Space Time Play book

Space Time Play Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level, edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger (Birkhäuser/Springer Online bookstore). A big compendium of 140 writers, the book "explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space". The table of content is impressive and I am looking forward to read as it seems to be a blueprint about this topic.

You can fin on-line the introduction about "Why should an architect care about computer games and What can a game designer take from architecture?", which has some interesting perspectives and summarizes very well the issues as stake.

"The spaces of computer games range from two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional spaces to complex constructions of social communities to new conceptions of, applications for and interactions between existent physical spaces. (...) The spaces of the digital games that constitute themselves through the convergence of “space,” “time” and “play” are only the beginning. What are the parameters of these new spaces? To what practices and functional specifications do they give rise? What design strategies will come into operation because of them? "

Of particular resonance with my research will be:

"THE ARCHITECTURE OF COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES, traces a short, spatiotemporal history of the architecture of digital games. Here, architects are interested in the question of what spatial qualities and characteristics arise from computer games and what implications these could have for contemporary architecture. For game designers and researchers, on the other hand, it’s about determining what game elements constitute space and which spatial attributes give rise to specific types of interaction. Moreover, it’s not just about the gamespaces in the computer, but about the places where the games are actually played; playing on a living-room TV is different from playing in front of a PC, which, in turn, is different from playing in a bar.

The third level, UBIQUITOUS GAMES, on the other hand, demonstrates how real space – be it a building, city or landscape – changes and expands when it is metamorphosed into a “game board” or “place to play” by means of new technologies and creative game concepts. (...) What happens when the spaces and social interactions of computer games are superimposed over physical space? What new forms and control systems of city, architecture and landscape become possible? (...) The migration of computer games onto the street – that is, the integration of physical spaces into game systems – creates new localities (...) 4th level (...) how the ludic conquest of real and imagined gamespace becomes an instrument for the design of space-time. "

Why do I blog this? tons of material for my current research, I am expecting this to be good for thoughts for future projects. I also wrote a chapter with Fabien about how pervasive gaming can be seen as a re-interpretation of >la dérive situationiste (Guy Debord): a new way to experience the city environment.

Sci-fi futures on hiatus

"What happened to the science-fiction future?" by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user's pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked:

"Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists. (...) Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits, and consumers’ insistent pragmatism. (...) In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be “too cheap to meter,”"

Why do I blog this I definitely like this topic, and working as a UX researcher in a tech school makes really buying the things that are described here. The article gives intriguing examples (skyscrapers, jetpacks, roads-that-must-roll and underwater dwellings) about techno-push futures that have troubles finding their way to users acceptance... and it's not because there is a tech breakthrough that a product is there, acceptable, usable and successful. The last bit about the role of science-fiction is also interesting considering the recent books/short stories by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson:

"we—shouldn’t read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s already lying around."

Social software and gaming

Having work recently on implications of web/web2.0 practices for the video game industry, I was interested in the relationships between social software and video games. Trying to have a quiet look into things (as usual), I tried to make a sort of typology of the different directions at stake here: First, a simple option would be to simply think of "games" as social objects (in the sense Jyri describes it), which would lead to services allowing people to discus, comment, talk, criticize games or to use games or application played as a way to form a model of peers. In a sense, it would be about taking games (their physical instantiation) as belongings that can be tracked: My Things is a social platform that enable such a function. And if there are not physical instantiation? Well, Wakoopa would fit given that it "tracks what kind of software or games you use, and lets you create your own software profile". You can then share, tag, comment and web-two-point-o-ize (about) games.

A second possibility is that one could thing about "social software" as a social layer on top of games, i.e. as a way to find people to play games with (a problem referred to as "LFG": Looking for Group). This is the sort of service one can benefit from platforms such as Rupture ("Rupture connects you with the real people you play with online. You can automatically publish your character and guild profiles to the web, share pictures, chat with friends and recruit new people to play with.") or Magelo ("Launched in 2001, the Character Profile was the first tool on the market that could create a persistence of an in game character out of the game trough a simple web representation (...) Another sample is our proprietary software client, Magelo Update (MU). MU act as a 100% reliable game data collector, as well as a synchronization and authentication tool for Magelo Characters Profiles."). What is interesting here is both the profile building (either explicitly or automatically created through in-game data collection) and the social networking capabilities. There are still lots of room in the design space here, especially if you think that most of the work has been done for hardcore-gamers-oriented MMO. Adding a social layer to more casual MMO would be a good option. On that LFG topic, see also here for a discussion about Facebook and gaming.

