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Posted by Adrienne at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I noticed something interesting this morning when reading BoingBoing from my RSS aggregator. In a report about the jetBlue fiasco last week, Cory Doctorow writes,

After a week of terrible JetBlue delays, the CEO put together a youtube in which he apologizes to JetBlue fliers and promises to institute major changes to prevent a recurrence.

Posted by Adrienne at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No power = no heat, no light, no computer, no fridge, no Wii, and one unhappy camper.

Horrible infographic from Seattle City Light showing the areas without power in red

I find it particularly interesting that the most racially and economically diverse neighborhoods of Seattle just so happen to be the ones that don't have power yet. Of course, I'm sure this is just a coincidence...

Posted by Adrienne at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OMG. LOL. WTF?

Posted by Adrienne at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone who wants to argue that the video game industry isn't seriously sexist (and just about any other -ist you can think about) ought to spend a little time watching this fake ad for the Wii, which appeared on the G4 network. Oh, and the game industry says it's all about grrl gamers...right. And, don't get me started about the Ubisoft-backed Frag Dolls. Ugh.

There is, however, a great article in this month's The Atlantic about attempts to create immersive environments in which characters actually respond to your words. Facade, a freeware "interactive drama" from Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, is a pretty engaging first attempt. They're hoping to push the genre of these environments.

“There’s no drama genre, there’s no comedy genre,” Andrew Stern told me recently. “What exists right now are action movies, basically.” He might have added: silent action movies. The video-game industry’s annual trade show in Los Angeles, called the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short, is one of the loudest places I have ever been. Also one of the most silent.
...
It was only after I left the hall that I realized there was something odd about all the noise. The thunderous sound effects were masking the absence of conversation. In real life, much of what’s interesting involves talking to people. The characters in games could deliver scripted lines like “I’m ready to kick some ass!” or drop prerecorded comments on the action, but conversing with me or each other was completely beyond them. It occurred to me that if video games seem inhuman, that is because they lack humans. Their esoteric syntax is an artifact of a stunted environment in which blasting someone’s head off is easy but talking to him is impossible.

A month later, I asked Andrew Stern what he thinks of E3. “I shake my head a little,” he replied. “All this effort and money being poured into all this derivative and uninspired work. I’m bored and slightly disgusted.”

- Jonathan Rauch

Posted by Adrienne at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are some things I do without thinking about them. Take, for example, making coffee. I stumble out of bed at some early hour, barely awake, and manage to grind beans, filter water, and pour said water into my coffeemaker all in one motion without opening my eyes. (Ok, not really - but go with me here.) ANYWAY, I'm the same way with my Web browsing habits. There are only a small number of sites I visit daily, and those I do, I'm so used to a certain navigational pattern that I don't really think about what I'm doing. Since I'm pretty much breaking the bank buying books for my dissertation, Amazon has become one of those sites.

SO, Amazon just updated their Gold Box feature, and it's lame. Basically, instead of featuring 10 items randomly chosen from the site's product offerings and/or your wishlist, it now only features one item a day. Since everyone is vying for the same items, things sell out quickly. Apparently, a George Foreman grill sold out ridiculously fast when it debuted yesterday morning.

Today's feature was cookies. That's right, 25 packs of Hit biscuits. Now, I'm pro-cookie (my parents swear my first word was "cookie"), but not 250 cookies worth. Amazingly, the cookies sold out by noon on the East coast.

Amazon's case of cookies offer

The interesting thing is that the Gold Box also features a discussion board where folks can talk about the "great" deals they find. Of course, in keeping with Amazon's ornery (and often hilarious) customers, the comments are a bit less than laudatory. A few samples are listed below:

Hey, these cookies (biscuits?) are actually delicious! The question is, do I need like 250 of them? The answer is probably no.

The Gold Box? Even revised,it certainly doesn't contain any treasures. Before, my personalized gold box tortured me with endless offers of CD's from musicians I would never buy for myself, but because I purchased them as a gift, they were "my favorites". I finally figured out how to eliminate Mark Knopfler, and now you offer me....COOKIES? Come on Bezos--work with us.

you can buy these for a dollar from ikea.

I know Amazon is trying to be all things to all people, but I wish they'd stop with the food products already. For a real laugh, search for "Tuscan milk" and read the billion or so user comments.

Back in the real world... I liked the 10-item Gold Box format (now I even look back on the perpetually-sold-out Prada wallet offers with nostalgia). Bring it back, please, Mr. Bezos...

I can't believe I am too late.

I was just asking myself: I just got my 25 gallons of Tuscan Whole Milk 128 fl oz (I bought 25 gallons to get to the free shipping minimum and get $10 off with the invaluable but shortlived grocery3 coupon code)...

I know!

25 packs of Hit cookies!

Well, I was hit alright. Hit with a sold out sign.

You people who say this is fine... I suppose cancer, concentration camps, and global warming are fine too.

ANYWAY, after reading all of these comments, I had to check out the whole Tuscan milk debate. The comments are hilarious. Seriously, if you have some time you should read through at least a few of them (there's something like 700+). My favorite find? An ode to Tuscan milk from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately dairy-house decree:
Where Alf, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
the sacred cows wandered and fed,
And there were gardens bright with soft young grass,
Where blossomed many a pound of fresh-churned butter;
And casein scents filled the air,
Engorging the nostrils of naughty milk-maids.

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian milk-maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Cottage Cheese.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dairy in air,
That sunny dome! those cows of wonder!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Moo! Moooo!
Her flashing eyes, her swinging udder!
Weave a circle round her thrice,
And squeeze the teats with care,
For she on sweet grass hath fed,
And produced the Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon,
128 fl oz, of Paradise.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816

Maybe I'll order some milk and cookies for my coffee.

