The End of Cyberspace

Retro Arcade set

For those of you old enough to have played video games in the late 1970s or 1980s-- the halcyon days of Defender, Xevious, and Tron, not to mention a Pac Man franchise that rivaled CSI-- the terrific retro arcade photset on Flickr is not to be missed.

Perhaps I'm just over-generalizing from my own over-excited teenage reactions to these kinds of spaces, but I think these arcades, with their spaceship or Buck Rogers interiors, darkness lit only by the neon and the light of the games, played an underappreciated role in creating a psychological association between computers and space-- or alternate spaces.

called Station Break. The arcade was on the edge of the Virginia Commonwealth University campus, near student eateries, bookstores, and the city's only independent movie theatre. For a teenager, it was a neighborhood that spoke of leisure, freedom, and escape. The arcade itself was like another world.

The appeal of these spaces hasn't disappeared entirely, though most arcades are gone. The memory of the old arcade model was compelling enough to inspire MAME developers to create a virtual arcade, and there's a pretty clear linage from Station Break to Chuck E Cheese to the Pizza Planet in Toy Story. For those who really want the old experience, a Springfield, MO arcade, 1984, is a nostalgic re-creation of arcades from the era, right down to the 50+ classic games.

Tags: endofcyberspace, arcades, videogames, history

The new impetus to literacy

A couple months ago, we bought Nintendo DS machines for the kids. Of course, before we got them, my wife and I talked about whether the kids were old enough for the games, and whether we really wanted them to have access to the technology at all. Finally, we decided to buy them, but to put some firewalls around their game-playing time. (I later learned that they're instruments of Satan, but by then both kids were experts at Mario Kart, and it seemed a shame to waste all that skill.)

One thing I did not expect was this: my son now wants to learn to read so he can play Pokemon Diamond, which is full of captions and written instructions. (Without literacy, he's stuck in the Mario Kart and Lego Star Wars ghetto.) Of course we read to the kids constantly-- my son insisted we read the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets this morning, rather than watch cartoons-- but I think this may be the first practical use of literacy my son has encountered. He doesn't have to pay his own bills, figure out who to vote for, read nutrition labels, or interpret traffic signs. But he does want to conquer the Pokemon world, and to do that, you need to be able to read.

Maybe everything bad really is good for you.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Rock and Roll," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 2)".]

One more note on the Wii

And something more positive than my earlier post on ergonomics and cyberspace: Steven Johnson on Wii tennis:

Having written so much about the complexity of today's games, it's fascinating to see a platform so heavily promoting its comparative simplicity. But I think the success of the Wii is slightly more complicated than that. Wii Sports trades the onscreen complexity of goals and objectives and puzzles for the physical, haptic complexity of bodily movement. Since the days of Pong, games have been simplifying the intricacies of movement into unified codes of button pressing and joystick manipulation.... Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules -- as well as the imagery -- of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we'd ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.

Technorati Tags: Wii

Ergonomics and the end of cyberspace

This will probably be just a throwaway line in the book, or a paragraph at most, but I've been thinking a bit about RSIs and computer-related injuries as an example of the fractured manner in which we've tried to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds.

Of course, you can injure yourself carrying firewood, herding sheep, wrangling children, or doing a million other things in the real world. But as I understand it, people get RSIs when of two things happen: either when computers (or more precisely, keyboards, mice, and monitors and their relationships to the body) force users to do something that their body objects to; or when computers remove a physical constraint that prevented users from performing the same action for a long time.

This isn't necessarily a problem caused by badly-designed computers. One of my colleagues sent around this bit (allegedly) from the New England Journal of Medicine:

A healthy 29-year-old medical resident awoke one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently....

[H]e had bought a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced "wee") video-game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game.... In the tennis video game, the player makes the same arm movements as in a real game of tennis. If a player gets too engrossed, he may "play tennis" on the video screen for many hours. Unlike in the real sport, physical strength and endurance are not limiting factors.

The problem with the Wii isn't that it makes you do something really unnatural. But in the real world, few of us can play tennis for four or five hours straight; a Wiimote, in contrast, is light enough to make that possible.

There's also some criticism of the new Cisco open office on ergonomic grounds:

The photo of a Cisco no-cubicle office in the recent San Jose Mercury News article set off my alarm bells, however. The no-cubicle environment in the picture is an ergonomic nightmare. I can’t believe the article didn’t discuss this downside to the wonders of the new office.

I called Lisa Voge-Levin, an ergonomic consultant who helps companies design healthy work environments, and asked her to look at the Cisco photo with me.... [She reported that the armchairs, lack of eye-level monitors, and absence of tables for drinks and accessories] contributes to neck and back injuries including muscle and tendon strain as well as such serious injuries as ruptured discs. She also notes that in such an environment, it is hard to control lighting, glare, or noise; all can lead to headaches.