Finally, the third possibility to think about a social software as a game itself. An interesting direction is the one taken by Justin Hall in his "passive multiplayer gaming project (" a game that you get points and levels in based on the surfing you do on the Internet"). I've heard some other projects (like Playoo) are working on that social+game direction too (not in the PMOG concept though).

The underlying variable here is to think about the relationships between the game and the social software. The steps I described is actually a continuum from which social software are totally independent or a new layer on top of games OR the game itself. Anyhow, this topic will be surely addressed at LIFT08.

Why do I blog this some thoughts for social computing and gaming design space, potential material for further talks and actions.

Lack of innovation in the game industry

It's been now 6 years that I am in the video game industry (I worked part time as a user experience and foresight researcher during my masters and Phd and am still doing that) and I have always been amazed by the lack of innovation. Part of the reasons for that are covered in are interestingly described in this interview on gamasutra from a game studio director at Vivendi:

"It seems like most companies are one failed game from either dissolution or being purchased. Most companies have to put all of their eggs in one basket just because of their size, and when that basket is filled with 20 million dollars, it tips over. What kind of industry is going to result from that mentality? I don't think it's necessary.

CK: I don't think it is either. I don't think that making minigames and digital content is entirely the answer. It's one avenue, and they'll do more of it. I look toward some of the other industries that have solved this problem. There's car design centers that design cars, and set things up. It's a different skill set, and it's often either a different branch of the company or a different company altogether from the ones that figure out how to reduce costs much as possible to save money on things that they know about -- the repeatable things that don't have to be iterated on.

Our consultant uses the Big Mac example -- a Big Mac tastes exactly the same in Japan as it does in San Diego. The reason for that is that they have a 300-page Big Mac recipe manual. That's how you mass-produce things, by knowing exactly what it is. You can't do that with games. You can't repeat that process unless you know exactly what it is you're producing. That's what I'm saying -- separate the preproduction, know the game first, and only spend the five million dollars discovering that one hour of core that you want to sell. Then go to your 300-page Big Mac recipe and make 40 billion of those, like they do at McDonald's.

The problem is that you've got a developer like Angel Studios, which has big spreadsheets explaining, "Okay, we have to be in production here. I don't care where the game is. I have to find something for these 50 people who are coming off of Midnight Club to go on, on this date." You've got to make payroll, and you've got to get cash flowing in. That's what's forcing us to make all these decisions. The decisions aren't being made about the game. It's because resource flow on huge games is what rules developers right now. These days, you can't survive just having one project with 100 people. You've got to have three to justify your company. You've got to figure out what everybody's doing on a day-to-day basis."

Why do I blog this? quite sad but very common in the industry. Which does not mean, of course, that there are exceptions (the Wii, WoW, etc) or that external actors are going faster (see Sulake with Habbo Hotel for instance).

Sabbath, technological automation and control

My interest in "automation" and how technologies enables it through sensors and so-called computational "intelligence" has been attracted to a paper called "Sabbath Day Home Automation: “It’s Like Mixing Technology and Religion” by Allison Woodruff, Sally Augustin and Brooke Foucault. It basically presents a qualitative study of 20 American Orthodox Jewish families’ use of home automation for religious purposes. The two questions the authors address concern the relationship between home automation and religious practice, as well as the relationship between home automation and family life. Then they derive interesting implications from the results about this topic for a broader population. The paper start by describing the different automation technologies that can be employed on the Sabbath ("The reasoning is that, although an Orthodox Jew should not do anything during the Sabbath that has impact on electrical devices, they can perform acts in advance of the Sabbath"). They found 3 categories: timers (rotary timers), X10 (a system for using household wiring to send digital data between devices) and high-end schedule systems (" rule-based program that uses the Jewish calendar and the families’ specified preferences to dynamically generate a schedule that interfaces with controllers (typically X10) installed by the system developer, as well as with other automation systems in the home, such as lighting, sprinkler, security, entertainment, and security systems.")

