John Gray on Immortality
I’m a big fan of the philosopher John Gray. A (very) short (and simple) summary of his ideas is that while progress in science and technology is cumulative, once we know what evolution is, we can’t un-know it. However when it comes to areas such as human rights, this is not the case – once a country has, say universal suffrage, that needs always to be defended. He is also a major thinker on what it means to be human. Anyhow, he’s written a great piece on technology and immortality – which is also a call to caution regarding the hubris that our technologies can often bestow upon us.
The bit that most fascinated me was the idea that dead scientists were working on the other side of life to construct a ‘super-being’ to be born. Crazy, but fascinating…
Starting early in the 20th century, tens of thousands of scripts [of automatic writing] were produced by different mediums in several countries over a period of more than 30 years. Known as the “cross-correspondences” because they seemed to be linked together, the scripts contained texts claiming to be messages from deceased psychical researchers, including Sidgwick and Myers, which together demonstrated the reality of life after death. As the flow of scripts continued an even larger claim emerged: the dead had taken on the task of saving the world of the living by means of a post-mortem experiment in eugenics. Scientists who had passed to “the other side” were fashioning an exceptional human being, a posthumously designed messiah-child who would deliver humankind from chaos and bring peace to the world.
Designing a Close in Fight?
I was watching the Bourne Ultimatum on TV recently and there is a fantastic fight scene between Jason Bourne and a fellow assassin/agent. The fight is fast, visceral and very, very close in. The action flows between the two combatant who are in an enclosed space and they make use of the space and objects around to carry the action. You can see it in the YouTube clip below, it’s from 2.30 into the video onwards…
Now I don’t yet think we’ve managed to capture that sense of fighting in games. Traditional fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter, while fun, have too much distance to capture this. First person games, while great for shooting, lose a sense of danger to the person that third-person games get. I wonder if that sense will come from the new motion controllers? They offer a sense of physicality to the movement so might be able to lift it. Now, I know the film is choreographed and edited, but so is the combat in a game like Vanquish – more so even. Vanquish is on the right path to capturing the visceral impact of the Bourne fight, so perhaps capturing this essence is closer? My gut feeling is that it will come from third-person and not first-person games, but who knows?
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in Bristol
I’m at the Watershed and have just said a brief ‘hi’ to Jimmy Wales as he arrives in Bristol to give a talk. We are at the Watershed and there is a small group of people – bloggers and volunteers for Wikipedia here to greet him. I’ve just been chatting to one of the volunteer editors, who put himself as an Inclusionist in the debate over the general direction that Wikipedia should take regarding content. I’m not a Wikipedia editor, though I do contribute and in general I’m with the Inclusions. I’ve used Wikipedia to help me with my PhD research (it’s a great starting point for topic areas) and used to get a bit of context when watching trashy horrors. The more there is, the more I’ll use it and the more places I can contribute.
Update! Here is the link to a video of the talk. Enjoy.
Cthulhu Thursday: Cthulu Dildonomicon
Yes people (and non-people) – it’s that time again when we go all Cthulhu Thursday. This week I want to share a little music of the spheres with you in the form of the amazing Cthulu Dildonomicon (spelt with no ‘h’). This is a collection of FREE music by a bunch of talented digital music producers (mainly breakcore in style) that cuts to the heart of Chaos!!!
This is an MP3 collection of audio tributes to fantasy author Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937), as produced and compiled by various members of Jason Forrest’s Cock Rock Disco web-forum. This release was compiled over the course of 6 months from June 2006, and despite organisation problems and a whole cacophony of clerical errors, the audio is now available to download from Digital Vomit and Hallo Excentrico! for free.
If you enjoy this release, please visit the good people at Cock Rock Disco at their website –www.cockrockdisco.com. They too have free audio downloads, so grab them while you can. If you would like to find out more about the work of HP Lovecraft, have a look at this tribute website, at www.hplovecraft.com, which features comprehensive details on his life, his work, and the Lovecraftian creations based within New England, USA.
Time to download and enjoy!!!
Cthulu Dildonomicon
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
Best Selling Games of 2010
Here’s where it was at for 2010 from Gamesindustry.biz … (you may need to register to read full article, but I’m posting most important info here!)