Posted by Adrienne at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seriously, what's up with the cool stuff that everyone else (besides me) builds? Stamen Design is doing some of the coolest information design work today. Just a few of their projects include:

• Mappr - this application shows geographically-tagged Flickr photos overlain on a map of the US
  
• Cabspotting - real-time tracking of all of the cabs traveling in SF (based on GPS data), resulting in an amazingly beautiful, slowly moving (in)organic network
  
• Digg Labs - watch and interact with popular digg'd stories - the swarm visualization is particularly hypnotic

Collaborative exploration of info viz is also something Fernanda Viegas (of IBM's Visual Communication Lab) is working on. She showed an interesting demo of a collaborative information visualization tool where individuals can save "views" into the data and comment on it so other individuals can also view interesting patterns in the data they might find. This could be invaluable for groups working collaboratively with large data sets - and Viegas suggested that these sort of sites could also "enable conversation or storytelling" around these data.

Posted by Adrienne at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Local Projects creates media environments (including an aquatically-themed carousel), innovative interfaces, and collaborative storytelling projects.

Barton's background is in performance studies. Talked about The Louvre as an example of overt curatorial control, rather than actually engaging/"speaking out" to people who visit. Then, Barton showed the famous final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a huge, faux Smithosonian storage facility houses thousands of artifacts that never see the light of day. (He also mentioned the book, Making Museums Matter - Weil.) Barton suggested that there were lots of similarities between the way we navigate the Internet and the way museums work.

Memory Maps - This exihibition was part of the Smithsonian Folkways project. People "triangulated" through the exihibition while pinning their own stories to a map of NYC neighborhoods. On opening day, they had NO CONTENT, which Barton said was very challenging for curators to accept. Typically, there's LOTS of content when an exhibition opens. Local Projects is currently working on a digital archive of this exhibition.

Miners' Story Project - Interviews with actual miners added a significant amount of interest to what had previously amounted to "just a bunch of rocks." Local Projects designed a trailer that housed a recording studio - the graphic on the side of the trailer (a picture of a miner) is actually a really big speaker! He says they're intertwining "getting and telling" - "the getting is part of the telling."

StoryCorps - How do you create a massive archive of American oral history? StoryCorps (and Local Projects) created several booths (one of which is in Grand Central Station) where individuals can conduct interviews. A copy of the CD goes to the interviewer/interviewee and one goes to the Library of Congress. They also have two Airstream trailers outfitted with listening booths that can travel across the US to collect these stories.

Barton noted that there's a very asymmetrical relationship between that which is created in these booths, and that which is actually curated (about 1 in 100 actually are presented to the public via the Web site or Mobile story booths). This may mean that people are creating things that aren't very interesting to anyone but themselves OR it may mean that we need new ways to think about collective curation and reflection of these materials.

There's no actual agenda for the kind of stories that StoryCorps wants to hear, but this makes funding actually difficult. Barton thinks this is the strength of the project.

JetBlue (the yang to StoryCorps yin, Barton notes) - Apparently, people are so impassioned about the airline that people actually use a video booth to tell stories about JetBlue. (Meta note: the architecture of these booths is very cool.) This was not about a one-to-one experience. This was supposed to be fast and playful.

Key interaction design of physical spaces is (1) if people are going to do the experience, you have to make it clear and seamless and fun; and (2) space instructions out over time.

Local Projects actually builds the prototypes for these projects in their studios, and Barton showed a very cool time-lapse film of the booth they created for JetBlue.

Posted by Adrienne at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cronin is an Interaction designer at Cooper. This is a case study of the Getty Center (founded by J. Paul Getty - believed that art had a "civilizing effect" on the "common (wo)man." Hilarous!)

Getty Center - Richard Meyer (designer) - in Brentwood, CA. Meyer was one of the first famous architects to build in-game architecture (Sim City 4).

When the museum opened, a lot of folks asked about the location of the bathrooms, because they weren't readily apparent. (Meta note: WTF? Why can't architects figure out that this is one of the most important things for visitors?). Ok, so Getty apparently wants to bring "art to the people," but problems were numerous: physical layout (parking garage, tram, multiple buildings with little signage); collection is (relatively) inaccessible; curators are primarily well-educated, fairly high-minded art historians, and who have a fairly "elite" perspective on collections.

Getty wanted to:

• Redesign kiosk system (existing)
  
• Redesign audio guide/handheld (existing)
  
• Integrate these two with their Web site

Some stakeholder goals - get visitors thinking (not teach something in particular) and have visitors return.

Cooper conducted 52 interviews with visitors. Used a qualitative approach (1 hour interviews); Cooper wanted to find patterns (didn't want to design for "52 indiosyncratic people"); research was not designed to be statistically significant.

Findings: People pretty much pulled out the maps immediately after disembarking from the tram. This is partly a function of the architecture and the "sweeping vista" that you see once you leave the tram. The social aspect of visits were critical - most were there to spend time with friends and family. Most people would like "walking around with a knowledgeable friend" ideally. Most people didn't know how to find out more information about the art (kiosks were difficult to find as they were tucked into corners).

People wanted to know the technique, provenance, and relevance to visitors' life. (Meta note: the PPT slides for this presentation were very well done - one large image from the galleries behind a slightly transparent box containing a few key phrases.)

