GAMES: WHY ?

Preface note: after reading articles from the RSF: bloggers guide and recent national and international attempts of online filtering, I feel a little worried about dissing the US army. Especially since they were the first organisation to actually instigate the internet, hehehe.

Also this post is still all over the place, but until I put it up I won’t know how best to edit it.

What a great idea: Lets promote war to the next generation...

PROPAGANDA? The US Army has a recruitment strategy to target the next generation via a free online game called America's Army. "Players undertake their first tour of duty alongside fellow soldiers and, without leaving home, experience something of life as a soldier in the army."

"The developers claim that the game is played by several million players. According to a survey, the game had between 3,000 and 6,000 players online simultaneously from 2002 until 2005."

a little link in the left hand corner.

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So what does this say about gamers?
Has the US Army realised the power and potential of the gaming generation? (that's a bit obvious I think)

lets just smash you with the JUICY facts!

GAMING: 2005
Is a $28 billion industry worldwide.
Around 10 million people worldwide play at least one of the 350 so
massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like Everquest.

Phone games: 2003 sales around $587 million but are projected to grow
to $2.6 billion by the end of 2005.
First-day sales of Micrsoft's Xbox game Halo 2 were $125 million.

"You can't ignore an industry when people queue to buy a game at midnight because they are so desperate to play it… Nobody queues for music anymore."
Kevin Roberts, CEO Saatchi & Saatchi.

The average gamer age is 28 yrs old.

August, 2006, World Of Warcraft (WOW) 6million subscribers.

March, 2008 = 7,007,917

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

Why do people love games?

Entertainment

interaction

disorientation and

intrigue

backed by the projection that technology will compensate for the physical disorientation.
The activation of the right side of the brain.

To dream

To be lost

Emotionally appealling

suspensful

a connection with virtual surrounds.
Immediate surroundings affect emotions

the senses

a personal journey of fluctuating sensations.

Appreciation of the human scale

To surprise and delight.

Anonymity

To be whoever you want whenever you want.
Socially

To be a part of or act out a team member, leader or group.

Maybe gamers want to go against or escape Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexual desire or libido as the primary motivational energy of human life. Until some one can link libido to gaming.

The power of the story: the emotion of the narrative.

Story telling at its peak infuses drama, intimacy, mystery and the senses all on high alert. But don't forget they don't have to be first hand experiences at all. Stories are emotional by nature. They give us perspective and they inspire us to action.
"The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action, while reason leads to conclusions."

What people want:
CHOICE

INTERACTION and thus FREEDOM.

We like most of all to do several things at the same time.

We want great stories.

example of a World Of War Craft story: from Wikipedia

Corrupted Blood plague incident on WOW:

The Corrupted Blood plague incident was one of the first events to affect entire servers. Patch 1.7 saw the opening of Zul'Gurub, the game's first 20-player raid dungeon where players faced off against an ancient tribe of jungle trolls under the sway of the ancient Blood God, Hakkar the Soulflayer. Upon engaging Hakkar, players were stricken by a debuff (a spell that negatively affects a player) called "Corrupted Blood" which would periodically sap their life. The disease would also be passed on to other players who were simply standing close to an infected person. Originally this malady was confined within the Zul'Gurub instance but made its way into the outside world by way of hunter or warlock pets that contracted the disease.

Within hours Corrupted Blood had infected entire cities such as Ironforge and Orgrimmar because of their high player concentrations. Low-level players were killed in seconds by the high-damage disease. Eventually Blizzard fixed the issue so that the plague could not exist outside of Zul'Gurub.

The corrupted blood plague so closely resembled the outbreak of real-world epidemics that scientists are currently looking at ways MMORPGs or other massively-distributed systems can model human behavior during outbreaks. The reaction of players to the plague closely resembled previously hard-to-model aspects of human behavior that may allow researchers to more accurately predict how diseases and outbreaks spread amongst a population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft

To be edited and continued...

visually taste some online games at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaTzJSFwqwI

to Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents from www.rsf.org

www.ppadesign.com 

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Do something good by creating your blog with us

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

www.ppadesign.com

Restraints on freedom of the press...

