Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Chaotic fiction, collaboration, and ARGery

Alternate reality game creator and leader Sean Stacey has published an essay exploring ARG definitions.  It ultimately calls for reconsidering ARGs as "Chaotic Fiction," emphasizing the instability of production, consumption, and interaction.  Rules and authorship are key to this model, especially when play is the focus.

Stacey has fun returning this new Chaotic model to other digital worlds:

I have other examples of this new, internet-enabled, massively collaborative process of creation that are similar to chaotic fiction. I would describe the generation of Wikipedia as Chaotic Fact. Open Source Software can easily be seen as Chaotic Programming, in that its users are able to add features or fixes to the software they utilize, and provide those changes back to the central code repository to be incorporated in the "official version." I would even categorize what Markos Moulitsas terms as "people-powered politics" to be Chaotic Governance, after a fashion.

(via Mysdirection)

Video versus virtual spaces

Why avatars instead of video: a list of ten reasons to prefer virtual worlds. It's an openly interested list, coming from an avatar company, but that doesn't weaken its utility.  It might be worth asking people (ysers, teachers) to come up with their own list, in order to get them thinking about choices and affordances.

I'd quibble with some of the points.  Video is mashable, unless they mean streaming video. Maybe less mashable, but users can still do stuff with video.  Bandwidth can be a serious problem for avatars when they're embedded in spatial platforms (cf Second Life).  And yes, you can shoot talking objects on video.

Interesting how avatars and their 3d spaces appear separate from web 2.0 in this context.  Mashable, yes, and some little bits of microcontent.  But the list doesn't really rely on open content (imagine using a closed-platform avatar space on a walled garden mobile phone).

(via Second Life Future Salon)

SLARG: Second Life Alternate Reality Gaming

Alternate reality gaming in Second Life, or Andy Havens and I share a brainwave: how about publishing some ARG content in Second Life?

On one level, consider SL to be yet another venue for pushing or finding content, like the Web, email messages, phone calls, etc.  On another level, SL is a venue for hosting ARG communications, as part of the set email/discussion forum/Web page/IRC/phone/etc.

Using SL to access traditional forms of ARG content, like Web pages, isn't that interesting on the face of it.  But it might be a nice reward to find ARG content from a surprising place, like a tv screen showing a video clip, revealed on a certain spot of a specific wall.

What ARG implementations would maximize SL's attributes?  Emotional bandwidth is a key selling point, according to the Lindenii, so interaction with an avatar could be powerful.  This applies to characters and other players.  Virtual environments, socially experienced, would make for fine clue-hunting grounds.

How about altering the SL experience?  We could imagine a version of theiLoveBees HTML source code weirdness in, say, the recent grey goo attacks.  This does lead to classic ARG ethical questions, a la the Wikipedia content editing topic.

Lag might be a problem, since it makes publishing some content uneven.  Will we be misled in trying to read text on an object or avatar, looking for clues, when the text is only the result of a rendering error? 

A related potential problem: the difficulty in exporting content from SL. This is in part a preservation issue, one which the ARG world needs to solve - i.e., what happens to our virtual spaces if SL goes dark?

Thoughts? suggestions?

Comment attack, humanoid response

Apologies to readers, especially those who comment: I'm turning on this blog's captcha comment requirement.  We're getting hit hard by comment spammers. Junk notification, IP banning, ruthless monitoring haven't staunched the slimy flood.

So please do the human thing and interpret the block of weirdly fonted text when you comment.  If you have any problems, please email me.

Bah.  Death to spammers.

Learning the World

I adored Ken Macleod's Fall Revolution science fiction sequence.  It mixed a series of genres and influences in fresh and rewarding ways: British left-wing politics, libertarian politics, posthuman sf, utopianism/dystopianism/heterotopianism.  I taught one of those novels, the delightful Stone Canal (1996), as the capstone of a British novels seminar, in fact, which worked very well.