Method: Cooper created personas - their "tried and true" formula. Created based on goals, behaviors, attitudes and aptitudes. They developed around 11 personas. For example: Tyler - "Wants to impress professors, sees art as another aspect of media, media student at a university in Santa Barbara." (Meta note: More stuff for dissertation.) These are "composite" personas (based on behavior patterns observed during research phase of project) - of course, Cronin mentions that they "got some of the 'idiosyncrasies' out." The Getty folks didn't believe that the personas were actually who they thought were visiting their museum (because they weren't "art literate"). The Cooper based their personas on actual data that Getty had already collected.

Requirements: Mental models of personas - "What is there to see, what should I see, where is it?" Interesting note - directions to cafe and bathroom were/are the most commonly used functions of the kiosk.

Needs: Planning (Web site), wayfinding, understanding, collecting, exploring (browse connections), collecting (information about what they've seen).

Vision: think about, appreciate, and understand art - always bringing visitors back to the art.

Challenges: populist, educational mission of the Getty Trust; architecture's lack of "affordance;" technological excise, cognitive friction; massive amount of content.

Strategies: context awareness, bookmarks, related topics, (NOT visitor-generated content or tagging - because the Getty was concerned that high school students would tag nudes with the word "boobs")

Kiosk: in-depth exploration/topics; secondary purpose is wayfinding

Handheld: location-specific information; "secret mission is to lead visitors to the art" - No random access find (no search - just information on the gallery in which the visitor is currently located)

Cronin then showed a bunch of screenshots for the kiosk and handhelds with some notes about the information/interaction flow. (Meta note: I wonder how they designed for differently-abled individuals.)

Implementation: Usability testing after the fact made slight changes to the kiosks. Handhelds were more of a challenge. Worked well until launch party - then they crashed and they all died. As a result they're not in widespread use. RFID was talked about, but there were significant political issues with implementing it.

Posted by Adrienne at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuous partial attention - how we use attention today. We're not really multi-tasking today. We're paying continuous partial attention - and it's really stressful.

Multi-task --> desire to be efficient (same priority to each task)

Continuous partial attention (CPA) --> we want to be an "on" node on the network. To be busy, to be connected is to be alive.

We pay CPA to not miss anything. With multitasking we want to be more efficient. This involves an "artificial sense of constant alertness." Scanning the periphery - we want to be live nodes on the network. This is pretty interesting stuff.

(Meta comment: I like that she's not using slides for her talk. This definitely forces us to actually pay attention to what she's saying, not be carried away.)

Stone mentions the 60s as being all about "me" - the center of gravity was "me." Many of the companies founded during that time were focused on personal productivity. 1965-1985 - valued creativity and personal expression above all else. If you're all about self-expression, you're likely to become narcissistic and lonely. What was missing was connection.

1985-2005 - we begin to value communication and networks. We play networked games.

Starbucks becomes a third place. We can "drink always on fuel" and distract ourselves with continuous partial attention activities. We're everywhere except where we are physically.

But now... people are opting out of SNS because it's a pain in the @ss. People don't want to work all night - and Stone has been consulting with companies to figuring out how to make this possible. Ironically, those who ushered in/developed e-mail, voice mail, etc. tend to not find the "off switch" on these communication devices, but Stone argues that those who grew up with these devices are really questioning these priorities.

We've created a sense of CONSTANT CRISIS, and Stone argues that we are responding to every possible e-mail, phone call, blog posting, etc. as though it's an emergency. She suggests that this is FUNDAMENTALLY different from multitasking. We become a great target for pharmaceuticals - because we're hyperalert and under chronic stress. We feel overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled.

We celebrate powerful technologies, but we feel powerless.

She's arguing that we're now ready to evolve. We're beginning to want:

• protection
  
• meaningful connection
  
• protectors
  
• authenticity
  
• trusted voices
  
• things (ideas, lifestyles, brands, etc.) that resonate with our values

We want to SORT through the noise and find meaning. We wear iPods to gain space. We're beginning to make meaningful connections. Stone mentions the tribes/guilds that form in WOW and Liz Lawley's piece It Takes a Guild to Raise a Child. (Meta comment: Hmm. Not sure how I actually feel about that.)

We're gone from information workers, to knowlege workers, and now we can become wisdom workers.

Ease of use is not good enough. New mantra: "improves quality of life." She suggests that good design is at the heart of quality of life.

Posted by Adrienne at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

I'm breaking just about every rule about sucessful blogging today, as I'm (1) blogging from a conference, which may be of limited interest to others and (2) posting directly to my site, without concern for spelling or grammatical errors. Apologies to the blog gods.

ANYWAY, I'm at the Seattle Public Library (free wifi, whoohoo!), attending IDEA 2006. Peter Merholz (of Adaptive Path) is the conference organizer and has arranged an interesting collection of folks tasked with structuring large information spaces working in a variety of contexts (museums, libraries, etc.).

I can't believe that I've lived and worked in Seattle for eight-ish years, and I'm at a conference in a field I've worked in since 1997, and I don't know anyone here! How is this possible?

This the first IDEA conference, so I'm curious to see how it goes. I like that the focus of the conference is not just Web-based. It's like people are finally getting the sense that IA can be applied to multiple contexts and that the advent of ubitquitous/ebedded computing requires consideration on an IA level.

Wikipedia entry suggests that "IA" is simply a synonym for "taxonomies" of Web site. Merholz suggests that IA has been constricted by the LIS folks. He mentions RSW's Information Architects book - and argues that there should be "broader application" to real-world information spaces. RSW did a lot to pioneer navigational IA like the Access guides.

