters, Robert Janelle curiously describes the quirks one can find in FPS: "Red Barrels Always Explode When Pierced By Bullets You Run Faster When Holding a Knife You Can Fit ANYTHING In Your Pocket Coloured Doors Are Locked Green Liquid is Harmful Helpful Items Are J...