Web Games in Meatspace

Culture-jamming, Internet - a series of tubes, memes, Professor Cram's Fun Lab, Situationism, Technology, , , , , ,

In my last post, I talked about two games which use a very large, dynamic board: the internet. By using the internet as a gamespace, players invent new uses for websites. The playspace is dynamic, always changing. Adaptive, creative strategies win out. Participation leads to exploration.

I have to confess I’ve been pretty plugged into PMOG in the last few days. I’ve enjoyed seeing which websites have been trapped or treasure’d by other players. And I’ve gone on some missions which have taken me to some pretty interesting and unusual spots on the web. But something’s still missing. I’m still anchored here to my computer, wishing these adventures were a bit more tangible. Such is the plight of any gamer whose characters lead more exciting lives than their player. But that’s the clue – PMOG and Wiki Paths blur the lines between game activity and non-game activity by creating a game that overlaps traditional web usage. Why not explore this border in the real world? Let’s imagine some game events which could happen if these passively-multiplayer games took place in 3D.

Several technologies already exist which allow digital interactivity in meatspace. It’s just that nobody’s set up a game (that I ‘ve heard of) which brings all of these elements together. GPS, voice-over-ip, and digital cameras could easily be blended together to transform urban areas into playspaces.

Imagine a game that you play as you make your way through the real world. As you pass an intersection, you receive a text message that there is a chest nearby. You click the link for more info, and see a picture of a nearby mailbox. You walk over to the mailbox and press a button on your phone to collect the loot.

Or maybe I leave a mine along a  busy street. A few hours later, another player walking down the same street is informed that he’s triggered a mine and has lost 10 points. If I respond when it happens, I have the opportunity to send a 15-second taunt via voip.

Maybe I’m hanging out at the library, looking for a specific book whose cover has a scavenger-hunt sticker. If I snap a picture of the sticker, I get to hear the next clue. While I’m searching for the book, I bump into another player who is on the same scavenger hunt mission. We agree to cooperate to find the next clues, and spend the rest of the afternoon navigating the city together. Suddenly the game experience has created a real-world experience. Relationships form. Networks grow. The line between the digital and real worlds has been blurred.

Of course, this presents some new problems. There’s an alchemy involved in meeting strangers, and not all formulas work. I imagine the ten year old player who ends up in a party with drunken teenagers, or the sociopath who lures players into isolated situations to meet them. The stakes of befriending a dangerous person are much higher in the real world than they are on, say, facebook. Controls could be set up to filter out certain players – like maybe you only want to play with other 20 somethings, or only people who go to your college. Maybe there’d be a way to tag problem users so your friends can avoid them.

I imagine puzzles that can only be solved by getting together a party of people. Maybe there’s a spot on a college campus which has treasure buried under it. To find the spot, you’ll need to get together someone who specializes in geocaching (to find the spot), logic problems (to pick the lock on the chest). Maybe you need to bring together certain character classes, sort of like how in fantasy games, a well rounded party needs at least a healer and a tank. When the chest is finally dug up, you snap a pic of your group for a few bonus points and they split the treasure. The person who planted the chest is sent the picture of the groundbreaking discovery.

Faster paced games would be possible too. Maybe I could put treasure in one room on the top floor, and then put killer landmines all over the rest of the building. When you hit a landmine, you’d have to go back outside and push a button to be resurrected. You’d have to use trial and error, teamwork, or creative problem solving to bypass the mines and grab the chest. Teams of players could compete to race to the chest. Or maybe two teams would race each other to the chest, or fight each other in capture-the-flag style matches. Every building, every park, every urban center lends itself to different strategies and tactics. The game is wrapped around real-world geography and therefore real-world problem solving is needed to accomplish game tasks.

One day we’ll be able to play this exciting game, or maybe one like it. The technology already exists and it’s just a matter of time before someone develops the game. And then we’ll be on our way to really having the fabulous, action packed adventures our characters so frequently do.

Games that use the Internet as a Board

Internet - a series of tubes, Professor Cram's Fun Lab, review, Spam, Technology, , , , , ,

As a kid, I used to draw board games on the sidewalk. I’d write “go back two spaces”, “lose a turn” and the like on the sidewalk squares in chalk. The neighborhood kids would grab dice and race each other around the block.I had psychedelically transformed my neighborhood into a board, and people into pieces on it.