One definition of IA: "Organization, categorization, and navigation (maybe that should be wayfinding)" - David Fiorito.

Another inspiration is the IA Institute's rewrite of its business plan, including virtual, physical, and procedural IA.

The library's IA doesn't always succeed "but where it fails, it fails interestingly." I can't believe that Peter just suggested that book spiral is great. Having actually used it, I found it incredibly frustrating and irritating.

Haha... Peter just had to explain where the restrooms are, because everybody has been having difficulty finding them.

Conference resources:
Wiki
Blog
Flickr set

Posted by Adrienne at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let me first start by making the following disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about sound editing. However, I happened to find myself in a situation recently in which I had a fairly distorted and echo-y recording of one of my dissertation interviews, making transcription an absolute bear. After messing with the settings in Windows Media Player, I finally came up with the bright idea to check online for some simple (and cheap!) sound mixing software. I found Audacity, a free, open-source editing tool that has a decent UI (as these things go) and lots of great one-click filters that managed to salvage an almost unusable and hissy recording.

Yay for open source!

Posted by Adrienne at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's another one for the "Hmm...maybe I shouldn't post that picture of me totally drunk doing a keg stand at the last frat party to Facebook/MySpace/Insert-Other-Social-Networking-Service-Here" file - The Stranger has uncovered compromising photos of one Hugh Foskett, a sophomore at the UW running for state representative in the 43rd district. I sense a "teachable moment" here.

Posted by Adrienne at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's an excellent article in today's PopMatters about the connection of virtuality, "overclocking" the brain a la Mind Performance Hacks, and consumerism. Rob Horning, one of the site's editors and the article's author, argues that much of the discourse today regarding technology and our "speeded up" life is entrenched in a battle between "the spiritual community of religious believers, and the eager community of technologized subjects, epitomized by the commercial and participatory promise of the Internet." He continues,

...On the flip side of the fear of mechanistic science is a kind of technophilia, in which humans are so impressed with the efficiency of machines that they voluntarily seek to emulate them. Consider, for example, Mind Performance Hacks, a book recently touted at BoingBoing.net that promises “tips and tools for overclocking your brain” and “new ‘software subroutines’ that you can run to optimize various mental processes.” The brain is hardware, and consciousness the output of resident programs. Computer metaphors are attractive in that they allow us to conceptualize enduring human problems—the ones that require utopian thinking—in a readymade way that makes them seem easily and inevitably solvable by the march of technological process. We see our own minds as programmable, controllable, able to be applied to discrete focused tasks, and different ones simultaneously in heroic feats of multitasking. We talk about plugging ourselves into networks and leveraging the knowledge distributed among us. We imagine social life as a massive operating system in which everything has a deliberate function, so that it can seem comprehensible and manageable. We talk of unfortunate ideas as computer viruses, taking a biological metaphor that’s been technologized and repatriating it for humans.

The human-computer fantasy typically views the brain as fundamentally passive—think of The Matrix‘s depiction of Keanu Reeves downloading immediately functional information directly into his brain, as though it ran on third-party programs that just needed occasional patching. One is configured as an end-user of one’s own brain, a mere consumer of the experiences it can be programmed to spit out. Consciousness is a step removed from the brain, which provides the data that consciousness enjoys, as though it were a film.

But Mind Performance Hacks inverts this, promising to make the brain work more like a machine under the user’s conscious direction, which suggests that the user’s consciousness itself aspires to be more machinelike, more relentlessly productive. Rather than receiving data the brain spits out, consciousness merges with “subroutines” it can perform to think more mechanically and more efficiently. No doubt these things work—these kinds of ideas for human perfectibility and increased mental acuity have kicked around before as mnemonics or chisenbop or EST or hypnotherapy, bioengineering, methadrine, etc.—but what seems new is the insistence on the computer metaphor, as if to be a computer would be to live the dream.

By imagining ourselves more like computers, we are to take the value system technology generates—the idea almost hegemonic in business culture that greater productive efficiency automatically generates an expansion of happiness—and apply it to our own behavior. Our economy’s emphasis on technology as a means to produce perpetual growth makes us think that by becoming more machinelike, we become more human in the sense of fulfilling our maximum potential. The more raw data we can process, the richer our lives become, as if processing information was valuable for its own sake. Information, now an unconquerable ocean, tempts us to master it through heroic feats of navigation, exploratory expeditions made purely for glory. Human potential, human experience, may come to seem entirely a matter of information processing; and the faster your brain processes information, the more life one is cramming into our allotted time on earth. Efforts to absorb all this information can become a kind of flow experience, a way of entering the “zone” associated with athletic accomplishment, and at that point one may seem to merge with the information itself, to become inseparable from its continual transmission. That might be the aspiration anyway, to become the best data you can be, so you still figure in a world awash in nothing but data.

This is fascinating stuff, and I agree with much of Horning's assessment, especially in his Marxist critique of the desire (which is probably as much market- as it is people-driven) to process raw data as a means in-and-of-itself. While I'm no Luddite (as evidenced by my annoyance at being offline for a few weeks), I'm also not a cheerleader for unrestrained technological development. Our "needs" are increasingly becoming commodified and consumerized - so I find it especially ironic that much of the technological-utopian discourse is being spouted by folks who consider themselves progressive anti-capitalist champions.

Posted by Adrienne at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

So, I've been signing up for all of these random online social networking services just to try them out. I'm not really conducting a scientific study of the various features they offer, but I am interested (along with about 95% of the rest of the new media scholar community) as to how they conceptualize networking/community(?). To make a long story short, I just received an email from Ziki.com that read, in part:

Ziki has crafted an innovative program that will assure you to be listed on the top spots on major search engines (Google, Yahoo & soon MSN). Available only for the first 10 000 members.