IMO, the "meat" of this research study consists in the description of how automation system became interwoven with the family lives:

"the home automation system reflected and shaped the routines, expected behaviors, and social relations of family life – the social order of the home. (...) Home automation systems are particularly rich organizing systems because they can act “autonomously” to modify the physical environment, and because they are embodied in the objects and infrastructure of the home. (...) Automation as a Resource for Influencing Behavior: Automation provides cues as to what actions are expected of household occupants at what times, and it is therefore a resource for influencing behavior – for example, when kids are in the recreation room late at night, a light turning off sends a “message” that it is time to go to bed. (...) Interpretation of the Role of the Automation System Interpretations of the automation system and its actions were varied and complex. However, it was quite common for participants to attribute meaning to actions taken by the automation system, and sometimes to associate them with expected behavior. First, participants sometimes oriented to the automation system as an extension or proxy of the person setting the schedule of the automation system. (...) Second, automation was strongly associated with caretaking, anticipation, and guidance"

Why do I blog this? What is interesting here is the relationship between a desire for automation and technologies. The solutions described here become part of a ritual and a sign of a community affiliation. This is different form other studies about automation (in which there the desire for automation is more tight to curiosity, for early adopters for instance). The accounts provided here gives a critical overview of specific issues regarding control and automation. I also found intriguing the implications for design:

"traditional wisdom argues for a high degree of end-user control. Our findings prompt us to consider a richer set of options in the design space. Studies suggest that there are situations in which surrendering control offers significant psychological benefit. (...) some individuals might be better served by systems that present a wider range of options for autonomy, e.g. that certain individuals at certain times would benefit from experiences that give them a sense of another entity being in control. (...) Plainly, we are not arguing that people should not have any control of their devices. We are however proposing that giving up control can be beneficial or desirable in some situations, and that this is an interesting design space to explore. "

Digital/physical interlinkage

"Copier coller" in french means "Copy paste".

Digital actions that spilled over the material world, seen in Lyon at lunchtime.

Audio interactions in Nintendo DS games

Beyond blowing at your DS to inflate bubbles in Nintendogs, other games make interesting uses of the microphones: Spectrobes:

"dark energy creatures called the Krawl, and they're now invading your system. The only way to defeat them is to excavate and reawaken ancient creatures that are buried deep underground, called Spectrobes. (...) minigame and involves making a certain level of noise, with the tone and pitch of that noise playing a part in deciding what kind of Spectrobe you will get once the process is complete."

Dragon Tamer Sound Spirit:

"Dragon Tamer: Sound Spirit is basically your standard Pokemon monster battling game, but in order to get new dragons, you record sounds from different instruments and sources with the DS mic.

This is kind of like what Monster Rancher for the Playstation, where different random CDs would generate monsters with different statistics and abilitie"

Why do I blog this? interestingly enough, the mobile game industry, which has the perfect affordance and habits to control things with the voice (i.e. a cell phone...) has never released something similar (although I've seen some prototypes) on mass markets. Interesting HCI anyway... and on the NDS, as usual.

"A city is not a tree"

Read in A city is not a tree:

"Each of these structures, then, is a tree. Each unit in each tree that I have described, moreover, is the fixed, unchanging residue of some system in the living city (just as a house is the residue of the interactions between the members of a family, their emotions and their belongings; and a freeway is the residue of movement and commercial exchange).

However, in every city there are thousands, even millions, of times as many more systems at work whose physical residue does not appear as a unit in these tree structures. In the worst cases, the units which do appear fail to correspond to any living reality; and the real systems, whose existence actually makes the city live, have been provided with no physical receptacle."

Why do I blog this? seminal paper about space/place, had a look at it as it popped up the a meeting with Nokia yesterday.

Level design and folk representations of the world

In lessons from first-person shooters, Robert Janelle curiously describes the quirks one can find in FPS:

"Red Barrels Always Explode When Pierced By Bullets You Run Faster When Holding a Knife You Can Fit ANYTHING In Your Pocket Coloured Doors Are Locked Green Liquid is Harmful Helpful Items Are Just Lying Around Crates Break Into Splinters When Pierced"

Why do I blog this? a video-game world is a "microworld" in the sense that it's a close environment with its own rules and processes. As an artifacts crafted and designed by humans, it embeds values and folk mechanisms about how the world could behave. It's then curious to see what are people's projections as the one described above. Would a game level be boring/non-challenging if it replicated the material world?

