After last year’s wiki novel, Penguin turns to non linear storytelling.

from the Penguin blog

…in a few weeks Penguin will be embarking on an experiment in storytelling (yes, another one, I hear you sigh). We’ve teamed up with some interesting folk (AKA Unfiction) and challenged some of our top authors to write brand new stories that take full advantage of the functionalities that the internet has to offer - this will be great writing, but writing in a form that would not have been possible 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. If you want to be alerted when this project launches sign up here - all will be revealed in March.

Looking forward..

(courtesy of if:book)

Keitai fictions, the compressed mobile novels, are one of my favorite mysterious topics. Mysterious because I couldn’t find one in a language other than Japanese (which I don’t understand). Last summer some Italian guy wrote a novel for mobile while going back and forth to work (see related post), claiming, actually he didn’t claim anything personally but Italian press did, that that was the first mobile novel ever. Now I read on if:book of a South African-born New York-resident writer Barry Yourgrau, who managed to break the Japanese market with his own keitai (keitai meaning ) stories. These stories can be read on Barry’s blog.
See the entire article on keitai fictions here.

I saw this book at some friends’ place and I thought it could be very inspirational, not only to architects but also to creators of locative/pervasive games (aren’t they “architects of participation” anyway, to extend O’Reilly’s expression?)

Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool, edited by Liane Lefaivre and Döll.

010 publishers says: Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool maps the continuing history of an urban design strategy for play in the city. Liane Lefaivre has developed a theoretical model for tackling playgrounds as an urban strategy. She steps off from a historical overview of play and the ludic in art, architecture and urban design, focusing particularly on the post-war playgrounds realized in Amsterdam as joint ventures between Aldo van Eyck, Cornelis van Eesteren and Jakoba Mulder.

(from “We Make Money, Not Art)

The computerized version of Guy Debord’s 1978 game Kriegspiel (Game of War) by RSG is available for download and can be played, although in beta version.
Debord designed the game as a “Clausewitz simulator”, to represent the totality of factors involved in war maneuvers, that Debord called “the dialectics of all conflict”. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord’s game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares.

Debord, forerunner as usual, decided in 1977 to give up film (”The cinema seems to me to be over”) to create a game, finally produced on cardboard with wood tiles in 1987.
Precious bibliography on the subject, from the RSG website:

Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, Le Jeu de la Guerre: Relevé des positions successives de toutes les forces au cours d’une partie (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Game of War (London: Atlas Press, 2007).
Guy Debord, Correspondance, volume V: janvier 1973 - décembre 1978 (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2005). Contains letters written by Debord during the period of creation and production of the game.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). Transcript of the film (his last) Debord created in the same year as the game. The film features images of the game.
Guy Debord, Panégyrique, tome premier (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). Debord’s pseudo-autobiography contains pictures and other references to the game and themes of war.
Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (Jonathan Cape : London 2001).
Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Tom McDonough, “Guy Debord, or The Revolutionary Without a Halo,” October 115 (Winter 2006): 39-45.
Keith Sanborn, “Postcards from the Berezina” in Napoleon, How to Make War (New York: Ediciones La Calavera, 1998).
Anthony Vidler, “Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented,” October 115 (Winter 2006): 13-30.
McKenzie Wark, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-2007 (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Includes a closing section on the game.
Stefan Zweifel, et al., eds., In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni–The Situationist International (1957-1972) (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006). This catalog contains one of the rare color photographs of the original 1978 game board.


this is a screenshot of the digital version, good work.
About RSG and their project: “We explore the contradiction between Debord, a symbol of radical politics and art in 1960s France, and the Napoleonic war game he created. In Debord’s own words the game was the only thing in his entire body of work that had any value. Was it nostalgia, or a vision of things to come?”
Founded in 2000, RSG is a collective of programmers and artists working on experimental software products.

Technorati Tags: educational, games

says Terranova, commenting on DGC 2008: The Future of MMOs

French President Sarkozy sent an sms to his ex-wife Cecilia before his marriage to singer/model Carla Bruni saying something like “If you come back, I’ll cancel everything”. The sms, once become public via usual gossip (printed) press, has been made into a song by Jeanne Cherhal and posted on her MySpace page.
So much for migration of content.

Quick link to Jenkins’ reflections on YouTube, WeTube, cross-posted to both Confessions of an Aca/Fan and Convergence Culture Consortium, commenting on the DYI Video Conference at the University of Southern California. A quote from the Chief:

“One of the things that has excited me about YouTube is the ways that it represents a shared portal where all of these different groups circulate their videos, thus opening up possibilities for cross-polination. Yet, as many at the conference suggests, the mechanisms of YouTube as a platform work to discourage the real exchange of work. YouTube is a participatory channel but it lacks mechanisms which might encourage real diversity or the exchange of ideas. The Forums on YouTube are superficial at best and filled with hate speech at worst, meaning that anyone who tries to do work beyond the mainstream (however narrowly this is defined) is apt to face ridicule and harrasment. The user-moderation system on YouTube, designed to insure the “best content” rises to the top, follow majoritarian assumptions which can often hide minority works from view. Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the way YouTube strips individual works from their larger contexts — this was an issue even here where “Closer,” a fanvid considered to be emotionally serious within slash fandom, drew laughter from a crowd which hadn’t anticipated this construction of same sex desire between Kirk and Spock. This conference, from its preplanning sessions which encouraged people from different communities to work together towards a common end, through the main conference screening which finally juxtaposed videos around shared themes rather than respecting the borders between different traditions, and through conference panels and hallway conversation and hands-on workshops, created a space where different DIY communities could learn from each other (and perhaps as importantly, learn to respect each other’s work).”

“Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.”
In a video of nineteen minutes Rheingold explains all about it, in a message of peace and optimism.

(courtesy of Robin Good)

Fresh from shipping a paper related to Facebook and social networks, I found this really interesting post on the convergence of virtual worlds and social networks on Terranova.

It stems from the following points:

1. Virtual worlds already ARE social networking sites of a sort.
2. Social networking sites provide profiles and buddy lists for your WHOLE life, not just your virtual one.
3. On social networking sites you play yourself, while in virtual worlds, you play someone else (well sort of).

and rouses the following questions

Is it a good idea to combine virtual worlds and social networking sites?
How should virtual worlds and social networking sites be integrated, if at all?

a somehow related post on Klastrup Cataclysms ponders on the debate on the difference between Communities and Networks, will write more about it later on.

Just read a post, saying that Kate, KateModern, killed at the end of the first season of the 35 million views’ TV soap from Bebo.com(the second season is consequently entitled “Who Killed Kate?”), was killed because “the audience didn’t fancy her”, said Bebo international president Joanna Shields. This used to happen in TV soaps as well, only now audience monitoring is almost simultaneous to broadcast. Is this a rising form of “passive interaction”?
More about definitions: this post calls KateModern “interactive video drama”.