Our initial sponsored links program tests showed a very positive and enthusiastic feedback.

Even better, some of you wrote to share how proud they were when they typed their name in Google or Yahoo : their Ziki profile was on the top list of the search results. Cool feeling.

YES we are doing a free advertising campaign for you !

Why are we doing this ? Because we know you are concerned about your online identity and some of you might want to promote theimselves and their content. Simple.

We hope you will enjoy this unique feature, which is a powerful management tool of your online identity.

This is how it works: log in to your Ziki account, click on "Promote my Ziki" and then click on "Sponsored links".

Just check the box to authorize Ziki to buy these sponsored links on Google and Yahoo and we do the rest.

To be eligible for this program, we require the following inputs in your Ziki profile : first name, last name, your picture (not at 5 years old!!), a URL of your blog or website, and at least one personal feed. Don't forget to describe yourself with at least 5 tags and make sure the "about me" section is filled in. Please go back to your profile and check we have everything we need.

If you don't enlist this program, you will just miss out.

This offer is limited to $10 per person of sponsored links and over a one year period.

I can't really articulate why, but this totally freaks me out. There's something sort of creepy about Ziki taking out ads for a bunch of their users - it's clear that they're trying to push as many people as they can to the site in the hopes that they, too, will post their profiles. I don't like the idea of my online identity being used to sell something (Me? My online profile? I'm not sure what.) Additionally, I'm not happy that they make specific requirements about the nature of the profiles they'll promote (real first/last name, current photo, 5 tags, etc.).

Up until now I've been using my Ziki to aggregate feeds from Flickr, del.ici.ous, etc. - which, while probably not useful for anyone else, is a great time-saver for me. But this whole ad thing is making me think about cancelling my account altogether.

Update: Check this post's comments to see what the folks at Ziki have to say.

Posted by Adrienne at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just got my ValleySchwag for the month. The best insert? A pack of cards for Perplex City.

See the package contents.

Posted by Adrienne at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, the issue of why more women (and girls) don't play games came up at a conference in Edinburgh this weekend, when an EA exec mentioned that the industry was "failing women."

This is a complex issue, and one that isn't just about the lack of "female-friendly" video/pc games. Companies like EA are looking to essentialize certain titles as "female-oriented," because they're an untapped part of the vidoeogame market. What frustrates me most about the rhetoric by game execs is that while they finally get that women don't want pink-colored XBoxes (well, most grown women don't, anyway) or overtly "feminine" games like "Shop with Paris Hilton" and "Be Katie Holmes' Nanny," they still suggest women want is more dialogue, more "chat-friendly"/casual games. Says who? The last thing I want is to have to talk to a bunch of people I don't know online. While I'm personally not into the whole FPS-killing-people/robots/mutated animals/whatever until your fingers bleed, I'm also not interested in turning into "Chatty Cathy" playing bridge with a bunch of old biddies. Not my scene. At the same time, I'm interested in playing games that are fun and creative. Hence my willlingness to experience GTA: San Andreas, despite its abhorrently racist and sexist gameplay. After playing it a few times, I understood the appeal - it was fun. Not socially responsible or appropriate for most people under 17, but fun nonetheless. The problem is that there are few games geared specifically to women or girls that do a good job with the whole fun factor.

Some other irksome parts of this article: I love that the video game industry is now looking to Hollywood for pointers. As David Gardner, COO of EA argues,

The movie industry doesn't just make films for boys. Star Wars was the biggest film of all time until Titanic came along; Titanic became the biggest because women went to see it and women went to see it multiple times. Just as boys saw Star Wars multiple times. (from the BBC News article)

It's pretty clear that most game companies are going for the lowest common denominator - release even a mediocre FPS with a poorly-conceived plot line and you're likely to at least get somebody's attention (and make $$), especially if the game includes lots of large-chested, scantily clad women cheering you on from the sidelines. These sorts of stereotypical portrayals do women (and men) a disservice, suggesting that all of us have to be stuck in some sort of socially-awkward teenage boy's secret fantasy life to enjoy videogames.

Hopefully, the next generation of gamers will have better options (picture from MonkeyJunkie's Flickr pool)

As I mentioned earlier, much of this debate has to do with a lack of understanding of the types of games that women would want to play, and that's almost entirely the result of a serious lack of interest in researching women (and girls) to find out how they actually spend their time. The last company to seriously design software with young girls in mind was Purple Moon, and although Brenda Laurel was amazingly attentive and interested in the deeper social issues involved in computer game development,* and consciously made a real effort to have women involved at all levels of the design and development process, the company went under. (This is not to say that Purple Moon was without its own share of problems, as this 1998 article points out.)

While I don't think that "women's games" should be specifically social in nature, the whole crafting-DIY resurgence suggests that women (and men) are interested in social pursuits, especially if they revolve around creativity and collaboration (just look at the success of sites like craftster.org). So, I think it's possible to create games that encourage this type of community building - but it's likely going to require an entirely new genre. What about more ARG-style games that involve some collaboration on- and offline? What about incorporating more casual/puzzle games (one place where females outnumber males) into larger MMO or stand-alone adventure games? Why not incorporate more ways to interact with the environment besides simply fighting (like the old Star Wars Galaxies did) or buying/selling? Perhaps incorporating more player-created content would help as well.

