Access Controller now shipping for PS2/PS3/PC - Hack a Day
"[Ben Heckendorn]’s Access Controller is now shipping. The controller is designed to be used with just one hand. It has six openings that the five control modules can be placed in. It’s easy to reconfigure depending on the player or game. While the prototype was built using Xbox 360 controller parts, this newly released unit is available for the PS2, PS3, and PCs. The Xbox 360 version is still being reviewed for final production. [Ben] says that in the coming weeks he’ll post a how-to for building your own modules. There’s always one empty slot and the bus like design should make this fairly simple."
The Play Generated Map and Document Archive
"PlaGMaDA's mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space. The Archive will solicit, collect, describe, and publicly display these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right. By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations. "
Pentagon Researcher Unveils Warcraft Terror Plot | Danger Room from Wired.com
"I'm in ur base, killin' ur manz."
Matt Farrell: Jesus Christ. It's a fire sale.Epic.]]>
John McClane: What?
Matt Farrell: It's a fire sale.
Deputy Director Miguel Bowman: Hey! We don't know that yet.
Taylor: And it's a myth anyway. It can't be done.
Matt Farrell: Oh, it's a myth? Really? Please tell me she's only here for show and she's actually not in charge of anything.
John McClane: What's a fire sale?
Matt Farrell: It's a three-step... it's a three-step systematic attack on the entire national infrastructure. Okay, step one: take out all the transportation. Step two: the financial base and telecoms. Step three: You get rid of all the utilities. Gas, water, electric, nuclear. Pretty much anything that's run by computers which... which today is almost everything. So that's why they call it a fire sale, because everything must go.
Nevermind being addicted to pop-science. If games are a series of meaningful choices, what does this mean?
Scientists, We Need Your Swords! -- Bohannon 320 (5874): 312b -- Science - Annotated
On May 9-11, the first scientifc conference will be held in World of Warcraft. Awesome!
The Errantry Team is pleased to announce the launch of its website, www.errantrythegame.com, and at last join the ranks of its website having brethren, RagnaRøkk and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom.
Precipitated by the short march to the Indiecade submission deadline this Friday, April 11th, www.errantrythegame.com will host all things Errantry related, including screenshots, movies, an executable, as well as guides on how to use your wiimote to on your PC or Mac, as well as a plethora of links to resources the team has found helpful during the process of developing a game with Wiimote technology.
As we enter the festival season, the Errantry Team would like to solicit the opinions of the IMD community on how to best improve our web-presence and the appearance of our website, either by direct mail or a comment left on our site (which will help stress-test its infrastructure).]]>
Now instruments are of various sorts; some are living, others lifeless; in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument; for in the arts the servant is a kind of instrument. Thus, too, a possession is an instrument for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments.Tied in with this are a series of antitheses, between master and slave, soul and body, man and woman, natural slave or slave by law, and so on. Without misinterpreting his point too egregiously, it seems that Aristotle settles on a definition of slavery which runs thusly: a natural slave possess reason, but will, and can therefore conduct human (as opposed to bestial) labors and duties, while still being dependent on his master's soul fully animate his volition. It's not entirely successful as first principals go, because then along come slaves by law or custom, such as debtors or prisoners of war, who were freemen, fully possessed of their own volition. This becomes further embarrassing when these slaves by law are Greeks, and therefore ought to know better than to have let themselves owe so much money, or surrender in battle, etc. Having arrived at a set of natural conditions for slavery which are immediately complicated by the customary conditions, Aristotle's definition fails to reconcile the two. Much, as I suspect, we will fail to reconcile the difference between a sufficiently advanced semi-intelligent machine created to serve us, and a truly intelligent machine put to human use. At some point, lacking a proper definition, the distinction breaks down, which is why we need a set of ethics. The problem is, this is one of those unresolved philosophical problems. I'd like to stick in the fairly safe and philosophically minded realm of antique slavery, because frankly, it is safe. A lot of people think that Classics is a field where one studies what dead white men wrote about dead white men, and while that's not strictly true, what racism is present in antique history is at least abstracted away from the current world, invested with customs that aren't familiar or widespread to modern (ca. 1500 CE and forward) notions of slavery, and importantly, not racially based. While it is possible to see a parallel between Aristotle's "natural slave/legal slave" and a chattel slave/indentured servant in the early history of the Americas, it is still possible to divorce the former from questions of race at least on an abstract level, while the latter distinction is driven by race at its very core. That's not an issue that I am equipped to deal with, but then I'm not equipped to deal with the creation of AI or deep-seated philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence. Not yet at least. Additionally, slavery in the classical world could take forms we are unaccustomed to thinking about when we think of slavery today. A Roman, for instance might own a Greek slave who was better educated than he, who in turn would raise his master's