Years later, in college, I created a campuswide 24/7 game, called “Tales of the Dreaming”, where the players played the roles of creatures living in a dream world. The people on campus who weren’t playing — or rather, people who didn’t think they were playing — were figured to be people just going about their dreams, oblivious to the battles and stories and scavenger hunts going on right below their noses. At any time you wanted to go to the Dreaming, you could slip on an arm band and be your character in this parallel community.

I’m intrigued by blurring this boundary between games and reality. That’s why I was delighted to discover two games which use the internet as their “board”. Both are firefox plugins, and very easy to learn.

The Great Link Race
The Great Link Race

The first is WikiPaths, a “Wikipedia-based scavenger hunt game“. After you install the plugin, when you go to the wikipedia entry for Path, you’ll see a start button. Click it, and you’ll be taken to a random page. Another random page will be displayed in the bottom right corner of your screen. Your goal is to navigate from one page to the other in the shortest number of clicks possible.

Since the pages are random, there’s no way to really know if you did “well”. It takes a bit of strategy to figure out how you’ll navigate from, say, an obscure hair metal band, to a public school in india. The name is a bit misleading though because it’s not really a “race” – there’s no way to record your score or compete with other racers. Regardless, Wiki Paths’ reappropriates wikipedia as a game board.

PMOG

The second game is called PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game.  This game takes your normal web browsing behavior and plugs it into a few game feedback loops. Every time you view a unique URL, you get a few points. You can then spend those points on tools, which allow you to interact with other players. You can set a mine on a page, and the next player to view it will trip it, causing their browser to shake and a few points to be lost. You can also leave crates, which give players goodies for finding them. As you go through the web, messages will pop up when you encounter something that another player has left. It’ll also notify you when another player trips your mine, and give you the opportunity to taunt them.

Since you accumulate points just for using forums, social networking sites, reading blogs, porning around, whatever, you’ll be racking up points all the time. It feels a bit like Progress Quest in that you’re effortlessly and passively accumulating resources all the time. This raises a few privacy issues of course, namely that when the plugin is turned on, pmog.com is recording what sites you view. But they swear on a stack of bibles they won’t hose you (intentionally) for participating.

There’s also missions, guided tours of a section of the internet. The mission creator will string together 4 or more websites around a theme, and write about a paragraph about each site. If you’re not interested, you can just click through to the end of the mission, but if something along the track piques your interest, you can jump off and explore to your heart’s content before you continue. Missions often take you to some pretty interesting places which you may not have encountered in your regular web travels. It’s in this way that PMOG rewards you for exploring the web, and checking out stuff outside your normal circles.

Creative gamers are reappropriating the web, transforming it into a playground. New behaviors are emerging out of this digital morass. Wikipaths has forged a new usage for wikipedia, while PMOG blurs the line between game play and non play. That’s the Golden Secret, some say, transforming Life into the Art of Playing Games.

Burn baby burn

20 minutes in the future, Articles by others, Black Swan, current affairs, Fascism, religion, society, Tactical Polyvalence

Increasing complex systems have a tendency to collapse in more catastrophic ways.  Hence, when George Soros and Nassim Nicholas Taleb say that this economic crisis will be worse than the Great Depression, I am not surprised at their appraisal.

However, what does a Depression actually mean, in our current socio-political economic condition?  No doubt, circumstances across those three areas of analysis do differ from the 1930s and so we have to ask ourselves, what does that mean for us?  The only viable mass movements of the moment seem to be, at least in the American contexts, religious ones.  In the UK, I don’t think even that is possible.  While I think the worries about fascism, at least in parts of the Third World, are valid, platforms explicit about such a program are rejected, and not just because of the negative connotations of such labels.

And how will the internet affect such a Depression, as well?  Will we see spontaneous protests, or even peaceful urban takedowns, orchestrated via Facebook and Twitter?  Or will the net become a talking shop, the modern day equivalent of a soapbox, where gripes and despair about our current conditon are aired but little else is actually done?

Obviously, my thoughts turn to recent graduates and attempts to get jobs, for personal reasons.  Will unemployment and the lack of prospects lead to, as it did in Italy in the 60s, a militant intellectual movement who felt they had more in common with the proletariat than their (usually) middle class backgrounds?  Or could it breed a new class of cosmopolitan guerrilla entrepreneur, an anti-Davos man if you will.

I could really do with a team of sociologists and cultural theorists right now.

Just a friendly reminder

Law and Disorder, politics, Propaganda, Tactical Polyvalence, terrorism, Tin-foil hats

Guantanamo and Camp X-Ray do not equal all American operated black sites

Link

The Justice Department ruled that some 600 so-called enemy combatants at Bagram have no constitutional rights.

