The Economist on SL

An article in The Economist about Second Life, some excerpts I found interesting: Second Life, as Mr Yellowlees illustrates, is not a game. Admittedly, some residents—there were 747,263 as of late September, and the number is growing by about 20% every month—are there just for fun. They fly over is...

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Data mining and MMOG game design

In this Better Game Design through Data Mining feature, David Kennerly nicely describes how data mining can improve MMOG game design. He starts by describing the "why" Why Mine Data? Because players lie. Player feedback alone provides a poor diagnosis of game design. The picture a player's verbal f...

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Space and Place 10 years after

Dourish, P. 2006. Re-Space-ing Place: Place and Space Ten Years On. Proc. ACM Conf. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW 2006 (Banff, Alberta). This paper is a follow-up of the "Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems" by Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish that ha...

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Hakim Bey's spoken dub

Excerpts from "Final Enclosure": spoken words (on dub music) of Hakim Bey and french dub band Brain Damage (extract from the Spoken Dub Manifesto album): There’s nowhere to go! This is the final enclosure! You know science fiction novels about societies of the future which are completely contentles...

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Extremely playful game space

Via, this incredibly nice and real Donkey-Kong environment. Anyway, I can't find the name of who did this. Why do I blog this? The guy metaphorically overlayed the digital character but effect is compelling. Le Parkour at its best? Is it the equivalent of Survival Research Labs for Alternate Reali...

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A graphic language for touch-based interactions

Straight from the Mobile HCI workshop about " Mobile Interaction with the Real World " (see the proceedings), this paper: "A graphic language for touch-based interactions" by Timo Arnall. It actually investigates the visual link between informationand physical things, using cell phone to interact d...

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DA/VE (insect eye visor)

I like the DA/VE (insect eye visor) by Nikita Pashenkov da/ve was my first electronics project at the media lab. The starting idea was an image of an insect eye made out of disrete leds. The addition of fiberoptic elements transformed the display surface into a rudimentary visual matrix, which was ...

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Survival Research Labs and their motivations

The last issue of Stanford's Ambidextrous magazine features an interesting article about Survival Research Labs (heavy pdf): Survival Research Labs (SRL) has built its reputation on providing “the most dangerous shows on earth”—it is an art collective that specializes in staging performances, ...

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