Infrequently updated
musings vaguely inspired by my PhD project.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Don't make me think (about THAT)
 I'm fully aware that esteemed colleagues Mads and Martin believe that Usability is Not Enough. Me, however, I belong more to the It Would Be a Damn Fine Start school of thought. Here is my home doorbell system (a 2004 model). Right (TH) is left, and Left (TV) is right. Except for the ground floor where Right is right and Left is Left. Fair is foul and foul is fair...
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 31.10.04 1 comments
Friday, October 29, 2004
Game theory gone bad
Funny little film-clip from The Princess Bride (WMV, 5.5MB)
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 29.10.04 0 comments
Old news
"Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her." ("Of the Original Contract")
Asked David Hume, and that old debate seems as fresh as ever - at least it's a constant cause of disagreement among those interested in virtual worlds, e.g. this thread.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 29.10.04 0 comments
Thursday, October 28, 2004
7h3 d1574n7 50und 0f 7rump375
So they thought they could mainstream gaming, study it and lay bare all its secrets? Thought they could clean it up and make room for newcomers who would be judged on their merits alone? Well, they thought wrong ('they' often do). As always, the old-timers find ways of remaining exclusive. As is often the case this happens by inventing slang or even entire codes that only the initiated can negotiate safely. Leetspeek had to happen. Here's this blog in Leetspeek, courtesy of The l33t Surfer.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 28.10.04 0 comments
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Risk-free societies
I'm quite bored with the Disneyworld approach to social interaction strived for by several MMORPGs. I think I'm ready for something more PvP soon - and a bit of permadeath wouldn't hurt either. Also, it seems increasingly self-defeating to me to instate rules that roleplaying can never be an excuse to violate the be-nice rules of EULAs. I think my dream MMORPG would have PvP, permadeath (or at least something close) and an advancement system which made sure that even newbies could "physically" threaten experienced players. Oh, and now that I'm reading from the wish-list I would also like to see worlds in which choices actually had long-term consequences even if it meant upsetting carefully established gameplay balances. But I guess I've ranted on this before.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 27.10.04 0 comments
Monday, October 25, 2004
Jurassic Park
Friday, October 22, 2004
Gore
The Prince of Persia: Warrior Within demo shows the game to be: Excessively violent, too action-oriented for my tastes, and extremely, untastefully entertaining. The distorted guitars and heavy drums all add to what is perhaps one of the more truly baroque game experiences I've ever had.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 22.10.04 0 comments
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Free Culture
The SWG EULA makes it clear that: For any of your Content that is not a Derivative Content, you hereby exclusively grant and irrevocably assign to our licensors and us all rights of any kind or nature throughout the universe to such Content (including all ancillary and subsidiary rights thereto which include, without limitation, merchandising and interactive media rights) in any languages and media now known or not currently known. This seems a little limited, only this universe? What about parallel dimensions?
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 21.10.04 0 comments
Her highness
 Okay, no-one's going to tell me that's not Princess Leia herself (left side, under the trees). She's on Naboo, and to think that I sped right past her. The stories to tell one's grandchildren.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 21.10.04 3 comments
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Twinked!
Moving rapidly from frog-fighting street thug into the ranks of the newly rich, I met up with Chek in Star Wars Galaxies. Chek, being accomplished in the arcana of the game's mechanics was throwing around goodies like credits and a nice hover bike now residing comfortably in the... well, pocket of yours truly. Biking in the sunset I was given a great tutorial and was later taken to see the stately - postcardly situated - houses of certain esteemed game researchers. Oh, and Chek keeps some dragons around. And I think he is closer to the emperor than he cares to admit :-)
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 20.10.04 0 comments
The evolution of social software
In the past I've spent quite some time looking for exactly that - so here's Christopher Allen's Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 20.10.04 0 comments
The truth shall set me free
Which OS are You?Oh, my God - Miguel is Ret Hat Linux. Who would have thought? And Gonzalo is Debian Linux. I'm SO closed source compared to them. BTW, Martin is the Unix Core. (Via Mia)
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 20.10.04 1 comments
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Those who are about to die
 OK, I am easily impressed by fancy audiovisuals. So sue me. Trying out the Rome: Total War demo was not a nailbiting experience, but it sure was a pretty one. And the war elephants... you've got to love those war elephants.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 19.10.04 1 comments
Monday, October 18, 2004
The distant sound of drums pounding away on some hilltop
I just made the first full printout of the entire draft for our book. It adds up to 304 pages, and as we were aiming for 300 one can only conclude that the Old Ones must be on our side.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 18.10.04 0 comments
Sunday, October 17, 2004
The Crusade against intelligence
 Wired continues the story about The Crusade Against Evolution rightly noting that This is an issue, of course, that was supposed to have been settled long ago.Is the evolution of human beings (or other organisms) by natural selection a proven fact? No. Is it a theory backed by a crushing yet increasing weight of evidence likely to convince anyone but the most hardened anti-materialist? Oh yes. I'm so glad to live in Denmark where that debate could never occur.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 17.10.04 0 comments
Saturday, October 16, 2004
The architectures of thought
Believe it or not, when I wrote my master's thesis " The Architectures of Trust" concerned with ways in which behaviour could be regulated by code (essentially) I had never read a word by Lawrence Lessig. Indeed, I remember first paying attention to his name in march 2003. Odd then, that when I recently read Lessig's Code cover-to-cover (5 years too late) his main argument and particularly his terminology seemed curiously like my own (even if his main interest is different from mine). There is little question that he says things more clearly than I - and even less doubt that he used the phrase "architectures of trust" long before me - but still, I'm curious as to 1) Why didn't I know of this book? (why didn't anyone tell me?) and 2) How did I come so close to his theory/terminology without hearing it spelled out? Conspiracy?, self-deception? I'm guessing: The memes did it.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 16.10.04 0 comments
Thoughtful