The point is that attracting women to the console or PC will likely require much more research, effort, and broad cultural/social changes at game companies. That is, most women are not going to flock to games that simply reproduce what's worked for predominately male-oriented games (Halo, Quake, RPGs and war-based strategy games) with more female characters. At the same time, game companies would do well to spend more time researching just what kinds of gameplay appeal to women, and less time lumping them into one big category. Not all men like to play first-person shooters or sports games, just as not all women will want to play Dreamfall or The Sims (just look at the diversity of games favored by contributors to GrrlGamer.com, for example). Creating innovative games designed with/by potential female players would be a good start. And actively hiring female developers/producers/executives would be an even better one.

* I remember that when I attended E3 in 1997, the Purple Moon booth was the only place on the exhibition floor where I felt comfortable since I wasn't being leered at or hit on.

Posted by Adrienne at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Warning: This post is extremely geeky and futher cements my place in the world as a geek grrl, not just a grrl who's happened to date some geeky guys. So, if you're uninterested in games, World of Warcraft (WOW), politics, or gnomes, you might want to skip this. (Of course, Dave Chappelle apparently likes WOW, so maybe it's gained some hipster cred. Whatever.)

At night, after a long day of teaching, dissertating and/or reading tomes like this or this, I often log on to WOW and complete a few quests involving: 1) transporting item "a" to place "b;" 2) killing boss "c" for loot "d" so NPC "e" can make potion "f;" 3) hitting peons on the head with a bat so they'll get back to work. Usually, I'll end the evening by flying back to one of the cities and selling off all of the useless crap that animals in the game carry around despite having no pockets or opposable thumbs.

I enjoy these evenings of mindless stealthing (I play a rogue) and socializing (A usually plays with me). I'm not a big socialite in or out of the game, but I have been enjoying the intelligent and engaging conversation that takes place in the guild to which we belong (TerrorNova). Guild conversations often revolve around the ethical issues of gaming research (many of its members are academics who work in/with virtual worlds), and I have found my guildmates to be generous and supportive of newbies like me to a fault.

So, what's the problem? Why am I posting at all if life in WOW is so hunky-dory?

I play on a PVP server. PVP, for the unintiated, stands for "player vs. player," and it means that characters representing the other faction (the Alliance) - who are at war with the Horde for mysterious reasons that I suspect have more to do with the marketability of Warcraft than with differences outlined in the game's sketchy mythology - can kill me and my Horde brethren.

Happier days on a non-PVP server - Skador and Arendt

Now, what's so bad about this, you ask? Well, it just so happens that Blizzard's poor implementation of the PVP system means that level 60 characters can: 1) kill a bunch of Horde characters having a funeral for a fellow friend who died in "real" life without penalty; and 2) hang out in areas where lower characters are questing and kill them repeatedly (which is called "ganking" or "griefing"), again without penalty. In WOW, there are things called "honorable" and "dishonorable" kills - the former is reserved for player characters who are at or above your skill level; the latter is for lower-level player kills. At the end of the day/week, players are ranked according to their honorable kills and win...absolutely nothing, except the right to run around and tell everyone that they've killed the most Alliance or Horde players.

I guess this system is set up so you're supposed to feel bad if you're a 60th level priest (which means, essentially, that you're invincible to all but the biggest and baddest in Azeroth), and you kill a puny level 30 hunter with one hit.

I say supposed to, because as far as I can tell, the honorable/dishonorable kills thing means nothing. As far as I can tell, PVP attracts a certain level of, shall we say, immaturity, where high level characters have no problem camping some newbie's corpse and killing her over and over again. Sometimes, they'll even gang up with each other to prove that the other faction knows who's boss, going on a killing spree that litters the countryside with dozens of skeletons.

You might be asking at this point, so what? I mean, who cares if people in this virtual world are killing each other - it's just a game, right?

To which I respond, no, it's not just a game. How many articles have to be written about the real world implications of online activities before players start realizing that there are PEOPLE attached to the characters you're killing?* Llokye (my female troll rogue) and Skador (my male dwarf hunter) may not be "real," but I've spent a lot of time in the game with them. I'm not really offended when they're killed (or kill) some boar or an NPC in the game because I know that those characters are computer controlled and that they exist in 1s and 0s only. I am, however, very annoyed and frustrated and freaked out when I log on for five minutes in a zone to complete the last part of a quest and get ganked four times in a row. The worst part of it is that I can't even communicate with my attacker, since the two factions don't speak the same language. So, I am, effectively, mute. And helpless. And dead. That's a bit too close for comfort for my tastes, given humanity's seemingly endless love affair with genocide and torture.

So, why would I be on a PVP server at all? Well, because of the guild, and because I had no idea what I was getting into. I just assumed that individuals on a PVP server would try to "kill honorably" (this is an oxymoron, I know, but go with me here).

I guess I can see the value in PVP, just not how Blizzard has implemented it. I mean, first-person shooters have a large portion of the gaming market, and I know that this is a for-profit affair. If players on PVP servers really want to fight each other, they should at least make it fair; a substantially higher level character should be penalized in some real way for killing a substantially lower level character. Right now it feels like there are a bunch of bullys roaming Azeroth, randomly killing other helpless players who are effectively gagged. And, I have no way to vocalize that I'm *not* a threat and that I'm *not* interested in fighting. The best I can do is use an emote like /dance or /hi and hope that my fellow players take pity on me.

All of this is to say that I wish there were some way to change servers so I didn't have to deal with this conflict. Seriously, I like Llokye, and I don't want to start all over again with a new character, but she's living in an imaginary world that is a bit too close to the "real" one - except there are no penalties for killing.