RSF to protest cyber-censorship every March 12

The Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) – an international media watchdog –will organise activities on every March 12 to condemn cyber-censorship throughout the world.

The RSF is calling on Internet users to protest online from 11am on March 12 to 11am on March 13 against nine countries that are “Internet enemies”. Anyone with Internet access will be able to create an avatar, choose a message for their banner and take part in one of the cyber-demos taking place in Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, North Korea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.

“ ... We are giving all Internet users the opportunity to demonstrate,” an RSF statement said on Wednesday. There are 15 countries on the RSF list of “Internet Enemies”. They are Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

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A higher index indicates more restraints on freedom of the press.

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above: Worldwide press freedom index
2007 press freedom rankings

RWB compiles and publishes an annual ranking of countries based upon the organization's assessment of their press freedom records. Small countries, such as Malta, and Andorra, are excluded from this report. The 2007 list was published on 16 October 2007.

The report is based on a questionnaire sent to partner organisations of Reporters Without Borders (14 freedom of expression groups in five continents) and its 130 correspondents around the world, as well as to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.[4]

The survey asks questions about direct attacks on journalists and the media as well as other indirect sources of pressure against the free press. RWB is careful to note that the index only deals with press freedom, and does not measure the quality of journalism. Due to the nature of the survey's methodology based on individual perceptions, there are often wide contrasts in a country's ranking from year to year. The ranking also states it takes into account pressure on journalists by non-governmental groups, for example the Basque terrorist group ETA in Spain or the Mafia in Russia, can pose serious threats to press freedom.
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Press freedom

RWB was founded in Montpellier, France in 1985. At first, the association was aimed at promoting alternative journalism, but before the failure of their project, the three founders stumbled on disagreements between themselves [1]. Finally, only Robert Ménard stayed and became its Secretary General. Ménard changed the NGO's aim towards freedom of press [1].

Reporters Without Borders states that it draws its inspiration from Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to which everyone has "the right to freedom of opinion and expression" and also the right to "seek, receive and impart" information and ideas "regardless of frontiers." This has been re-affirmed by several charters and declarations around the world. In Europe, this right is included in the 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

Reporters Without Borders is a founding member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, a virtual network of non-governmental organisations that monitors free expression violations worldwide and defends journalists, writers and others who are persecuted for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

In 2005, Reporters Without Borders shared the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought with Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and Cuba's Ladies in White movement.[2]

Over the years, RWB has published several books to raise public awareness of threats to press freedom around the world. A recent publication is the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents,[3] which was launched in September 2005. The handbook provides technical tips on how to blog anonymously and avoid censorship. It includes contributions from renowned blogger-journalists Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders

Toshio Iwai: interface instigator

www.ppadesign.com 

"I've been longing for the feeling of my childhood in the digital world and that is why I've been sticking to relations among media, machine(s), and people through interactive works."
Iwai quote from: http://www.dcaj.org/oldgp/97awards/english/person/person01.htma

Iwai is the first internationally-recognized gallery artist also to have lead the creation of several successful commercial videogame projects. This cross-disciplinary ability typifies Iwai's career.^[11]

Iwai's first game was the musical shoot 'em up Otocky (1987), produced in association with ASCII Corporation for the Famicom Disk System, an add-on for the NES available only in Japan.^[12] The game is notable for being the first to include creative/procedural generative music. Through association with different game mechanics and player actions, the game plays quantized-in-time musical notes in a variety of digitally synthesized voices. Otocky is a precursor of Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi's 2002 Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 game exploring similar themes of player action and musical evolution.^[13]

Later, leveraging work done on the installation art project Music Insects at San Francisco's Exploratorium, Iwai created another sound-based game for the Super Famicom system called Sound Fantasy.^[11] In the game animated insects traverse a grid containing colored dots. As the insects pass over the dots, musical scales, sounds, and graphical effects are triggered. The player can select colors from a palette and paint on the grid, triggering new results and changing the insects’ direction, improvising a visual music performance.^[14] However, the game's release was cancelled and it was eventually converted into the PC title SimTunes, published by Maxis, a division of Electronic Arts.^[1][15]