Pervasiveness of gaming

Pervasive gaming IMO or how a game can pervade the environment: two basic sudoku boards in your plane mealbox:

Roles of ethnography in design

Ethnography and Design? by Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden is an insightful paper written in 2002 about the practical relationship between ethnography and design. The main problem they describe is how to link details accounts of situated activities (provided by ethnography) to the actual design of computer systems. Beyond "requirements engineering", the authors propose "a broader conception of design work" with three roles for ethnography:

"To identify general researchable topics for design through continued workplace study. (...) To develop abstract design concepts concretely by using workplace studies to sketch out and work up design-solutions. (...) Evaluations may be both summative, where ethnography is employed as a means of conducting a ‘sanity check’ on design, and formative, where prototyping sessions are treated as sites of work amenable to study and findings are used to drive iteration in design (...) To drive the development of novel technologies by evaluating the social application of innovative technological research. "

They also distinguish "product-oriented design" and a "process-oriented view":

""The product-oriented perspective places an emphasis on organizing the design of an end-product rather than on the nature of the production process itself (...) An alternate point of view - the process-oriented view – places emphasis on the role of learning and dialogue between the parties to design throughout the development process employed as a means of conducting a ‘sanity check’ on design, and formative, where prototyping sessions are treated as sites of work amenable to study and findings are.""

Why do I blog this? some good elements here to nurture methodological discussions and to go beyond current use of ethnography in design research.

Crabtree, A., Rodden, T. (2002). Ethnography and design? In Proceedings of the International Workshop on "Interpretive" Approaches to Information Systems and Computing Research. London. pp. 70-74.

Ball-Shaped camera and tangible interactions

Fabien, who is at Ubicomp 2007, just sent me this crazy project: TosPom: a ball-shaped camera that takes pictures while playing catch by Izumi Yagi, Mitsuyoshi Kimura, Makiko Nagao and Naohito Okude:

"TosPom is a ball-shaped camera that takes pictures while playing catch. When the photographer throws TosPom to the object, the object’s face will be taken automatically as the object catches it, and the picture will be shown on the display. With TosPom, the act of taking pictures becomes a mutual, interactive activity that involves both the photographer and the object while both parties engage in a fun activity of playing catch. Moreover, the photographer can draw out a more natural and relaxed expression from the object."

Why do I blog this? catch, camera, ball, nice combination of keywords. Beyond that, the sort of data that they can get out of this might be curious to design playful activities. The device is playful but at the same time it records interactions with it and the surroundings. It's interesting also to think about other affordances of the ball... using the rolling capacity of the device to take picture of certain places, etc.

Seamful design: showing the accuracy of location predictions

Dearman, D., Varshavsky, A., de Lara, E., Truong, K.N. An Exploration of Location Error Estimation. To appear in the Proceedings of UBICOMP 2007: The 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (September 16-19, Innsbruck, Austria), 2007. The paper deals with location-aware computing and how location predictions often fails to report their accuracy. The authors propose to reveal the error of location prediction (in a very "seamful design" way) and evaluate different possibilities in a field study, showing significant benefit in revealing the error of location predictions.:

"Predicted Location. In the predicted location condition, we provided participant with the predicted location of herself and the poster

95% Confidence. In the 95% confidence condition, we provided participants with a region defined by a confidence ring, in which the application is 95% confident that the actual location is contained within the ring.

Customizable Confidence. In the customizable confidence condition, we provided participants (by default) with the same visualization as the 95% confidence condition; however, they could manipulate the confidence level of the ring.

Optimal Error. In the optimal error condition, we provided participants with a ring for each location (see Figure 3(e)) where the ring’s radius is defined by the true error of the location prediction."