* Julian Dibbell's classic tale, A Rape in Cyberspace, is probably the most famous and relevant one in this case.

Posted by Adrienne at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, I've been in Vancouver since last Thursday (3/23) for the IA Summit, which is part of my dissertation research. It was a good conference - lots of interesting things going on in the IA field that I will be thinking more about during the next couple of weeks. I attended a bunch of different panels, including one on research in the IA field (side note: it's amazing how many people only consider quantitative work valuable), and connected up with some UW geography students and one of my committee members. I also conducted two of my expert interviews: one with Peter Morville and one with Keith Instone. Both gave extremely thoughtful answers to my questions, and I am lucky that the IA community is filled with such generous people who are willing to talk to a total stranger in such depth about the work they do. The conference was a great opportunity to meet people whose work I've admired for a long time. I'll be conducting a number of interviews (via Skype or phone) over the next few weeks with some other folks who presented at the Summit.

I arrived early for the conference so I could enjoy a bit of the Pacific NW. I was reminded, again, of how much I miss this place, and how wonderful Vancouver is. I spent some time shopping on Main St. (between 12th and 24th), an area that reminds a bit of Capitol Hill and parts of Toronto. There are great coffee shops, cafes, ethnic groceries, amazing restaurants, vintage stores, and comic book shops in the area. I got a bunch of local zines at Lucky's and bought a bunch of other frivolous items at Voltage. I also ran on the seawall path along the water and gazed out at the beautiful mountains to the north. Sigh. I'm happy to be going home, but I really miss living in a (real) city.

A let me know about the horrible stuff that happened on Saturday in Capitol Hill. The Stranger has a very detailed article about the events. It's very weird, as I only lived four or five blocks from the crime scene. (via joygantic)

Oh, and I'm blogging from the YVR airport. For free. This place rocks!

(Pictures and other conference thoughts to come when I can figure out how to get my stupid cameraphone to send photos to Flickr at a higher quality.)

Posted by Adrienne at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm currently sitting in a Borders bookstore, mooching free wifi from a neighboring restaurant and trying to come to terms with the lack of wifi access in San Antonio. Despite being one of the top-ten biggest cities in the US, wifi hasn't really caught on here...or rather, it's caught on at hotels near the Riverwalk, but nowhere else. Tourists, rather than locals, seem to be the perpetual focus of urban projects around here. This makes SA a great place to sit next to a river and drink a margarita, but it means that there is a substantial lack of basic city services (like recycling) for people who actually live here. (And, the fact that I would refer to recycling as a "basic" service means I really am an ex-Seattlelite.)

And, why am I sitting in a Borders, rather than an independent coffee shop? Because there are, like, maybe four that are "in town" (meaning, mostly outside of the loop), and of these, at least three are run by evangelical Christian groups. I'm all for freedom of religious expression, but it's hard to concentrate on a dissertation when you're encouraged to join the Bible study in the back room.

Somehow, I thought it would be easy to move here and view the significant cultural shift as a interesting sociological experiment. Instead, I find myself getting frustrated by the smallest things, and it's difficult not to feel like I'm a serious outsider. Still, I know that a city this size has to have a number of people who are somewhat like me -- it's just a matter of finding them.

(Oh, and the nicest thing about sitting in a SA Borders? Streaming KEXP live!)

Posted by Adrienne at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A just wrote a great article for the local alt-weekly here about our experiences playing World of Warcraft together. Read on, but please don't laugh at us too much! ;)

(Oh, and yes, I'm the burly dwarf hunter in the picture...)

Posted by Adrienne at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

six Gmail invites. I can't imagine that anyone out there isn't already on the early-adopter train, but if you're interested in getting one, drop me a line.

Oh, and more regular postings are to resume later this week after I've returned to Seattle and have again acclimated to my far-too-quiet apartment.

Posted by Adrienne at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While I'm not a total slouch at text messaging, I can't hold a candle to Kimberly Yeo, a Singaporean business student who just broke the world record for sending the fastest text message. To win the competition, Yeo typed the following two sentences (160 characters):

The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.

Posted by Adrienne at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wouldn't you love it if all of your problems could be solved using only two easy-to-remember phrases? The Two Things presents short, informative gems that just might help solve your work and/or life problems. Here are a few to whet your appetite (via xBlog):

The Two Things about Art Criticism:
1. If it isn't novel, critics aren't interested.
2. If it is novel, no one else is interested.
-TheLetterM

The Two Things about World Conquest:
1. Divide and Conquer.
2. Never invade Russia in the winter.
-Tim Lee

The Two Things about Working with Building Materials:
1. It's all about the wood.
2. Don't giggle like a 12-year-old when the L is not pronounced in caulk.
-Dina

The Two Things about Dormitory Food:
1. Everything is cold, except what should be.
2. Everything is greasy, including the corn flakes.
-Steverino

The Two Things about Blogging:
1. Everyone who runs one is a kook.
2. Everyone who comments in one is a kook.
-Josh

Other educational links:

• Maybe you're doing a report for your LIS class, or maybe you're just inquisitive.... Regardless, you might be wondering when the first metallographic printing happened in Holland. Find out on this most excellent timeline of the history of information.

• I'm always curious why it takes about the same amount of time to fly from Seattle to Amsterdam as it does to fly from Seattle to Tokyo. And it's weird that one of these flights goes near the North Pole rather than going across the US, then across the Atlantic (but, I guess it makes sense, given the whole "round earth" thing...). Anyway, if you're so inclined, you can map your next airplane trip using the Great Circle Mapper - and, you can also be a big nerd like me!

