War* and the homeland.

*If you don't want to register with the Times, use (mefi/mefi) or this mirror (via Nick Denton).
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I feel bad for not having comments and an RSS feed and a blogroll and proper archives. But if I get some free time I should probably do my taxes before I switch over to that moveable type installation that has been sitting there waiting for me for so long.
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I've been meaning to post this for a while now, but better today than never: this is the last day to get discounted tickets for the Gel conference, May 2nd, in NYC.
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According to the culinary calendar in the latest CityFood (a local free foodie quarterly which has pretty lousy distribution so I only rarely see it; their website is not worth bothering with) two of the best chefs in town are giving class next week: Vij (of Vij's) and Tojo (of, er, Tojo's). They are both at Tools & Techniques (250 West 16th) and both cost C$90. Tojo is at 10:00am on Saturday April 5th and Vij is at 6:30pm on Monday April 7th. Woo!

On the topic, Marc Canter tells me about a restaurant here in Vancouver that I am very curious to find (he doesn't remember the name): he says ”this place that did food art - a private place - across the street from some fancy hotel ... incredible wine cellar - I sang Opera for the owner ... It's on the ground floor - I believe is French.....it is downtown, on a major street.“ Hmmm.

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I saw this Reuters article — U.S. Says Will Not Cede Control of Iraq to U.N. — on Yahoo News. At first I thought it had to be a parody and someone doing a clever URL hack to make it merely appear to be on the Yahoo News. But, lo, it is a genuine Reuters story. Kind of surreal. Some quotes:

• “We didn't take on this huge burden with our coalition partners not to be able to have a significant dominating control over how it unfolds in the future.” (Powell, addressing a House subcommittee)
  
  
• Powell said the United Nations should, however, have a role in a post-Saddam Iraq, if only because it makes it easier for other countries to contribute to reconstruction costs.
  
  “If we ask these nations to go get funds from their parliaments, it makes it a lot easier for them to get those funds and contribute those funds to the reconstruction effort ... if it has an international standing,“ he said.
  
  
• The coalition is the Bush administration's term for the United States, Britain and the other minor contributors to the invasion of Iraq they launched last week.

Pretty weird to see Reuters getting that snarky.
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eyebees (via Steven Johnson). It's a lot like Quek in function but with a few more features and a very different implementation. This may not be it, but like threedegrees (previous reference), it strikes me as a herald of the coming age of collective internet experience and shared social spaces. (Ta da!)

Eyebess is built for swarming (you see the other eyebees in your swarm and they cluster when looking at the same page).

Swarming?
Swarming is a shared Internet experience. You can see where others are going on the Internet and they can see you. After downloading and installing the Swarming software, you enter our Swarming community and become an Eyebee. Your Eyebee is Red, theirs are blue. Eyebees Swarm.

Things are starting to heat up.

(Update: have played with it for a while and unfortunately the messaging is pretty broken. Still, it's a step.)
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Microsoft Pushes IM Standard “Microsoft Corp. earlier this month debuted the long-awaited beta of its real-time communications server along with a strategy designed to make it an emerging standard for embedding instant messaging and presence detection in other applications.” Hmm. (Via VentureBlog)
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By request: Pasta Nicola (for two).

Start with fresh linguine or fettucini, brussel sprouts (pre-steamed or boiled) and some pesto. Saute a finely chopped shallot in nice olive oil. Dice a good sized wine chorizo sausage (the hard kind with lots of white fatballs) and add it around the time when the shallots have gone clear. Stir and scrape the pan until you have a nice base of red oil (melted bits from the sausage, coloured by the spice). Lower the heat and add the pesto, making sure to keep things moving. Dice the brussel sprouts and then toss them in for the last minute or so to get them warmed up.

The basil in the pesto makes other herbs would be superfluous, but a generous amount of pepper is recommended. Toss with the pasta and finish with lots of reggiano grated on top. Simple as can be.
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Andrew Wooldridge adds reputation and sharing to the list below. I can see that, though I was thinking of reputation as an aspect of identity, whereas sharing, like collaborating, playing, etc., as things people would do inside a platform which supported (some combination of) the five things (technologies? devices? dimensions?) listed below.
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An article complaining about ‘social software’ and a rebuttal from Ross Mayfield. So there is an argument. But this is the thing that caught me (from the original article): “The key idea behind social software is that by using technology we can reinvigorate interest and participation in the democratic process.”

Attempting a rigorous definition seems pointless (partly because “social software” doesn't pick out a neatly contiguous space), and I much prefer “social computing applications” (since there are no connotations of AI, the MS Office paperclip, “friendly software”, etc.), but in any case that is certainly a bad definition.

Applying social software to politics is only one small piece of a big picture because politics is only one small piece of what people do. It is like trying to explain the key idea behind enterprise software as “using technology to reduce the costs of doing payroll.”