What is very interesting here is the description of how users cope with the localization system and how they benefit from the presentation of the positioning error:

"Our results show that presenting an estimate of the positioning error provides a significant benefit. Fixed estimates of error (e.g., 95% confidence and customizable confidence) provided little additional benefit, but they do help confine the search area. The optimal error condition strongly and positively in- fluenced participants’ search strategies. Participants found all posters where the true error was small. When the true error was large, participants experienced the same problems for finding the posters as the participants in the other conditions. However, participants in the optimal condition could identify that the true error was large and differentiate between high and low true error, where as participants in all other conditions could not. "

Why do I blog this? because this field study is an interesting exemplification of seamful design, i.e. revealing the limits/shortcoming of a system to the users. Results are quite interesting as they express which sort of information can be valuable to the users.

One Wilshire building: when digital is material

Reading this summer "Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies by Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis was a good experience, as the whole book itself is insightful and written exactly in the sort of style I like. It's basically a compendium of stories that may seem odd but which have important implications. The most interesting, with regards to my interests is Ether. Some excerpts I found relevant:

"If Ether were to have a palace, it would have to be the 39-story One Wilshire tower in downtown Los Angeles. (...) One Wilshire unequivocally declares that form follows function. (...) Damaged by the decentralizing policies of Cold War urbanism and increasingly threatened by the sprawling suburbs, the congested vertical urban core began to empty in the 1970s. (...) Eventually, however, a new opportunity presented itself and One Wilshire’s height returned to its advantage. With the deregulation of the telecommunications industry, long distance carrier MCI, which had its own nationwide microwave network, required a tall structure on which to install microwave antennas in close proximity to the AT&T (...) One Wilshire is not only a staging ground for carriers connecting to the local system, it is a key peer-to-peer connection point. (...) Because space in One Wilshire is at such a premium, companies run conduit to adjacent structures. Over a dozen nearby buildings have been converted to such telecom hotels, providing bases to telephone and Internet companies seeking locations near the fountain of data at One Wilshire. This centralization of information defies predictions that the Internet and new technologies will undo cities. But neither does it lead to a revival of downtown in classical terms. (...) The virtual is generally perceived as a drive against the spatial or physical world. Nevertheless, as One Wilshire demonstrates, the virtual world requires an infrastructure that exists in the physical and spatial world. (...) Massive telecommunicational hubs like One Wilshire and their radial networks make the virtual world possible, and firmly ground it into the concrete cityscape."

Why do I blog this? as one of the example I extracted from "Blue Monday", the story about One Wilshire is important because it's an example of how digitality is made possible through materiality. It's also very interesting to see that "space matters", leading companies to locate their servers farms and telecom hotels near this hub. Furthermore, I find curious the presence of such artifacts in cityscape. Here in Switzerland, it's common that server farms (from banks for example) are scattered around the country leading real farms to be also server farms.

Game settings and privacy

Different type of game require different levels of privacy. On these pictures taken in Seoul: compare the lonely gamer in arcade-game row to the comfy-door-augmented karaoke arcade game. The possibility to close a door surely allow more privacy for shy karaoke players

At the same time, read about this topic in The Economist:

"as other aspects of gaming become more realistic, from high-definition graphics to vibrating controllers, manufacturers sense an opportunity to offer dedicated gaming furniture, controllers designed for specific gaming genres and new types of fancy screens."

About "virtual recycling"

Ecotron is new feature/device in Habbo Hotel:

"The Ecotron is the latest in Furni recycling systems. No longer will you have to delete your room, turn off the computer or dump your unwanted Furni on a friend. Now you can throw it all into the Ecotron and get some brand new Furni back! Open the catalog and click and drop your unwanted Furni into the Ecotron - when you've put enough in, the power bar will turn green. You can either accept the bounty or continue to fill up the Ecotron for the next gift."

As described by Sulake:

"In Habbo, it is possible to recycle the virtual furni that you don’t need anymore. In exchange for recycling the old items, using a recycling device called Ecotron, the Habbo user receives a brand new piece of furni, which is in fact created from the old materials, or so the design makes you believe. In a virtual world the bits of data are of course always new.

A joke? Maybe not. Since it's launch, the Ecotron device has recycled 4.634.117 pieces of virtual furniture and the amount increases all the time."

Why do I blog this? recycling is, a priori, an intriguing practice in digital environment (in which everything is recyclable by definition, because of the "code" nature of artifacts). What is more striking here is the spatial/artifact recycling which may be meant to bring people to recycle material stuff (after being used to recycle digtial stuff)?

I wish Habbo's artifacts could also age and evolve over time, but this recycle bit is a step towards re-thinking the evolution of digital objects.