Technorati Tags: ergonomics, Wii

The truest things, said in jest

The Onion reports on low sales of Sousaphone Hero:

Despite a catchy 1890s soundtrack and realistic-feeling game play, Sousaphone Hero, the third installment of Activision's massively popular Guitar Hero video game franchise, sold a mere 52 copies in the United States in its opening week, the company reported Monday....

Sousaphone Hero offers two dozen public-domain marches, including 1893's "The Liberty Bell," 1896's "Stars and Stripes Forever," and 1897's "Entry of the Gladiators." The bulky sousaphone-shaped controller coils around the body, and players wear white spat-like foot coverings fitted with sensors that monitor synchronized marching steps. As with the fret buttons on Guitar Hero's guitar peripheral, the sousaphone controller's three valves are color-coded to match on-screen notes the player must hit.

What's notable about this is that haptic game controllers are now familiar enough to be parodied. You can only get the joke if you're familiar with the Wii or Guitar Hero, and therefore can more clearly imagine how much something like Sousaphone Hero would suck.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, games

Haptics pay off

For Nintendo, anyway:

Nintendo Co. Ltd. zipped past Sony Corp. in market value on Monday and became one of Japan's top 10 issues for the first time, as it elbows the PlayStation maker out of its decade-long dominance of the game industry.

Nintendo has offered a slew of innovative and easy-to-use game software such as "Brain Age" and "Nintendogs" for its hardware in recent years, broadening the game-playing population beyond young males to women and the elderly.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, games, interface

The pearly gates of level 200 of Tetris

Observed on Flickr:

This slab is claimed to be the place where Jesus' body was prepared for burial. Superstitious Christians from around the world come here to kiss the stone and rub common-day items against the rock in order to "suck up" some sort of blessing or holiness.

You'll notice the kid is rubbing his Game Boy on the rock.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, games, religion

VERB Yellowball

On the heels of reading David Weinberger's piece on unique IDs, a friend sent me a link about VERB Yellowball.

VERB YELLOWBALL is a big, bouncy, world-changing idea that was created to spread play to every kid in America.

Here’s the deal. We’re scattering thousands of yellow balls all across the country. It’s up to you to find one, play with it, and most importantly, pass it on.

FIND ONE. Someone is bound to pass one to you. Can’t wait? Check out our “Pass It On” section.

PLAY WITH IT. However you want. Whenever you want. Just play.

WHEN YOU'RE DONE, ENTER THE CODE ON THE BALL AND BLOG YOUR STORY TO THE WORLD.

PASS IT ON. To a friend, or a kid you don’t even know. Pass it as far as you want. If you’re going on a trip, bring it with you. Remember, this is a revolution. And you are the messenger.

It's a bit like Where's George, in that part of the point of the game-- or meta-game?-- is to contribute to a record of the object's travels, and the system relies on each object having a unique ID that is linked to information about it. Though in this case, the purpose of the records (or the blogs for each ball) seems to be to encourage more use-- to get other users to play with the ball.

Not quite things that blog, but things that are blogged.

Not hard to imagine such objects connected to online games-- for example, putting objects that have magical properties in a game environment out in the real world.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, games, blogject, sports, unique ID

3D models from Second Life

This connects back to something I posted recently on rapid prototyping and education: Gizmodo reports on a new service that lets you create models of objects you create in Second Life:

Those amongst you who spend all your waking time on Second Life: rejoice! Simon Spartalian and Mike Beradino of Recursive Instruments are launching a milling service for SL users on June 1, so you can have actual physical representations of your avatar, builds or favorite SL objects made out of anything from foam to wax to stainless steel, up to 9”x5”x5”.

As 3pointd writes,

Part of the goal of the project is to bridge the virtual and the real “by developing a cultural authority in the virtual that till now has been reserved for the physical,” Spartialian says. The service will allow residents to create physical objects that can take on personal importance or perhaps even come to have financial weight around the edges of SL’s in-world markets.

The Recursive Instruments blog has lots of geeky goodness.

[hat tip to Jason]

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, games, manufacturing, printing, prototyping

Another meaning of always-on

And not such a good one. From Schneier:

When "Off" Doesn't Mean Off

According to the specs of the new Nintendo Wii (their new game machine), "Wii can communicate with the Internet even when the power is turned off."...[Security and ownership issues aside, w]hat's interesting here is that Nintendo is changing the meaning of the word "off." We are all conditioned to believe that "off" means off, and therefore safe. But in Nintendo's case, "off" really means something like "on standby."...

There's a serious security problem here, made worse by a bad user interface. "Off" should mean off.

Technorati Tags: games, privacy, security, ubicomp