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I missed my true calling as a hawker

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

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Electroplankton

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

By now I have little doubt that the Nintendo DS is a work of interactive design genius, and that Nintendo’s brave new plan is working and is brilliant. In our little household, Animal Crossing has even managed to win over a videogame luddite. It seems that the DS just invites people to pick it up and start prodding and pushing (and shouting and blowing and scratching) at it to see what it will do.

Latest is Electroplankton (flash site), a little explorative sound and music thing. You play with lots of little microscopic particles swimming about in petri dish by poking at them with your stylus, and they make sounds. That’s it. Its loads of fun. It’s not a game in the sense of something to be beaten or overcome, but an object play with, to explore and just enjoy.

The game is designed by Toshio Iwai (whose talk at Futuresonic this year I just missed, which I really regret now). I love the inlay card that comes with the game, which explains how he came up with the idea:

Just for fun, here are some MP3s I recorded while playing with Electroplankton: Luminaria, Lumiloop, Hanenbow, Marinesnow. And a rare bonus track from my Electroplankton avant-garde period: all of them at the same time.

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Computers set to destroy the earth

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Well, not quite, but if Nick Carr can come over all sensationalist then so can I. Nick takes the fine art of guesstimation to dizzy new heights in looking at the potential environmental impact of Second Life:

So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours

Per capita, that’s:

60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they’re in the same ballpark.

Never mind that his figures are almost certainly crazy wrong (SL servers aren’t just dedicated to individual avatars, avatars owners PCs could be turned on anyway, and wrong number of servers according to the comments); its great that people are thinking about this type of thing more and more. We’re so used to thinking of power consumption as being a direct result of our immediate actions (driving, throwing things away, etc.) that its easy to think of the impact of computing as the running of the box on your desk. But online activites incur an embodied cost of running servers too. Or as Nick rightly says:

… avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem. They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.

Previously on thoughtwax: Linutop: less is more, The environmental impact of thin client systems.

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Emulating the past. Or, nostaligia isn’t what it used to be

Friday, December 1st, 2006

For a young man, I seem to have an odd preoccupation with nostalgia. Like lots of other people who are thinking about the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii and what its all about, I’ve been wondering about videogames and what type of fun they are, and thinking about the fun I used to have playing them in the relatively untroubled days of my youth.

The games I enjoyed more than any other I’ve ever played in my life were the early 1990s LucasArts adventure games. You walked around and talked to characters and solved little puzzles. They were clever and funny and bags of fun. They’ve stopped making them now though. And in an odd inverse-obsolescence kind of way, you can’t run these old games on your computer any more because their programmers had to allocate memory slots manually in order to improve performance, whereas modern machines manage memory dynamically. Here comes the nostalgia, but I think there’s a certain romanticism in that; each little byte hand-delivered to the computer. Animations drawn pixel by pixel, not rendered by an engine. Today’s processors are too powerful to even support this old way, and instead do their work by brute force.

You can run old games using an emulator, though, tricking the game into thinking its on an old 386. ScummVM lets you run the LucasArts adventure games on your shiny new laptop. I installed it a couple of nights ago and have been having lots of fun since. Here’s Monkey Island 2 running on my Macbook Pro:

(As an aside, I also came across ScummVM for Nintendo DS. It seems to me that this is what the DS was made for. I would gleefully pay the price of a new game to legitimately and easily play Day of the Tentacle on a Nintendo DS, if they were to re-release it on a cartridge. Please make it so, rights-owning people.)

Back to the Wii. Of course, it’s going to be pretty lo-fi in comparison to Microsoft and Sony’s offernings. It’s also going to have an online store that allows you to download and play old Nintendo console games for a few euro, which is a fantastic and crazy selling point, when you think about it. You pay the price of a coffee for a decades-old game that you then play on your expensive, brand new next-gen console. There’s got to be an -ism to describe that. But if the thought of it appeals to you or someone else (it does to me), maybe it represents something.

Granted, that something could be kind of pathetic, namely that our personal culture and memories and emotional triggers are based on dumb, corporate entertainment, packaged experiences. But I don’t think it’s that big a deal.

In a way, it shows a certain sense of maturity in videogames, an ability to move beyond the bigger, faster, stronger approach. I’m not sure what progress is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t linear. These very same things happen at different stages in fashion and in literature, and in film and software and music and art and architecture and living and pretty much any other form of culture I can think of. I think it means that the medium is breathing.

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New camera

Friday, November 10th, 2006

The hand-wringing is over. I’ve taken the plunge and spent what is still a ridiculously large amount of money on a discretionary item by getting a Nikon D80 digital SLR. Despite the fact that some of my favourite amateur photographers use a Canon EOS camera, I decided to go for the Nikon based on personal recommendations and the fact that I’m a sucker for the rich browns it seems capable of capturing. Good times ahead, although I fear this purchase may be a gateway drug to also finally spending money on a Flickr pro account.

I don’t think I’ll ever leave film behind though. Despite my lousy conversion rate of about five decent photos for every roll shot, there’s something about film that digital will never match. Not only in the texture of the image produced, but in the anticipation of development, the joy of the happy accident (a common occurrence in my light-leaky old Canon AE-1), and the sense of wonder at the precise mechanical ingenuity that went into the manufacturing of my beautiful, heavy old camera, long before I was even born.

Anyway, despite the fact that the clocks went back last weekend and all our lovely summer light is gone, there should be more photos around here soon.

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