So, what is social software? By me, it is software that people use to interact with other people, employing some combination of the following five devices:

• Identity
• Presence
• Relationships
• Conversations
• Groups

Conversations can be real-time or asynchronous. Relationships can be as simple as “contacts” or can be more subtle. There's been relatively little group stuff (yet).

Instant message networks have four of these (Identity, Presence, Relationships and Conversations) networks of blogs have three (Identity, Relationships and Conversations), Metafilter has two (Identity and Conversations), Yahoo Groups has three (Identity, Conversations and Groups), IRC has four, but two of those in a half-assed way (Presence, Conversations and weak forms of Identity and Groups — cf., the sixth paragraph down in this Joel of Software article). And so on.

We'll be seeing many more applications which combine these elements. Here's why: when I first started using the internet (in 1992) I used it almost exclusively for social purposes (mostly Usenet and email, occaisonally IRC, FTP, gopher) and so did everyone I knew (“IRL” or online only). That was possible because everyone who was on the internet then were experts/power users/very familiar with computers; they were skilled enough in the medium and comfortable enough with the technology to be able to use it socially.

Now, the 600 million people who came online in the post-web explosion are developing that same skill and comfort. Most of them already use the internet socially, but this aspect of internet usage will only become more important. Weblogs were only the beginning.

In his last essay, Clay Shirky wrote “No matter how much the administrators say it's ‘for work’, people will bend communications tools to social uses”). Similarly, the two fundamental principles of our current work are:

• Human beings appropriate technology for human ends.
• The Internet is at its best when connecting people.

Though I tend to disagree with him about where the design challenge lies for group-oriented software, there are some good and provocative points in that article. Clay goes on:

The last time there was this much foment around the idea of software to be used by groups was in the late 70s, when usenet, group chat, and MUDs were all invented in the space of 18 months. Now we've got blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Trackback, XML-over-IM and all sorts of IM- and mail-bots. We've also got a network population that's large, heterogeneous, and still growing rapidly.

Indeed we do. And again, here's to what's next.

(Related [groups, politics, encoding the latter in the design of software]: Pavel Curtis' techTVized The Incredible Tale of LambdaMOO and Learn how one of the first virtual worlds ballooned into a real-life nightmare.)
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temp
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Uberman's sleep schedule — I have to try this at some point.
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30
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Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, makers of the upcoming Puzzle Pirates, (and owner of this cool personal site) wrote me a nice note about the MMOG posts I've been making. He says that, as far as he knows, we are the only people trying to do something fundamentally different (though, as a few people have pointed out, A Tale in the Desert is also pretty different). Nice when “competitors” are friendly and cool and recognize the good in each other.*

I once heard that some Japanese companies, instead of making five year plans, made 250 year plans — and the question was posed “What would you [companies] do differently if you have a 250 year plan? Would it make sense to pollute? To pursue short term goals? Would you pump up quarterly revenues at the expense of long term viability? Would the company's scope enlarge to the point where humanity was a concern?” Very interesting stuff. We started on a 250 year plan for Ludicorp, but it is hard — a goal for one year from now is to have a 250 year plan ...

*Earlier I was going to say that any networked game in 2003 should at least expose web services interfaces and gateways to most instant messaging platforms, but I won't say that any more.
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For later: A Summary of Pythagorean Theology (MeFi). See also The Theology of Arithmetic (last thought about nearly two years ago on this site).
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Caterina.net round-up: good long post on play and a solid discussion of Wiggenstein on the comments on this post.(The latter makes me realize how long it has been since I've thought very seriously about contemporary philosophy.)
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Addendum: I think some of my comments below have to do with the fact that I'm not much of a gamer —I haven't owned a console since my intellivision when I was wee (though I did play a lot of arcade games growing up and about 2⁷⁹ hours of NHL '94 on the household Genesis during the first two years of university). And various RTSs, a lot of Sim City, etc.

On the other hand: I like people, and playing, and playing with people. And since the real lesson only seems to be being absorbed now, I think I will have many more and varied opportunities for that in the future.

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Grownups use IM! — (1) NYT: Clique of Instant Messagers Expands Into the Workplace. (2) News.Com: Message in a Bottleneck.
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LazyGoogleAnswers: anyone know what percentage of internet users in the pre-web days used Usenet, IRC, mailing lists, M/UD/OO/USHs?
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Started reading Diane Ackerman's Deep Play (a gift from the book buyer) which begins with:

“Let me recite what history teaches: History teaches.” —Gertrude Stein

Lessons I've been pondering lately: When Ultima Online (UO) came out (fall of '97) it was very cool and very popular and it happened to be a graphical D&D-genre RPG. The lesson people seemed to take from it, however is “Graphical D&D-genre RPGs are very cool and very popular”.