MMO communication tools

Game Career Guide reports on Nick Andrew Quagliara's masters thesis about communication in MMOs. The research conducted here basically addressed the following issues: "Do these chat communication interfaces support the types of interactions that users desire?" and "do the current interfaces, which rely on prior experience with MMOs, inadvertently frustrate new players to the point that they stop playing?" The author addresses them through 3 steps: content analysis of chat communication, expert evaluation of 10 MMOs and a focus group of users (to gauge their impressions of chat communication interfaces in MMOs). Results indicate "that there needs to be a reexamination of the designs of the chat communication interfaces in MMOs". Some of the problem mentioned:

"chat communication interfaces within these MMOs were alike. Tasks were typically carried out in a similar fashion from one MMO to the next. The most significant difference noted was with the handling of windows (...) Users felt that the interfaces were at times overwhelming as there were situations of information overload. Participants provided anecdotal evidence that they were often missing messages in the chat communication window while they were occupied with other tasks in the MMOs. It was also noted that the interfaces did not seem to be learnable or conducive to play."

Some heuristics to go beyond these problems are then proposed:

"Automate when possible / Make information meaningful / Don't assume prior knowledge / Look to the mod community / Simplify when possible / Alert the user to messages / Gradually present some functionality / Give users access to information relevant to their play / Keep consistency with interactions / Provide different functionality for different users / Consider icons in place of text commands / Give the user the chance to opt out."

Why do I blog this? although the research is maybe briefly described on the Game Career Guide website (mabye more here), there are interesting elements here about the connection between game interface and computer-mediated communication.

Weather forecasts maps and otherness

Today's column by Tyler Brulé in IHT tackles an intriguing issue: the one of map used in weather forecasts:

" In the early '90s, it struck me as odd that British broadcasters never bothered to inform viewers about the weather across the Channel. (...) The pinballing around Europe later revealed that this weather wall stretched to infinity and included most European countries. (...) No matter how many new discount airlines connect Europeans to new destinations at ever lower prices, most TV channels still treat their viewers as if they are house-bound and at most might pop to the store for a carton of milk. There's still no sense, if we're to look at something as simple as the weather bulletin, that there is this bigger entity called Europe and millions of people, everyday, conduct business and personal relationships across multiple borders. (...) the fact is that the media is one of the last sectors to embrace an increasingly global, connected market. Viewers, readers and listeners want to feel they're part of something bigger, not fenced in by borders that might limit choice, opportunity and freedom."

Why do I blog this? living in Switzerland and often traveling to other european countries, I've also been struck by this issue (except that the swiss radio I am following often give forecast for both Geneva and Lyon). I found this phenomenon intriguing, especially regarding how certain representations (maps) may help forming mental representation of otherness/alterity (other spaces).

Ubiquitous computing normative future and sci-fi

Stone, A.R. (1991). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118. An excerpt I like from this paper:

"Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas's powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single stroke, Gibson's powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction. As with Paul and Virginia in the time of Napoleon and Dupont de Nemours, Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large."

Why do I blog this? avidly reading some material about the relationship between media/culture and their possible influence on technological development. In my talk about the user experience of ubiquitous computing (and how it fails most of the time), I often quote the problem of how sci-fi has created a normative future of what should be the tech future. This quote nicely exemplifies this issue by describing how a novel such as Neuromancer can be think of a common ground for engineers and designers. One can see these novels as sort of anchors to point what the future will be.

LIFT Korea

Wednesday evening was the mini lift session in Seoul at the Yurim Art Hall. Everything went well and a large majority of the 180 people who signed-up came there to hear what Adam Greenfield, Bruce Sterling, Jake Song and Yoo-Suk Yeon had to say about technological implications in space (physical and digital). Being on stage to introduce the program and the speaker, I was not really in the mood of following everything (anxious by this first event) but everything went well (apart from the tedious changes of laptops and sound issues... as usual). More thoughts and thanks about it on the LIFT blog! Kudos to our 4 speakers as well as local support!

In the end, I think the ambience was great, lots of meeting there and a mix of korean+swiss food. A nice first visit to South Korea for me! I'll try to blog the talks as soon as I get my thoughts sorted about them ;)