nowuseit.com :: it's about excitabilityCo-candidate Martin on his fashionable - if constantly morphing - nowuseit.com mentions the "potential dangers of usability culture". This is a topic which I used to be rather obsessed with as an undergraduate, going as far as to write a largely misunderstood student paper entitled "The Disenfranchised User". In this underestimated masterpiece I argued that usability is wonderful in the short term but the requirement that users must not (for the love of God!) think may have dire consequences (insert, in the background, the shrill sound of high-pitch violins) in the long term. But it all depends on your conceptualization of IT - if IT is like electricity we have little reason to be concerned with the relative ignorance of users (or if we do, it takes someone more STS than me to realize it) but if IT is like a communicative infrastructure the design of which has large-scale consequences for both private and public life then we may not want to resign ourselves to ignorance, no matter how blissful in the short term.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 16.10.04 2 comments
Friday, October 15, 2004
And so it ends
 I've just finished (well...) a paper on trust in multiplayer gaming for an anthology on game culture. Now I can clean my mind of all things trust-related and go on to something easily defined and simple to measure - power :-)
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 15.10.04 0 comments
Abandon all hope
Luhmann writes that trust... "always bears upon a critical alternative, in which the harm resulting from a breach of trust may be greater than the benefit to be gained from the trust proving warranted. Hence one who trusts takes congnizance of the possibility of excessive harm arising from the selectivity of others' actions and adopts a position towards that possibility. One who hopes simply has confidence despite uncertainty. Trust reflects contingency. Hope ignores contingency". As an example, Luhmann says that leaving your child with a babysitter is not a case of trust but of hope. I'm experiencing absolute uncertainty as to my selection between multiple interpretations. What, I beg you, does he mean?
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 15.10.04 0 comments
Thursday, October 14, 2004
The World will have to do
The game center gets a writeup at BBCs The World. My attention was caught a statement by one Jonas Schmidt:
"It was weird to think that there would be some sort of payoff for all of the hours spent,” Smith says. “You know, telling our parents this, but they didn’t believe us. They should see this.”
The depth of wisdom within this one sentence, not to mention its daring position on the issue of internal coherence, boggles the mind.
In one of the pictures my office mate can be seen hard at work doing basic research.
But seriously, it's a nice piece. There's supposed to be a companion webcast but I can't seem to find a working URL.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 14.10.04 0 comments
Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner's Dilemma
Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner's DilemmaSouthampton people have bested Tit-for-Tat in a repeated PD with a somewhat ingenious setup. Although they won fair and square, in a sense they didn't respect the spirit of the game in which strategies are meant to compete (not their mastermind makers). TfT's original success was of course highly dependent on the actual setup of the tournament so beating it in some sort of repeated PD is not so sensational.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 14.10.04 0 comments
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
From the depths
 Having other mysterious business in the basement my wife hinted that it might be time for my illustrious Amiga 500 to again see the light of day (as long as it happened somewhere else). So now it's all packed and ready to make the (entirely manageble) trip to the ITU - complete with semi-functional RGB cable and all. I guess it would attract some streed cred to start of with " This dissertation was written on a pearly white Commodore Amiga". Then again, maybe not. And it really isn't all that pearly after all these years in the basement. But at least we'll finally get to see who's the real Speedball II champion. I ce cream, ice cream!
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 13.10.04 0 comments
Modding
Degrees of evil
Blogging from your email client is a sweet little feature. But I'm wondering... it seems that Firefox has no problem reading the pseudo-HTML produced by Outlook. Now, I realize of course that MS-HTML is evil, but how evil is it? Will there be subsequent punishment? Will future generations curse my laziness? Any thought? Anyone?
(Sent from Outlook)
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 13.10.04 0 comments
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Do you trust this definition?
It seems that all articles dealing with cheating must start out by saying that the phenomenon has not been studied before. Similarly, it would appear that all researchers working with trust have made a pact to always begin by emphazising the difficult and elusive nature of trust. Trust, or so they claim, is extraordinarily hard to define and particularly multifaceted. I think there is some mystification going on here. But the confusion is genuine when it comes to whether artifacts or arrangements (such as contracts, police forces etc.) can be said to eliminate the need for trust or should be seen as features which in fact increase trust (in most cases). The former position (the one most often found in sociological accounts as opposed to economic ones) hinges on the idea that trusting means putting one at the mercy of someone else. But I think there are two problems here: 1) We are led to assume that people trust indiscriminately. But people base their trust on all sorts of signals even they don't carry around actual contracts. 2) A contract is in fact a way of putting yourselves at the mercy of someone else (you specifically make that person able to sue you should you fail to uphold your part of the bargain). A contract merely makes the mercy aspect work both ways at the same time. So, I think the latter version makes more sense. If you and I conduct business through a bank then we (can) trust each other even if the bank plays a role in securing that trust.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 12.10.04 0 comments
Look to the East
The Japanese IGDA chapter have translated my Computer Game Research 101 ( original/ Japanese version). Hmm... I guess I should update that article... in a perfect world...
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 12.10.04 0 comments
The road to Jedihood
 I've been interacting with the intergalactic locals for a few weeks now. Star Wars Galaxies is interesting enough in some respects but low-level missions quickly become quite painful and I'm having trouble in fact finding other players to socialize with. Moderately multiplayer?
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 12.10.04 0 comments
The distant sound of trumpets
I suppose resistance is futile so here's the long underdue tentatively research related web log. Just what the world needs.
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 12.10.04 0 comments
Monday, October 11, 2004
The world is changing... I feel it in the water... testing... testing...
posted by Jonas Heide Smith # 11.10.04 0 comments
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