01 Call of Duty: Black Ops – Activision (PS3, 360, PC)
02 FIFA 11 – EA (PS3, 360, PC)
03 Just Dance – Ubisoft (Wii)
04 Red Dead Redemption – Rockstar (PS3, 360)
05 Wii Fit Plus – Nintendo (Wii)
06 Just Dance 2 – Ubisoft (Wii)
07 Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – Ubisoft (PS3, 360)
08 Wii Sports Resort – Nintendo (Wii)
09 Halo: Reach – Microsoft (360)
10 Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – EA (PS3, 360, PC)
No surprise there for the No.1, or 2 spot. Great to see a dance title take the 3 and 6 spots – shows the industry becoming more mainstream. A deserved no.4 for Red Dead Redemption (though personally I’d put it above FIFA). No PS3 only title in the top ten? I bet LittleBigPlanet 2 does it in 2011… here’s what the article commented:
Activision’s shooter sequel Call of Duty: Black Ops has been confirmed as the best-selling game of 2010 at UK retail – outselling all competition in less than two months on sale.
The Treyarch-developed PS3, 360 and PC title brought in £113.8 million in its first week of sales, which has been hailed as the highest-grossing week ever for a game in the UK.
A Personal CES Summary
CES, aka the Consumer Electronics Show, is a huge show in Las Vegas where the world gets to see the next generation of everyday technologies. While it is not a games event specifically, given the importance of new platforms such as smart phones to gaming and the ongoing intertwining of games and networks, this show is on my radar. While I was not there I thought I’d share a summary of the event…
First off we have the dramatic change in that Windows is going to move to more mobile platforms by becoming compatible with Arm chips.
Second the event saw over 80 tablet PCs launched. This seemed to be the major theme of the show – Tablets and tablets:
One emerging market that kept the masses of show attendees on the move was tablet PCs, as hardware makers showed off new devices, and Microsoft, Google and RIM announced future plans for their respective operating systems on tablets.
Third, Android launched a new version of it’s OS – Honeycomb – which seemed to be designed for Tablet PCs (them again);
While Honeycomb hasn’t been fully unveiled, there have been some tantalising features leaked and shared already – like discussion of email that exploits the features and full screen of the tablet and a 3D maps program, allowing renders of the environment featured in the map. While other features will be announced over the course of the CES, the conclusion so far is that Honeycomb is looking [solid].
Arm Chips and Tablet Computers and the Fuuuture!!!
This article in the Guardian is a good summary of the twists and turns in the PC/mobile market – which has huge implications for all forms of digital technology. To summarise, until recently Windows (which still runs on about 90% of the world’s PCs) would not run on Arm chips – which are designed for smaller mobile devices. Now Mircosoft has announced that the new version of Windows will run on Arm chips, which opens this new Windows to be usable by mobile and tablet computers that run Arm chips. The article argues that first this is a little late for Mircosoft, especially given that in 2001 Bill Gates thought tablet PCs would be big – yet the company failed to follow up on his vision. It is also late as the new version of Windows will take time to develop and Android and Apple are rapidly coming to dominate the space..
Companies such as Samsung, which used to focus their hardware efforts on Windows PCs and phones, have started instead making smartphones and tablets running Google’s Android.
Samsung says it has sold 1.5m of its Galaxy Tab tablets since mid-October, and it has become the world’s fourth-largest handset maker (after Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry creator Research In Motion). Microsoft isn’t seeing a cent from that success. Nor is Intel, which has grown fat on making chips for PCs: Arm chips power all of those phones and tablets.
The change is made even keener by the fact that it was Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, who announced the tablet revolution in November 2001, bravely asserting that it would be the most popular form of PC within five years. He was wrong. Microsoft failed to develop a tablet and by 2009 only 1m of the devices were being sold per year. But in 2010, that increased dramatically to an estimated 16m, driven by the launch of the Apple iPad, which accounted for about 14.5m of those sales.
[Former manager at Nokia, Horace] Dedlu says: “Many of Microsoft’s customers chose to use an operating system product from Microsoft’s arch-enemy [Google]. Microsoft, in turn, chose to port its operating system to an architecture from Intel’s arch-enemy [Arm].” And that, he thinks, marks the end of two long monopolies enjoyed by Microsoft and Intel.
Others agree. “The PC is not going to be the 95%-dominant solution five years from now,” said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. “The trajectory of the iPad and all these Android devices is to take on multiple form factors.”
Dance Your PhD!
OK, so this news is a little old, but it’s fun and fun is always new. There is this project to ‘Dance Your PhD’ – it’s mainly aimed a science PhD’s and has produced some very cool results, such as Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using SELEX from Maureen McKeague on Vimeo.
