Mssv

The last couple of episodes of In Our Time on Radio 4 have been particularly good. The first was on Pragmatism, not a topic that I initially had much interest in until I discovered that the philosophy of pragmatism, especially that of Charles Peirce, is rather close to what I support – unsurprising, given that [...]

Useful Ask Metafilter thread on finding a man-bag – increasingly a necessity in this world of digital cameras, iPods and Nintendo DSes. I read for the first time the word ‘murse’ in this thread, which is fun neologism.

School of Dreams by Edward Humes
My secondary school (or high school, for you American folks) was a rather pleasant private school in Birkenhead, across the water from Liverpool. You could make a fair argument for saying that it was the best secondary school in the area, although there were a few others that were close. [...]

Scientists, be on guard … ET might be a malicious hacker – nice to see people starting to think about the possibility of a viral attack by aliens. Doesn’t seem too outlandish to me (honestly) and brings to mind shades of Vernor Vinge.

Interesting Metafilter discussion about the Muslim niqab (dress for females that covers everything except the eyes)

I’m not sure why, but for some reason I’ve been going on a reading and writing spree in the past couple of weeks. It may have something to do with the fact that I’ve stopped playing Civilization 4 (at least until the patch comes out) – that saves an hour or two every night, but [...]

The proper title of this talk was ‘Through the Rabbithole: The history and potential of Alternate Reality Games’. It was presented at the 2005 Montreal International Games Summit and is an introduction to the alternate reality gaming genre.
Below is an essay based on notes that I prepared for the talk. It is not a transcript [...]

Astonishingly, for the second time in a single month, I’ve posted to the ‘massive’ section, with a rather wordy report on the Montreal International Games Summit. This is the conference where I spoke about ARGs, and discovered that there’s more to Montreal than the fact that they speak French there. It was a fun and [...]

NB: I’ll be putting up my presentation notes in the next few days.
As a game developer at the conference told me, “When people hear that I’m from Montreal, they think of two things. One, that we speak French, and two, that we almost separated.” They certainly don’t think that Montreal is a place where computer [...]

The popular games weblog Joystiq regularly posts about promotional ARG campaigns, generally to do with new games or consoles like the XBox. Until today, that is. Today, they proclaimed that they were sick of viral marketing and sick of ARGs. Their list of complaints include the fact that ARGs are predictable, not entertaining (this is [...]