^ Barcelona’s Cerda Grid (from http://odin.let.rug.nl/~kastud/barca/)
What makes a good game city?
I mean this in the sense that it makes for a great physical setting for playing a game such as ‘Gridlockd’ in. Which cities are good game cities? How would you construct an ideal game city?
Is a great city for playing a game in, the same as a great city for playing in?
What is a playful city?
Gridlockd by Mohit SantRam of NYU ITP sounds fascinating:
…an urban game where participants within one of four teams compete to capture grid positions in a half hour. the team with the most points wins! This project is meant to display how semacodes, cameraphones, ad-hoc groups, and social dynamics are effected under time pressure.
It’s going to be one of these fun ‘big games’ which create lots of spectacle, but looking at the core gameplay: capture grid positions… I wonder if it wouldn’t be more satisfying as a slower, more strategic game played over a much much longer timeframe.
As our own Greg Costikyan has said – latency in the mobile network makes it very hard to create real-time games. In Gridlockd – they are using walkie-talkie functionality to enable this – the phone is not the communications channel – it is a mobile networked computer for recognising physical/location data…
So why not play to the strengths of asynchronous communications instead, and harness an entirely different, more casual, less spectacular form of play.
I’m imagining a kind of urban location-based reversi that two people could play over a long time span – kind of like a play-by-mail game, but play-by-city…
This game would still using semacodes/QR-codes/NFC for the game grid positions. Janne Jalkanen has demonstrated how easy it is to create NFC/web services for presence – perhaps it would be possible to very quickly create such a game. Perhaps there could be some grid positions that were in coffee-shops where the players could meet and discuss the moves.
Of course, there are only some urban locations where the image of the city would match with the image of the game board. Manhattan and other big grid-structured US cities seem more ideal for urban games than European cities?
Matt Locke, a few years ago, wrote about slow-networks in cities a few years ago, using ‘public caches’ – bluetooth or IR connected public digital stores – what are the opportunities for slow-networks city-gaming?
I’m still trying to rehouse my blog, blackbeltjones.com/work; but the fact remains that ditching five years of writing felt good. The digital baggage gone, I found I really still needed to write my thoughts down. Here is where they will be. Moved!
Eco Sketch
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
is a phrase that’s been blowing around in my head since I was in Austin, talking with Otwell and Boyd (which sounds like a great law firm, or a promising wacky misfit information science / buddy-cop pilot)
At /play, where nonsense lives, I wrote this:
Raiding the 21st century
The next step in cut-up culture
Arthouse biotech
Wetwork warhols
Nanobiological burroughs
Performance creationism
Xoological situationism
Some assembly required
Crick, Watson, Double-dee, Steinski.
Intelligent design as artistic statement
Playing god, 5 times a week with 2 matinees
Oryx
Crake
Cut
Splice
Mashup mammals
Rip/Mix/Birth
Ellis writes tales of the Spidergoat.
Reality is entering the Silver-Age.
If you think it’s been getting wierd around here lately, and I should really be writing reams and reams about bloody tags or something; then tough.
When the going gets wierd – the wierd apply for patents.
This is "Ghetto Superstar"
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
This is Pras, ODB and Mya’s “Ghetto Superstar”: a visualisation from Jake Elliot’s PopSketchSeries.
Artists statement:
“this is a series of drawings generated from pop songs. the songs are analyzed note-by-note. at each note, a line is drawn. the angle at which the line is drawn is determined by the pitch of the note and the length of the line is determined by the volume of the note. the result is a series of playful, doodle-like, linear drawings.
Imagine taking music visualisation, mixing in play and embodiment into the mobile realm – mobile music players allowing you to trace your tracks like a demented Logo Turtle through the city.
Joined-up listening – groups and groupies conga together through the streets propelled by a programmatic peer-2-peer pied piper.
Dance Dance Dance Situationist Revolution.
Vib Ribbon Reality…
Very much enjoyed the video for the new Chemical Brothers track "Believe", which portrays a man in the throws of some kind of mental breakdown, tormented by industrial robots – and the city.
The robot’s lolloping indefatigability gives them an air of menace that is a mix of the raptor, the T1000 from T2, and the rage-victims of 28 days later.
The use of depth-of-field in the shots and colour treatment of the video give it a claustrophobia and feeling of decay I, at least, associate with the best, most terrifying British sci-fi of the 70s and 80s. Quatermass 4, Triffids, Pertwee in quarries, etc.
UNIT unfortunately doesn’t come to the rescue in this one.
The denouement, after a terriffic chase sequence, sees our antihero’s final downfall not at the claw of the robots, but by the city – as reality (and a 70s op-art concrete carpark) falls apart in psychadelic shards.
The best mini-movie I’ve seen in a while.
More on the directors, Dom & Nic, the process and details of the CGI here.
This effort of MMDC’s stood out from the scores of ‘transparent’ screen tromp l’oeil pictures created in the latest Flickr flap.
Why? The transparent terminal window floating in mid-air, mid-screen. Beautifully done.
Made me think of laptops from a possible augmented-reality future, where a vestigal frame of the screen is kept by industrial designers as a social cue, to be flipped up as an interruptions shield… even though the reality you are interacting with is just light scattered directly on your retina.
Something about the line-up of covers on the Icon magazine website struck me.
All the moody portraits of pensive designers in immaculately-cut monochrome schmutter (ok, except for Karim Rashid, but hey…) reminded me of a talk I attended back in architecture school by Jan Kaplicky where he juxtaposed one image against another to illustrate what he thought was important about design.
It’s a method used throughout Future Systems‘ published work, especially the excellent "For Inspiration Only".
First, he brought up a moody, black-and-white, Anton Corbijn-esque picture of Richard Meier – black cashmere turtleneck and all; dramatically lit against horizontal window blinds. The archetypal Howard-Roark pose.
Kaplicky boomed: "This is not design. This is not a designer." and flicked the slide to a sunny snap of a carpark at Boeing, full of the hundreds of people on the design team there for the 757 smiling and waving up at the camera (I think): "This is design. These are designers"
I’ve always loved that moment from Kaplicky’s talk, and subscribed wholeheartedly to the idea that the ‘great man/woman’ theory of design is bullcookies, at least for most things outside of the couture-culture of boutique graphic design, architecture or applied art celebrated by most of the design press / the Design Museum.
But – in these dawning days of ‘self-centred software‘ and personal fabrication technology, could it be that Kaplicky’s Boeing carpark picture is rapidly becoming the anachronism?
As one of the speakers at eTech on the coming fabrication revolution said (I think it was Saul Griffith), the design of objects, tools, devices, artifacts (and architecture?) is going to go through the same waves of democratisation, demystification and down-right gawdawful design as graphic design did with the advent of affordable desk-top publishing technology.
Look forward to seeing how Icon might reflect this in coming years…
The faceted, messy world of folk/tag/free/ethnoclassification seems to be a natural fit for zoomable user-interfaces, or ZUIs… or Zooeys*.
The latest in Flash-to-Flickr interfaces for Tag browsing by Felix Turner does a particularly nice job of using mouse-gesture, zooming layers and just good, tasteful visual design.
Here’s a grab for the tag "London" for instance:
* Zeitgeistfully, in the new film of HHG2TG, Trillian is played by a Zooey
Petafloptimism 