• Ingenious is a fantastic site; it houses a huge collection of images from the UK's Science Museum, National Railway Museum, and National Museum of Photography. There site also includes a number of short articles on history and technology.

• More educational links can be found at Museum Stuff, a collection of pretty much everything related to museums - online exhibits, guides, jobs, etc. I had no idea that there was an entire museum devoted to carrots. My life is now complete.

• Ever wondered what the front page looks like on your favorite (offline) newspaper? Wonder no longer - the Newseum has a collection of today's front pages from a number of worldwide papers. It's updated daily.

Posted by Adrienne at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

why some people might consider me a little on the geeky side. I just looked up all of the free Wifi hotspots in New Orleans in preparation for my trip. (Here's another list.) Apparently, I'm going to be spending a lot of time at Cooter Brown's (the name makes me laugh). There's also wifi available at the Wine Loft, which is supposed to have quite a swinging singles scene as well - maybe a good reason to avoid it.

Ok, this is really weird. I've been listening to KEXP while typing this post, and John in the Morning has been talking to Dave Bazan from Seattle's own Pedro the Lion. While listening to his discussion, I browsed around the New Oreleans' Citysearch site, and noticed a link that read "Pedro the Lion." Apparently, they're playing in New Orleans on Friday night (5/28) at Howlin' Wolf. How's that for synchronicity?

(Oh, and the Citysearch review says that the crowd will consist of "indie interlopers with their heads in the clouds." Fantastic - it's just like being in Seattle!)

Posted by Adrienne at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm thinking that I need to focus on the good that may exist in the world. To that end, this posting is all about the better things going on out there. Now, we may differ on what should constitute "good things," but I think there's enough goodness in this posting for everyone.

• Oxfam International is tapping into the P2P file sharing market creating the first music service whose profits go to charity. It will cost from 75 to 99 pence (pence!!!) a song, with 10 pence going directly to Oxfam. Bravo.

• Someone is finally cataloging all of the payphones in the world. I'm glad to see that in the era of highly mobile telecommunications devices, I can still call 813.355.9885 and reach the payphone outside Rip Van Winkle Lanes in my hometown. The Lanes may be gone, but my memories remain.

• I recently saw an ad online that claimed to have stock charts that were so beautiful, you'd want to frame them. I'm not sure if I agree with the ad's claim that they're "beautiful," but the charts from Stock Chart.com are pretty visually compelling. And, they could make for some interesting wallpaper, virtual or otherwise.

• I just discovered Vivisimo, a search site that clusters the results together by topic. This might be one of those times when frames are useful (see the Lightbox feature at Getty Images for another). Looks pretty interesting - now if someone would just create a really efficient and engaging visual search engine, I'd be really happy. (musicplasma is pretty cool, but its interface is a little clunky. And, what's up with KartOO's odd genie motif?)

• Apparently, we're supposed to be eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables. This is old news, but you may not know that Dole has an entire site dedicated to "5 A Day Fun" for kids. The site itself isn't that interesting, until you get to the 5 A Day Friends section. Especially riveting is Kenny Canned Pineapple, who I even chatted with for a few minutes. For the P2P collector in you, there's even a collection of MP3 files featuring such hits as "Phytochemicals," "B is for Banana," and the provocatively named "Fiber." You know what? Dole really does make 5 A Day fun!

Posted by Adrienne at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Cameron Marlow, creator of Blogdex and a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab, has created a very compelling art project that translates blog postings into streaming audio using text to speech technology. It's like listening to a bunch of Stephen Hawkings chatting about relationships, technology, politics, sports, weblogging, etc., and it's insanely compelling. I could listen for hours.

Try it yourself: radio vox populi: live from the commons.

Damn those MIT Media Lab people. They're always building something cool - unlike the rest of us doctoral punks who just sit around and pontificate about "hegemony" and "discourse" and "democracy."

(Weird meta comment - I wonder if after I post this to my blog, I can saunter on over to Radio Vox Populi and listen to it being read.)

Posted by Adrienne at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Note one: I went to a party this weekend and was teased mercilessly (but in good humor) for having a weblog. Everyone kept asking me if the evening's activities were "blogworthy." I smiled silently, but secretly thought about the digital camera that I've been obsessively keeping in my bag ever since I received it for Christmas.

Note two: One of my friends read my weblog recently and mentioned that the person on it is not the one he knows. When I asked for some clarification, he said that he was just glad for the context of real life. Another friend told me that my postings are in keeping with my "RL" identity. They're both interesting observations (and both made by individuals who study communication and culture and know about this stuff), but at some point all of this gets very Turkle-esque and the debate about online/offline identity formation rages on. However, I find the roots of this discussion fascinating, so I purchased (finally!) a used copy of Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in the hopes that I could get some clarity. (Side note: Apparently, the person who owned this book before me was somewhat obsessive - the underlining looks as though it was completed using a ruler. Also, I've never seen such neat-looking braces!) (Side-side note: I wonder if I tend to be much more parenthetical on my weblog than I do in the "real world." I'm not sure what that statement means, but it sounds good. I need coffee.)

Note three: In keeping with the propensity for bloggers to comment on and link to articles about blogging, I offer a piece from the NYT - My So-Called Blog.

If this new technology has provided a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy. The new forms of communication are madly contradictory: anonymous, but traceable; instantaneous, then saved forever (unless deleted in a snit). In such an unstable environment, it's no wonder that distinctions between healthy candor and ''too much information'' are in flux and that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a generation were given a massive technological truth serum...Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

I really do need some coffee.

Posted by Adrienne at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)