children or run a business for his master. A gladiator could expect to die relatively quickly in his profession, and yet he might be treated like a modern rock star, being feasted and bedded in order to maintain his happiness, and thus ensure the quality of his performance in the arena. These are, of course, gross oversimplifications, but they form the broad outlines of slavery as an everyday condition that we are unfamiliar with. Further muddying the matter is second half of one of Aristotle's antitheses, that just as some are born slaves, others are born masters; that there is an art and science to the rule of intelligent being. While it would be easy to leap to hysterics and couple the concept "natural" mastery with modern notions of race in order to arrive at the verboten concept of a master race, it is also an entirely too heated (and thoroughly disproven) chain of logic. Of relevance and use to us now is the question of how the perception of mastery alters the "master" class. Just how much does power corrupt, and through what means? This question is an extension of a familiar one, that of "how are we shaped by the everyday use of our devices?" But again, in anticipation of the shift from "device" to intelligence, how will we be shaped by participating in a culture of use or cooperation with these "things," for lack of a better word. We already have some experience with non-human intelligences, although to what extent they are intelligent is certainly up for debate. Somewhere back in the stack of unpublished posts for this blog I have an essay on Elephants, and whether or not they can play games. It was prompted by a video similar to this one: We've already begun the process of exploring how to interact with non-human intelligences, things which think in ways fundamentally different from our own. Whether you or I think in the same way beyond a shared language is certainly open to debate: I'm willing to wager no, given my own relative stupidity and the diversity of "intelligences" they teach you about in grade school, like kinesthetic vs. spatial vs. musical vs. verbal learning and so on. Not to mention neurodiversity. Libraries worth of bad science fiction have been devoted to the topic, while a few shelves worth of books seem to have broached the subject intelligently. We're starting to explore it more in our natural world , as we try to get an empirical grip on what cognition actually is, but all the while we hold ourselves out above animals, and with good reason. Those lines of reasoning, however, cannot begin to prepare us for what happens when we finally through the switch or push the slinky down the first step on its path towards intelligence. So, succintly, these are the issues I'm curious about exploring: what is an intelligence? When will we know it when we see it? How will we treat it? How should we treat it? How will we be changed by how we treat it? What are some of the precedents for these issues? Obviously, this is a thought experiment, and more than a little crazy. It will likely be 20 years before any of these issues begin to really thrust up beyond the horizon. So I'd like to learn more about the issues involved. I was told this could be a book, but I 'm not sure that's the best use of the next two years of my life, even if a publisher were interested. I certainly think it could be a paper, and I could probably get the abstract done in class. In unpacking the problem, there are a few angles I'd like to explore, namely how to anticipate an AI, how a slave society conducted itself (and collapsed) in the Graeco-Roman world, how those paradigms are relevant to us, how the roots of this future problem are taking shape today, and what the proposed ethics of an AI-dependent culture would actually be. Once we have them, how will it be ethical to use them for entertainment in games? Will we be compelled to ask them nicely to play with us? From a game design perspective (to ratchet this all back), I often think the answer of "well, story (or problem X) is hard, but someday we'll be able to plug an AI in there, which will solve everything for us" is a lazy one. AI may not be the best thing to design for, and good designs may come from designing around the need for AI. Likewise, a human-like AI may not be the most interesting AI players will want to interact with: perhaps something closer to HAL 9000, or a complex system that seems possess everything but intelligence, like an ecosystem. Imagine building a game around the Gaia hypothesis, only rather than being a complex emergent system, there was some spark of volition behind it all? Pulling back yet another step, this time towards answering what to make of the web and its impact on games, how do these intelligences change when we move them away from a purely playful space and put them in the context of virtual worlds and networks. We've spent a lot of time in the past playing with solipsism in our fiction as a culture, but are we prepared to anticipate networked solipsism, where liminal bounds break down, and once erased, the context for thought makes it impossible to distinguish the quality of that thought? I'm not sure where I'm leading with any of this, except that there are a number of exciting areas I'd like to plumb a little more before I pick a direction. So I'd like to ask for recommendations on books, authors, topics, articles, and what-have-you in order to help get my head around the problem, and once there, I'll ask again about actually tackling it. I already have Weizenbaum's book on Peggy's recommendation for a starting point, but I'd like to get as broad a sampling as possible. I am nothing if not a fan of syncretism. ]]>
A quick head's up: there's a 10th anniversary screening of The Big Lebowski 7:30 PM Saturday, March 29th at The Egyptian.
I'd post more details or a link, but The Egyptian's website is pokey at the moment.
As a media scholar, I can only offer the following postulate: whatever cinema started in the early 20th century reached its apotheosis with this film at the end.