Links of Interest: March

Jesse Schell gives a talk on how gaming will transform our world and (in the wrong hands) utterly replace our values and desires with ones designed by someone else.

PS3 Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

And he follows that up with a description of four different types of game designer (fulfillers, humanitarians, artists and persuaders).


Jane McGonigal's talk at TED 2010 about how gaming can change the world provides an optimistic
counterpoint to Jesse's talk. Her thesis: gamers are an untapped resource, and gaming fundamentally changes people's brains to give them advantageous personal qualities.





Truly Free Film links to a Bruce Sterling talk in which (as a tangent) he discusses how to solve problems now:

1. Write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.
2. Write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys.
3. Write problem in Twitter. See if it gets retweeted.
4. Open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.
5. Start a Ning social network. Name the network after the problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.
6. Make a video the problem and put it on Youtube. See if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.
7. Create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Jill Golick gives a brilliant post on the bare minimum of web promotion you need to do. Some excerpts:

You don’t have an air date or a web site yet.  But that shouldn’t stop you from having a hundred followers on Twitter or 5000 hits to a blog.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if by the time you got your airdate a thousand people or ten thousand already knew about the project?  And all it cost you was a few hours a week on the web.  Let’s face it, you’re on the web already.  Just make the time productive.

... [Have] someone on the team contributing to a blog though prep, production and post, to have a Facebook fan page up from day 1 building interest, to start a Flickr account to house pictures from set and YouTube channel from some video.

The Department of Internal Affairs begins internet censorship in New Zealand.

Blogger introduces a new template designer. Behold its effects by looking at my blog.