Iwai's acclaimed Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS was released in Japan in 2005 and in Europe and North America in 2006.^[16] A suite of ten different interactive music and audio toys themed around cartoon plankton and using the novel touchscreen and microphone interface features of the Nintendo DS, Electroplankton draws heavily on Iwai's earlier work, including Composition on the Table.^[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Iwai#_note-mmcagrandprixprofile

youtube video of Iwai at @ArtFutura05
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQq2aXvIsz4
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Others in the field of Technology/Multimedia/art/interface:
Gregory Barsamian:
http://www.gregorybarsamian.com

YouTube - Gregory Barsamian animatronic

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Paul De Marinis:
urzhiata.emoc.org/General/p3

YouTube - One Bird - Paul De Marinis

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Heidi Kumao:
http://www.heidikumao.net/



Heidi Kumao is an interdisciplinary artist who creates video and machine art to explore ordinary social interactions and their psychological underpinnings. Working at the intersection of sculpture, theater and engineering, she creates “performative technologies.” These devices are designed to re-enact an event, perform a task for the viewer, or mediate her roles as a woman.
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Ellen Zweig:http://www.ezweig.com/

ELLEN ZWEIG is an artist who works with text, audio, video, performance and installation. In her installations, she uses optics to create camera obscuras, video projection devices, and miniature projected illusions.

http://astro.temple.edu/~sdrury/speakers/zweigBio.html
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hopefully with time this list will continue to grow.

www.ppadesign.com

Sydney: free taxi ride from tour NZ

Have you seen these taxis around? apparently they give free rides, but is anything free?

Marketing has hit Sydney streets. You've seen cars with adverts over them but have you been in a free taxi that advertise inside during your journey?

New Zealand Tourism is all about being green and gold at this time of year - so take a free ride in one of these 5 “cabs” in Brisbane and Sydney over the next six weeks and learn all about it. This program, designed by Play Communication for NZ Tourism is designed to tie in with the current TVC and highlights a great way to create synergy across your marketing promotions, by having all elements tell a similar story. In a further push to highlight the ‘green’ nature of the program, ‘Toyota Prius’ were used as the donor vehicles.

website: http://www.autoskin.net.au/
marketing: http://www.playcommunication.com.au/
campaign: http://www.newzealand.com/travel/Australia/

Klein, Dytham & Technology

www.ppadesign.com 

www.ppadesign.com

Klein Dytham architecture (KDa) is a multi-disciplinary design practice active in the design of architecture, interiors, and public spaces and installations. Established by Royal College of Art graduates Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein in Tokyo at the dawn of the 90s, KDa is today a multi-lingual office with an increasingly visible international profile and client list.

KDa's base in Tokyo provides constant source of inspiration and creative energy.

The Japanese thirst for the new, a sensitivity to material and detail in crafting, and an ever-changing urban environment nourish KDa's ideas and production.

KDa spans east and west, offering the freshness of vision that only an outside perspective can bring.

www.ppadesign.com

This was the first time mobile phone technology had been used any where in the world in such an interactive way with a large scale outdoor advertisement.

Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 11.2000:

Japan is a country in love with mobile phones and the lifestyles they make possible.

Tapping into this demand for anytime-anywhere interactivity this temporary hoarding was built in Harajuku the heart of Tokyo's youth fashion zone. Virgin Atlantic Airways asked us to develop an innovative visability campaign for them.

iFly Virgin Wonderwall was a 20-meter-long LED ticker-tape display set into a wall of bright red acrylic. One general knowledge question appeared on the wall each hour of each day.

Passers by with web enabled i-mode phones could answer the quiz by connecting to the campaign website. At the end of each hour entrants telephones automatically received an e-mail notifying them if they had answered the question correctly, and whether or not they had won a prize.

- www.ppadesign.com

play with data

Marunouchi, Tokyo 9.2002:

Financial data and financial news, by its nature, is a very dry affair - well to most of us who are not in the financial world.

Bloomberg is about communication and information - and we had to find away to showcase this in away which would appeal to all age groups - all walks for life in this very public space opposite Tokyo Station in the new heart of Maruonuchi.