But the cool part wasn't the blacksmith skill or the isometric medieval graphics or the swords and dungeons and click-click-click battle (speaking for myself, anyway). The cool part was that you could form relationships with people inside the context of play.

Modes of interaction with other human beings inside a construction of constraints (other than the ones we normally abide by) doesn't stop being fun or absorbing or interesting or valuable when we stopped being children. Exploration of and experimentation with the rules of our interaction, the conversations we have, the agreements we make and the rules we live by is constitutive of playing with life. And, really, you're only genuinely alive when playing with your own life.

Maybe that's all over-lofty. And UO players weren't exactly giving birth to a new Academy (though play should not be judged by the production of profound results). But the essential point is true: even though EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot (and Asheron's Call, to a certain extent) went on to further establish that massively multiplayer swords and dragons-type RPG games could be successful and popular and fun.

But the formula seems to have been:

• Take a video game and add a social infrastructure: relationship-forming, communication system, etc.

Rather than:

• Take a solid social infrastructure and add elements of play (a richer set of interactive capabilities as well as constraints which define the creative space)

The emphasis in the development from UO (isometric) to EverQuest (3D, but relatively primitive) to the next-generation of these games, like Star Wars Galaxies, Shadowbane, EQ 2, AC2, etc., has been on graphical sophistication and now-traditional game industry production values, which is probably why gamers are left unsatisfied with the tools provided for interaction (apart from battling together, etc.) And it is probably why none of these games ever appealed enough to me enough that I wanted to play them, however much I dug the fundamental idea.

Jason (another Ludicorper) tells the story of having played one MUD for five years, played UO for three, EverQuest for a year and half, Asheron's call for six months and then recently bought Asheron's Call 2 which he played for 3 weeks and then tossed. As the games increased in visual sophistication —and AC2 is quite beautiful— they lost what was most interesting (to him). (Even now he occasionally dips back into the MUD.)

When I think about what kind of virtual world I'd like to participate in, the idea of immersing myself inside Shadowbane (pictures) seems like a kind of nightmare. And, as Koster implies (in this big quotation) there are probably many more people for whom it seems vaguely nightmarish than people who'd pay to spend a few hours a day inside of it.

It seems to be that the sword and dragon games were an accident of history, and they gave rise to this diversion into some enclosed sub-volume of the enormous possibility space for play-related social computing applications. The first dips into the big pool are starting now — not just The Sims Online*. There and Second Life, but also things like Microsoft's threedegrees, the first “post-IM” application (and, of course, GNE, which is somewhere between those two camps.

Anyway, here's to what's next.

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* The Sims Online was so disappointing because it simulated all the least interesting things about humans (peeing, mindless repetitive tasks, doing dishes) instead of what is interesting: relationships, networks, groups, loyalties, politics, economics — the things that take place one or more levels up from the body (I've always wondered how it came to be that video game designers got so obsessed with modeling bodily interaction). And it is very, very hard for the participants to overcome the limitations of the simulation.
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The Economist Opines:

America has missed its chance to start the deregulatory ball rolling, first with the wired networks and then with the wireless ones. Now it is up to Asia and Europe to avoid making the same mistake.

Doesn't our society seem sometimes like it has hit a local maxima and is stuck is some weird position where the ends most beneficial to all just can't be achieved? Even The Red sees the potential of “networks are largely ‘user financed’ and deployed in an unplanned, ad hoc manner”. Go team.
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Cruising Meatball Wiki, I found John Kellden who points to Managing Play: A Master Thesis in Entrepreneurship.
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His Station and Four Aces — I used to have this.
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Paul Perry's Alamut has now been going for over five years. Congratulations Paul! Now in addition to recording this present attention, he will be revisiting the archive on a day-to-day basis because “What's the point of keeping a record if one doesn't pay attention to it?”

On a similar note, I passed the three year mark with sylloge a while ago (I don't remember exactly when I started and I lost the first few months back after the first 5k contest blew up the server, but it was around November '99). I was reminded of that a while ago because I got this spam which proposed a link exchange between this old sylloge page and the links page from Glow Inc (“the world-wide distributor of glow-in-the-dark paints and powders using the new "Long Afterglow" pigments”) — they saw some synergy there, I guess.

Reading that old sylloge page brought back memories of when I was really engaged with keeping a weblog (most of 2000) and the time I stopped have the inclination (or the ability?) to do it so well (“[sylloge] used to be a good blog, but got steadily duller until it shut down” — Oct 2001). Ebb and flow ... no insight here; it was just interesting (to me).

(Update: I forgot to mention that, speaking of anniversaries, I'm turning 30 on March 21st. Oya! The days are long, but the years fly by.)
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(I can post again!)
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Hey all you stupid dorks, I don't have a TV for a reason. I didn't want to know about the extreme milk! Are you all mindless sheep? I go to your sites for news, commentary, insight, humour or morbid curiosity, not to watch you act as stooges for Dr. Pepper. Come on!
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I just need to record this somewhere so that when I am feeling down, I know that I can find a chuckle.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.