So Learning the World (2005) read in a very familiar, pleasing way.  It's a first-contact story, where a generation ship hits nonhuman intelligence life for the first time.  Unsurprisingly we find a mix of Marx and Hayek, with revolutionaries playing a futures market, and scientists struggle past bureaucracies and ignorance.  It's a delicious read in many ways, from fun naming schemes (Horrocks Mathematical, Synchronic Narrative Storm) to returns on the classic sf trope of transformed language ("when humans lived in caves" refers not to prehistory, but to a future lunar settlement period).  And the book is dotted with many speculative and funny asides or mini-narratives, like this breezy, reference-speckled account of a posthuman childhood:

"Talking to my parents was becoming like SETI.  They had grown distant and strange.  When I was a kid, my pet animals uplifted.  My imaginary friends became virtual and autonomous.  My real friends upgraded and diversified.  They haunted the walls and sent me presences to converse with and meat puppets to fuck.  I couldn't evade the feeling that they were giving me less than their full attention.  I lit out for the territories." (38-9)

This makes me want to track down Newton's Wake, or go back to the Engines of Light sequence.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to force myself to finish The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.  A promising first third, steampunkishly charming and decadent, but I'm losing patience with repeated spills and near-death fights.  Maybe the serial edition would have fortified me.  Come to think of it, I could name one of our goats Cardinal Chang.

On the Commodore

On the Edge: The Rise and Fall of Commodore sounds like a useful book to have.  It's vital for internet history to remember those who influenced the world, but didn't survive into recent memory.

I remember deciding not to buy a C64, back in high school.  Instead I bought an Amiga, thinking that it had more usable memory.  Speaking of influential machines!

Revisiting the Encyclopédie

There's a fine podcast about the Encyclopédie (1751ff) from the always worth downloading/embarrassment of riches, In Our Time.  Many fine touches in this forty minutes' conversation among scholars, mediated lightly by Melvyn Bragg.  The importance of practical knowledge, the variable role of Voltaire, connections with Damiens' spectacular execution, financing, religious opposition, and censorship.

I'm increasingly impressed by Diderot's ambitious map of all learning.  Good case of inventing a materials means to cope with information overload.

In Our Time is really that excellent.  Kudos to them for opening up their archives of past shows for easy downloading, at last.  What a trove of up to date scholarship, presented with energetic clarity.  Very direct, stripped-down content, too.

Nice tag cloud snapshot, btw.

Learning silos

Why does Blackboard lead to some information architecture issues?  Today's example, which comes right after a fascinating presentation wherein using BB weakened a class in Second Life, comes from my looking into this blog's server logs. 
I spotted this link:

Ah, a new reader, I thought.  I don't know which school that is, offhand, but I want to meet someone new.

So, not thinking of the likely outcome, but reacting from the distributed conversation habits of the blogosphere, I click on the link.  Behold the result:

Thank you, Blackboard.  You broke a conversation.  Someone linked to me, and rather than being able to find who that is, share a thought with them, maybe learn something from them, I'm thrown into a wall, and stall out.  The end.

Better yet, I have no way of reporting this to that domain.  I could email the webmaster, but the domain surely connects to too many people ("Say, is anyone there at that school linking to my blog?").

(Rod Serling voice) Imagine a silo.  A snapshot of social connections deferred.  Software used to separate, rather than connect.  And this is an outcome of America's leading learning management system.  Lesson learned.  Class, and conversation, dismissed.

Mashing it up with Brian Lamb in Texas

End of the day at the New Media Consortium's 2006 regional conference.  After my manic blitz through Web 2.0 etc, Brian Lamb took the room to whack away at mashups.

Lamb set up a dedicted del.ico.us account, http://del.icio.us/diygonewild, and invited the audience to sign in and tag.  Good idea - we slaved away like mad.

Topics: mashups as modernism, but as ancient cultural movement.  Antiauthoritarianism.  The bogey copyright.

Some mashups touched on: Riot browser.  The Teacher as DJ.

Arguments: can we use a Digg approach for educational content?  Does a short-term blog (a semester) go against the idea of blogs as emergent voices, given how long it takes for the latter to arrive?

Metaphors and virtual spaces

Gardner Campbell is leading a presentation on metaphors and virtual space.
He has set up a wiki for backchannel.

One major theme: play in education, as a cognitive engine, and how it appears in virtual ways.  Campbell cites Vygotsky on alienation within play, then applies this to Second Life's play with behaviors and objects.  Very strong point.