Bloomberg harvests information data from all around the world - and processes it into a very pure and understandable form.
We felt that for this showcase for Bloomberg everybody should process and play with data it in a very tangable and touchable way.
In the very early stages of the project we invited Toshio Iwai to collaborate with us on this project. Iwai is one of the world's leading artists in interface design and has a knack for demystifying computers and data.

A pure white element in the space allows clouds of information to condense. Something like an icicle suspended from the ceiling where data magically forms. Ice of course is pure and very cool, but ICE can be also interpreted as Interactive Communication Experience
In its resting mode with no one interacting with it stock tickers are expressed in a fun and easily understandable way. If the stock is up the stock sign swells - if it drops the stock shrinks and drops below the line.
When you approach ICE the infrared sensors behind the 5.0m x 3.5m glass wall detect your presence and you begin to interact with the data. You don't actually have to touch the glass - the sensors detect you from about 500mm away.
A menu scrolls down the screen giving you 4 play options, a digital harp, a digital shadow, a digital wave and digital volley ball. Go play!

- www.ppadesign.com
walk in screen
Ginza, Tokyo 10.2005

Ginza - Tokyo's Fifth Avenue, Oxford Street, main drag...whatever label you give it, Ginza is the commercial heart of Tokyo, even of Japan. It is also the byword for luxury and class. In　recent years, flagship stores of global luxury brands have been sprouting all along the Ginza, including Louis Vuitton, Prada, Hermes, Dior, Tiffanys, Apple and Chanel. And now there is Uniqlo - Japan's most famous casual clothing brand.

These buildings function essentially as walk-in advertisements. They conjure desirable images to wrap around their products, aiming to grab attention and admiration (and sales). Walking down the Ginza is like strolling through a glossy magazine - and these buildings are the ads. These brand images are largely communicated through the facades, which increasingly resemble screens. The Chanel store uses a facade composed of hundreds of thousands of LEDs - a high-res building-sized video screen.

All rights for www.Klein-Dytham.com
www.klein-dytham.com

www.ppadesign.com

Video conferencing: what? when? how?

The technology is here now and it's been here for a while, but how do we embrace it?

Maybe we need to adapt to it or maybe the technologies interface needs to be more human?

Yes we can save time and money but can we still keep our relations the same?

www.ppadesign.com

Video conferencing: at last a good alternative to travel?

Video conferencing has been around for a surprisingly long time. AT&T ran the first call in 1927. Since then, pundits have been consistently predicting that video conferencing was just about to take off. They have been wrong for eighty years. Why should we believe the techno-optimists now?

In the last year, several companies have launched video conferencing products that provide an experience similar to real meetings. The quality is surprising and even sceptics have begun to see the advantages of using a meeting room for an hour rather than spending three days going to Hong Kong and back. Cisco’s Telepresence product is generating enthusiasm that is tempered by the enormous costs of setting up the equipment and providing the bandwidth. But the company says that prices will fall dramatically over the next few years.

Is this going to be enough to get people out of planes? The signs are good. Even low bandwidth alternatives suitable for home use are getting praise from the experts. So if Cisco doesn’t make video conferencing work, Bay Area start-ups like VSee will probably start eating into the market for lower cost products.

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Video conferencing: why we need it to work
UK companies are increasingly promising ‘carbon neutrality’ to their stakeholders. Electricity consumption can be neutralised by the purchase of energy from renewable sources. Gas is more difficult to counter-balance, but is a small element in most firms’ carbon emissions.

Carbon produced by travel is an increasingly important part of the budget of most large companies. Amongst the very largest companies, business flights dominate the total emissions from employee travel. And as air travel is perceived to get more time-consuming, stressful and unproductive, some companies are beginning to investigate much more extensive use of video conferencing. Other than investing in dubious ‘offsetting’ projects, video conferencing may be the most plausible way of beginning to hold down the apparently inexorable rise in air travel.