As I have suggested before, the Bush administration’s great crime was not its rampant criminality and disregard for others, it was that all this was obvious, and they broke the fourth wall of politics with great regularity.  Obama’s is much superior at playing the game while keeping the pretence up.  I still suspect the new crew is not as criminal as Bush, but, well…

Musings on Suriving a Sword Fight

CRAZY PREPARED

Why the FUCK are you in a sword fight?

As antiquated weapons, replaced mostly by handguns in our current age, we see very little of swords, or any blade longer than a meter in any widespread use, offensive or otherwise. The closest analogue that most people of this age will use and keep around as a common tool is a kitchen knife or a machete. More traditionally styled swords are still found in ceremonial roles, as decorations, or for practicing martial arts / historical recreation (which may be the most functional of the three examples.) There have been cases of people fending off robbers or assaulting others with such pieces, but these are isolated cases. For simplicity and basic concept, we’ll consider a machete length blade the most likely you are to come across or use. This information applies the same across most single handed swords designed to chop effectively. These could include falchion, grossmesser, katzbalger, cleavers, long kitchen knives, wood / plant cutting tools, a stick, pipe, or even a piece of rebar. Rapiers, two handed swords, or katana are different animals, and special cases, so won’t be discussed yet.

To examine the basic idea, a sword fight would imply some form of duel. Both opponents, for whatever reason, have agreed to fight each other with similar weaponry. Outside of such “controlled” circumstance, two people rarely meet in a mugging or home invasion, pull long blades and square off. This is about as anomalous and odd a circumstance as the mythical “knife fight”. More likely two people will meet under such circumstance, and one of them has such a tool as their intended weapon, or one is close by and is grabbed as an available weapon. When a fight with matched weapons and supposedly even terms does occur, it’s often a very touch, squirrelly occasion. If for some bizarre reason you’re forced into a ritualized duel, look for ways out of it other than winning by the sword. Likely your opponent will have people there who will kill you if you win, so a way out other than fighting may be best.

No advice or pointers will make you a master swordsman; it takes practice, study and improvisation, like with any art, but a few basic ideas help make it less daunting.

1. SWING. Can you swing a stick? Answer yes if you can move your arm; trust your author on this. Good, in THEORY, this means you can use a sword. A sword is a metal bar with an edge, but don’t let the edge distract you. It will cause pain or damage no mater WHAT side you hit with.

2. MOVE. Do not try to stand in one place and act like a chef chopping meat. You need to move, circle fade in and out on your opponent. Even a stick is only good at a certain distance from your arm to your target, so while you play kung – fu with the hands, you need to play chess with your feet to get your opponent into your optimal striking range, an keeping yourself clear of your opponent’s.

3. You can hit with more than one part of that thing. Though frowned upon by more rigid “honorable” forms of fighting, smashing with the base of the handle, punching, grabbing the blade and using the sword like a short staff, or abandoning the sword to grapple are ALL valid techniques. These can shorten your effective striking range almost instantly, and can catch many opponents off guard.

4. Don’t block when you can avoid. This will help you learn to MOVE in a hurry.

5. Keep your defense / offense ratio balanced. Assuming matched weapons you don’t need to attack with suicidal abandon. Keep offensive, but don’t commit heavily, and hit targets of opportunity. If you can thrust with the blade you have, use it for quick jabs as distraction.

6. Go for more than the kill shots. Strikes at arms, legs, hands, or face are great for distracting and keeping your opponent back. They won’t rush at you so quick if you can spank or gash the first appendage to come into range.

For more specific development, look around for local Renaissance sword “Guilds”, a new fad in martial arts, historical recreation groups, or martial arts studios that train in stick fighting (Filipino martial arts specifically, have a VERY good curriculum on the subject)

Good luck otherwise. While training specifically for the possibility of a sword fight on the street is fairly useless in this time period, the training and general fitness of martial arts is ALWAYS a good thing, and you can meet some truly interesting folks through it.

John Frusciante’s new album

music, Youtube

Is really good.  No, really good.  Might even be better than To Record Only Water for Ten Days, which I always thought was his best solo work.  It takes a bit to get into it, but when I did, I found myself really enjoying it. That’s all, no review or anything else, just a recommendation as to what I’m digging currently.  Via Youtube, here is the track Central.

Charles Darwin: Great Biologist, or GREATEST Biologist?

Science, society

This was originally written for the Darwin Day celebration on the 12th. Subsequently I was urged to put it on the blog, and so I have.

Today is the 200th aniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday, and this year is the 150th aniversary of the first edition of On the Origin of Species.