Ditto for "french toast," which will be known as "freedom toast."

The name changes were spearheaded by two Republican lawmakers who held a news conference Tuesday to make the name changes official on the menus

Grown-ups did that.
Never forget that.

(straight from MetaFilter, sorry.)
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The Tyranny of Email (which, ironically, I will read later since I am catching up on email). (Via, Dave “Google is an Evildoer” Winer.) (Update: Michael Sippey hisself says don't bother. All it says is to turn your email client off. Although Sippey's credibility slipped a bit with the dumb Wi-Fries joke.)
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Ben (Neb), Ludicorp's eye at the GDC, sends summaries of good talks missed and in particular a link to Raph Koster's smoking good presentation entitled Small Worlds (graph theory, six degrees, Barabási's Linked and more in the context of online worlds).

Koster was the lead designer for Ultima Online (the first massively multiplayer online game), and is now creative director for the upcoming Star Wars Galaxies (the most expensive?). Koster has graciously made a tremendous amount of his thinking available to the public and I've found a lot of inspiration in it (there is an extensive quotation from something he wrote as an appendix in Ludicorp's business plan — I include that block at the end of this post*).

But it reminded be to post this mixed bag of MMOG links:

• Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Run a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
  (Required reading at our office.)
• 10 Strategic Tips for MMOG Developers and Publishers
• An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth
• MMOG - Game On!
  (Overhyped “study” on growth potential: my math on their math says 16 million subscribers by 2006 which is feasible worldwide, but it sounds like they are talking about the English-speaking world.
  
  And from the academic side of things:
• Whose Game Is This Anyway?”: Negotiating Corporate Ownership in a Virtual World (PDF)
• Causing Mayhem on the Internet with Virtual Environments

Oy, it is hard.

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*Current and future developments in online games (his whole site is good and there is a lot there worth checking out)

The simple fact is that our consumers are not who they were five years ago. They are different now. Where they were once online gamers, a discrete market, they are now the standard gamer market, weaned on Doom and bred on Quake, blissfully unaware of antiquities such as BBS door games, the year in which MUD II launched, and Modem Wars. In few more years, the market is going to be someone quite different from that. Someone who doesn't necessarily care about flashy 3d graphics, but who certainly isn't going to sit still to read quickly spamming text. Someone who isn't into blowing up bizarre alien creatures or slaying innumerable orcs and dragons.

The consumers that are the future of our genre are everyday, ordinary people. Most of us in this technology-mad industry frankly have no contact with them. The technology we need to develop isn't the technology of more polygons or better 3d sound or more accurate simulations. It's the technology of people. Of giving them what they don't know they need.

I spent last Christmas holidays in Ohio, with my father's side of the family. An architect, a teacher of disabled children, an ex-firefighter who now sells bathtub linings. They had many questions for me —they wanted to know if I was proud of what I did, and how I felt about videogames allegedly driving disturbed youths to acts of insane violence.

And boy, I longed to make a game for them. Because I knew that I could get them interested in an online game that personally touched them, that made them have a greater awareness of the world around them (for in my technologically savvy big city mind, I suspect I saw them as provincial in some ways. I don't feel too proud of myself for feeling that way, either). An online game that connected them with people they wouldn't have otherwise interacted with. That maybe didn't have a single dragon or spaceship in it. A game — let's be frank — an Internet — that is woven into the fabric of their lives. I know it can be done, and I also know that it's not online backgammon.

So this is my challenge. The new guard, the boxed game companies, and the old guard, the online game diehards, may both miss the boat. That's OK, because someone else will see the obvious and rush in to capture the audience that is waiting. But I know where I want to go: I want to go towards experiences that are emotionally resonant to the widest range of people possible, because in some kooky, idealistic way, I'd like my work to touch people.

Amen.
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A lot of posting coming up (finally).
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In the office, I use Outlook Ex Pee (long story; don't ask). Here is the thing: if I get a message in HTML format (e.g., all the yahoo group lists I'm on) the initial reply is always in HTML as well. And in HTML messages, there is no way to reply to text inline — e.g.,

> what time is it?

it is 3:00pm

since the left-border intenting line won't “break”. And if you convert it to plain text, the indentation will not become prefixes (like the “>” in the example). So, I have to reply, then convert to plain text, and then manually add line breaks and “>”s for each point I want to address.

Can this really be freaking true? Michael Sippey, where are you? If anyone knows how to get around this (and yes, I have tried every preference I can find and I have googled extensively; and no, don't bother suggesting switching to another mail client) then please email me at sylloge.com (any old name will do) and tell me what is up. Thanks!
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