The Marriage
“In early 2006 my thinking on the matter had narrowed to two areas. One was seeking a unique artistic form for games and the second was categorizing game creation…The Marriage addresses the first area of seeking a unique art form through games…The challenge as I saw it was to have the primary medium of expression something unique to games. So it couldn’t be a story for example, because stories can be told by other mediums. It couldn’t be a poem or sounds because they also have other counterparts. In other words I didn’t want to limit games to being a hybrid art form.”
So, now we have artists ‘discovering’ games, and game designers ‘discovering’ art. Could you imagine the catastrophe if these two sides ever should meet? Wow.
March 19, 2007
Shock! Awe! New blog software.
Where’s the blog? (you may [or may not] ask)
Well, I’ve finally broke down…Greymatter, which has served me well over many, many (indeed too many) years, just doesn’t have the stuff anymore. I stuck with it for ages, mostly because over the course of time, I knew its structure inside and out, and could customize it any way I wanted. Also, it didn’t use a cumbersome database. Sadly, what finally made me quit…no RSS feed. Which I’ll need for a new (secret project). Sigh.
So I’m switching over to Wordpress. Why Wordpress? Well, because it took me 2 min to install it to my home directory, and create an entirely kluged template from my old site, without having to redesign the site.
To be honest, I still like the site design.
So, a thousand pardons while I update, tweak, etc. And please don’t be alarmed that nothing quite…works…yet.
March 17, 2007
Deconstructing the pencil
Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Derrida, but I just find this terribly funny:
“A pencil is based on a contradiction between two opposing concepts: one of control and the other of freedom. A pencil provides a way to control the distribution of lead by encasing it in wood which protects the lead from easily breaking. This aspect of pencil is contradicted by another aspect, which is that it must allow the users to freely sharpen it with a knife. For this reason, the support material for pencil cannot be too hard, or it becomes useless. A pencil therefore exists with two contradicting forces of control and freedom.” (via dyske)
March 10, 2007
Cory Doctorow: The Totalitarian Urge
It still kills me somewhat to hear of cool things going on at SFU: like the 2007 FAS Leonardo Lecture by Cory Doctorow “The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards”:
“Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.”
Fortunately, the audio file is now online.