So that got me thinking – how would I dance my PhD?
Dance your PhD
Jimmy Wales in Bristol, Live Webcast
Yes this week! On Thursday 13th:
WIKIPEDIA @ 10
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikimedia talks in Bristol, United Kingdom – about its development and future plans.
Official Twitter hashtag : #wp10
Watch the LIVE WEBCAST – CLICK HERE
Webcast Notes: The LIVE WEBCAST will start at approx 11:45am and finish by13:00 GMT. The archived webcast will be available soon afterwards on the Ustream channel (search for Brrism).
In association with Bristol Festival of Ideas, Connecting Bristol, Bristol City Council, BBC Anchor Trust and Wikimedia UK: a special event to mark 10 years of Wikipedia with the man behind the project.
A decade ago the idea of a constantly updated online encyclopaedia, which would be collaboratively written by tens of thousands of people and read by hundreds of millions, was a dream.
Since then, Jimmy Wales has inspired others to join him, and has formed a 100,000-strong online volunteer community, which has built Wikipedia into a worldwide force for free learning and general education, run with modest resources, engaging communities worldwide. It’s now firmly established, but where will it go next?
This is a rare and special opportunity to hear Jimmy Wales talk about the history of this remarkable project as well as the plans for future development.
Going Beyond 2011? Gaming Plus 25 Years…
So having looked a gaming trends in 2011 and games that are coming in 2011 – now we cast our scrying mirror a little further a-field. The Observer had a great article looking at not just 2011 – but 25 years forward, so 2011 till 2036. There was one gaming entry in this (that I have covered before here):
Gaming: ‘We’ll play games to solve problems’
In the last decade, in the US and Europe but particularly in south-east Asia, we have witnessed a flight into virtual worlds, with people playing games such as Second Life. But over the course of the next 25 years, that flight will be successfully reversed, not because we’re going to spend less time playing games, but because games and virtual worlds are going to become more closely connected to reality.
There will be games where the action is influenced by what happens in reality; and there will be games that use sensors so that we can play them out in the real world – a game in which your avatar is your dog, which wears a game collar that measures how fast it’s running and whether or not it’s wagging its tail, for example, where you play with your dog to advance the narrative, as opposed to playing with a virtual character. I can imagine more physical activity games, too, and these might be used to harness energy – peripherals like a dance pad that actually captures energy from your dancing on top of it.
Then there will be problem-solving games: there are already a lot of games in which scientists try to teach gamers real science – how to build proteins to cure cancer, for example. One surprising trend in gaming is that gamers today prefer, on average, three to one to play co-operative games rather than competitive games. Now, this is really interesting; if you think about the history of games, there really weren’t co-operative games until this latest generation of video games. In every game you can think of – card games, chess, sport – everybody plays to win. But now we’ll see increasing collaboration, people playing games together to solve problems while they’re enjoying themselves.
There are also studies on how games work on our minds and our cognitive capabilities, and a lot of science suggests you can use games to treat depression, anxiety and attention-deficit disorder. Making games that are both fun and serve a social purpose isn’t easy – a lot of innovation will be required – but gaming will become increasingly integrated into society.
Jane McGonigal, director of games research & development at the Institute for the Future in California and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Help Us Change the World (Penguin)
However this is about how games may grow in use within society – and as a direct effect of networking of technology. That said (and I don’t disagree) but there was a load of other interesting predictions that would change how we play games and the kind of game we may make…
Neuroscience: ‘We’ll be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex’
By 2030, we are likely to have developed no-frills brain-machine interfaces, allowing the paralysed to dance in their thought-controlled exoskeleton suits. I sincerely hope we will not still be interfacing with computers via keyboards, one forlorn letter at a time. …
Now just stop and imagine the kind of games you could design with direct interface? Yes, not so much Virtual Reality, but it’s inversion, our Reality made Virtual. I’ve been re-reading Neuromancer, which I hope to post about soon. Still a visionary book in many respects and it is via direct inputs to the brain that the central character communicates with the Web. The novel describes this new anti-ecludian world as “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and consolations of data.”.
But wait! That’s not all… Quantum computing is the future declares one headline – though it does not go into enough detail. Put simply, this offers a radical powering up of computation. Games have always been an application that pushes any hardware it runs on to the limit (unlike office software) so what could a game do with a Quantum computer? Indeed.
A Great Becoming... 