Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Mittell on Lost

Jason Mittell has published an excellent article about season two of Lost and the alternate reality game attached to it.  It's a good think piece for web 2.0 storytelling, and transmedia narrative.

Narrative by operatic sock puppets and fan fiction

Here's an innovative way of telling stories.  Start off writing fan fiction set in the Harry Potter universe.  Then create dozens of characters online, who provoke arguments in various places, and also prop up the author's fanfiction-writing reputation.  Then write about it at length.

At least, that's what I think happened.  Any clarifications or corrections, o blogosphere of weirdness?

(thanks, Sean)

Update on the jihadi video game story

Pentagon experts and members of the US Congress mistake a fan film for a professional computer game.
Ian Bogost comments:

"What's deeply troubling is that the folks that they've hired, they don't seem to know the first thing about video games," Bogost said. "They're not even using the same language that anyone familiar with video games — who played them or who studied them closely — would use."

We noted this first in May, then updated with a correction.

(via WaterCooler)

This just in: the robot head of Phil Dick is still missing

The Phil Dick simulacrum's head is still missing.

(via Tailrank; thanks to Tanya for the nudge)

Hotels, MySpace, connectivity, and fear

I noted with grim satisfaction this confirmation of what Alan Levine calls "Alexander's law": the more expensive the hotel, the costlier and less satisfactory its internet access tends to be.  Orin Sreebny reports on staying at a reasonably-priced establishment, which (naturally) provides free WiFi.

Reading on, I found Oren complaining that that hotel blocked access to MySpace and Facebook.  Shades of DOPA?  Sort of.  The company blocks such sites for a reason: moral cleanliness.  From their site:

1. It contains suggestive and pornographic images
2. It allows for the easy posting of way too much personal information
3. It is a context for dating and personal ads
4. It can be and has been used to exploit children and teenagers.

A fine example of the fearsome Web!  I agree with Sreenby's parting shot: "Might as well block the whole Internet while you're at it. Sheesh."

Zombie machinima

"I'm not a monster, Tom.  Well, technically I am."

Here's a cute machinima video, a zombie musical built with World of Warcraft (I think).  Lyrics reference the situation of Dawn of the Dead (1978):

"We're not unreasonable.  After all, we're not gonna eat your eyes."

EDITED TO ADD: the song was written and performed by Jon Coulter.  Thanks, Rob.

Attack of the sixty-foot girl-marionette

Today's missive from the uncanny valley: a gigantic little girl, sixty feet high, striding through London.  It's part of the recent Sultan's Elephant event.

Watching this, at times I focused on the artifice and apparatus, such as the presence of the operating team, the actions of guide lines and pulleys.  Then the image would suddenly shift, even in a very small way, and I'd behold animation, mobility, facial expressions, gestures.

Amazing design and puppetry.  It would serve as a good visual for the apocalyptic finale of Kleist's puppet essay (1811):

We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. – But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god."

"That means," said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence."

"Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter in the history of the world."

There's a copy at YouTube, which might be shorter.

(via MeFi)

Pen-based desktop desktop

Here's an interesting pen-based desktop interface idea, mocked up in video:

It only really makes sense with a stylus, a la Tablet PC.  I use mine to lay out my desktop in a way similar to the initial versions the video describes.  It would be fun to play with the widgets.

(thanks, Thomas Beckett)

Greetings, Instalanche

Welcome, Instapundit readers.   Make yourselves at home.  My gaming and culture posts are here. I am also interested in fears, scary stories, and panics about digital technologies, which touch on gaming often enough. 

Thanks, Glen, for linking to my Rosen and computer gaming post.

Off to South Carolina for Web 2.0

I'm traveling to South Carolina this week, teaching workshops for faculty, academic computing staff, and others on social software and computer-mediated communication at Wofford College.  I'll blog materials at NITLE Liberal Education Today.