For many people, its easy to write Darwin off as a nobody who just happened to stumble on to the greatest revolution the biological sciences have ever seen, to write him as a clergyman who couldn’t do anything, a wannabe doctor that couldn’t stand the sight of blood right so he took a voyage on a ship named after a breed of dog and stared at some finches for a while, thus having a eureka moment.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Darwin was not just some guy who by chance founded evolutionary biology, he was a biological genius. He was the Issac Newton of the biological sciences. Darwin knew everything that had been written about biology back then. He was an equal to the best of the best in geology, botany and ornithology. He was a world expert on coral reefs, bees, beetles, carnivorous plants, pigeons, earthworms, orchids, and especially, ESPECIALLY, he was the world expert on barnacles. He was also a prolific writer, having many publications and over 20000 non published papers. Darwin also had an excellent memory and the sort of mind that found the perfect question to ask. This, all this, from a non academic who dropped out of medical school from the fear of blood, a failed clergyman, and a person who suffered from sickness (possibly chaggas disease) through out the the later portion of his life, allowing him to be active no more than 2-3 hours a day.

When you read On the Origin of Species carefully (first edition or WAYSA?), the genius of this person is so obvious. There is hardly a page where he does not anticipate some future aspect of biology or ecology, many of those 100 years ahead of his time. He does it so casually too, throwing short summaries of experiments he conducted which are so profound yet he gives so little time to. In a page he discovers mutualism, or anticipates the concept of a niche, or island biogeography, or population models. He was SO CLOSE to grasping the mechanism of inheritance; you can see him just out of reach throughout the text, and he died before he could discover Mendel’s work on peas and allele crossing.

So, as a biologist this is a great day for a great human, the greatest biologist, the founder of so many sciences, but I think it is also a day for all people to remember and recall our biology, our ancestry, the history of our planet and the processes of life which abound everywhere.

You see, even if he induced natural selection from four obvious observable facts (summary: inheritable variation, overproduction of offspring and selective deaths) of nature (which he figured out in part by studying Malthus more than his grandfather, Lamarck*, Lyell, or anyone else), HE FREAKIN INDUCED NATURAL SELECTION. Okay? And not only did he induce it he had the REAMS OF EVIDENCE to back it up. He spends one chapter in On the Origin actually laying out Natural Selection and spends the rest of the book lining, nay, PILING up evidence for his claim. Wallace, on the other hand, wrote a 6 page document; what did he think he was going to achieve with so little evidence?  He had to convince the western world to turn away from 2000 years of belief in platonic forms. He made a leap of logic that is so antithetical to Aristotelian philosophy. He was the greatest mind in biology ever, and also the humblest, because unlike Carol von Linne, he didn’t want glory. He was a seeker. If we could have brought him here today and showed him the world he brought about through his amazing mind

he would back away in humility, and say “The evidence spoke for me.”

For knowing so much, understanding so much, for asking the right questions and finding the right answers, even if he leaped off of the shoulders of giants, THAT is why he deserves every ounce of credit he gets.

*For goddsakes people, quit putting down Lamarck already. He was a brilliant man, so similar to Darwin in many ways. There was so much he wrote that feels it could have come from Darwin’s own writings, and yet we are left with this cartoonish image of him because the only thing anyone ever remembers or writes about is the giraffe neck stretching.

Some Lamarck quotes:

“time and favorable conditions are the two principal means which nature has employed in giving existence to all her productions. We know that for her time has no limit, and that consequentily she always has it at her disposal.”

“Do we not therefore perceive that by the action of the laws of organization…nature has in favorable times, places and climates multiplied her first germs of animality, given place to developments of their organizations,…and increased and diversified their organs? Then…aided by much time and by a slow but constand diversity of ciercumstances, she has gradually brought about in this respect the state of things which we now observe. How grand is this consideration, and especially how remote is it from all that is generally thought on this subject!”

Panic! at the economic disco

20 minutes in the future, Articles by others, Black Swan, Tactical Polyvalence, The Dismal Science

Just a short economic roundup:

Japan’s economy is going down the tubes at the fastest rate in 35 years.

Ireland could default.

Keep an eye on Eastern Europe (yes, I know the Telegraph are apocalyptic enough as it is, but hysteria aside, there are valid concerns about the state of the region)

China’s recovery may be riding on the back of sham loans

Kansas is having money trouble

Collateralized Loan Obligations could be next financial black swan.

Santander has liquidity issues.

In summation, things don’t look too good.  More and more, I find myself agreeing with John Robb, even when I actively try not to.