The previous generation of video conferencing products are widely regarded as wholly unsuitable replacements for meetings. The experience seems to be that only groups well know to each other with similar professional backgrounds can work around the deficiencies in older conferencing products. The new generation of video conferencing, universally called ‘telepresence’, is clearly a huge advance on the old systems. First reports from companies that have installed the expensive technology are extremely favourable. The computing press reports a Wachovia bank executive saying that telepresence suites were already in use 45% of the time within two months of installation. The previous kit had never got above 20%. Tate and Lyle is quoted as saying that the new service makes good financial sense because the typical trip between the UK and US headquarters costs $25,000 and three days of senior executive time.

Video conferencing still has a long way to go. I have only found two large UK companies that report their hours of video conferencing use: Pearson and Reed Elsevier. Both companies are diversified publishing companies with widely dispersed operations and very high levels of air travel per employee. Pearson employees travel an average of 4,000 miles a year by air, down slightly last year but still rising at approximately 1% a year over a longer period. Air travel represents over two thirds of all business travel. The company used its video conferencing suites for a total of 9,000 hours last year, up significantly in 2006, but still a tiny fraction of the time spent travelling by air. The average employee spend less than 20 minutes in video conferencing last year. The time taken to travel the average 4,000 miles by air was probably the best part of a working week.

The air travel of Reed employees was up 5% last year, and accounted for 45,000 tonnes of emissions or about a tonne and a half per employee. Its advanced ‘collaboration’ suites saved about 323 tonnes, or less than 1% of the air travel figure.

We are not going to stop the need for international collaboration. The general quality of these collaborations is widely thought to be poor, largely because people don’t spend enough time together. The impulse to travel more and more will remain unless we can really get video conferencing to work.

The problems with video conferencing
One source describes working with another person over a video conferencing link as being similar to collaborating with a ‘mentally defective foreigner’. What goes wrong?

• Audio needs to be synched with video. But sound is easier to process and tends to arrive first. If the voice reaches the listener too early, the speaker tends to be perceived as untrustworthy and glib. If an adjustment is made to correct this and the video arrives first, the remote person is seen as stupid and slow-witted.
• Social protocols demand that people look at each other directly. A conferencing system that gives the user an impression that his or her interlocutor is looking more than 3 degrees away from the eyes will make the user uncomfortable, and give an impression of disrespect.
• Successful oral communication demands rapid and seamless switching between people in the conversation. Bad videoconferencing makes this more difficult than in an audio call.
• Most clues to the speaker that he or she is boring the audience, confusing them or patronising them are non-verbal. For example, few people actually say that a conversation bores them; they give subtle and not so subtle clues to their conversation partner. Video conferencing prompts the bored person to offer these clues, but they are not received by the other person. The speaker does not adjust his or her communication style. Irritation ensues.
• Similarly, people implicitly expect video conferencing technologies to make their speech persuasive (which is one of the reasons why one wants to speak face-to-face). It does not and everybody finds the interchange unsatisfactory.

In summary, bad video is worse than no video. The availability of a picture sets up an expectation that normal free-flowing conversation is going to take place. So both parties behave as if they were in a conventional face-to-face meeting, in which verbal and non-verbal clues are being unconsciously processed. A phone conversation would have been better because we would have adjusted to the well-understood restrictions on our communications ability.

from website: http://www.carboncommentary.com/2007/10/29/38

www.ppadesign.com

In Schools & Universities?
Videoconference Classrooms
Video Conferencing Classrooms offer instructors the ability to teach classes to one or more remote sites using current classroom technology. Classes can be taught to any of the TWU campuses as well as many off-campus sites through the use of IP Technology.

from website: http://www.twu.edu/is/DentonCampus_classroomlabs_descriptions.htm

Don't have the infrastructure atm? why not test it out?

There are a range of conference rooms for hire, here is one example:

HB's Video Conferencing Products and Services Include:

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• Complete integrated video conferencing solutions
• Network applications (gateways, gatekeepers, MCU's)
• Video conference room rentals
• Videoconferencing demo facilities
• Long distance learning solutions
• Technical support and ongoing HB University online training

http://www.hbcommunications.com/vc_images/kcfrontwithtouch.jpg

www.ppadesign.com