[VideoGames] ‘Other Player’: a conference on multiplayer games

Other Players is a conference about the multiplayer phenomenon (December 6 – 8, 2004, in Copenhagen).

Combining technical and interface issues to create compelling digital entertainment is in itself a daunting task. In the past years, however, it has become increasingly clear that game designers must also deal with issues formerly thought to belong to fields such as sociology, political science, and architecture.
While many early games – think only of Spacewar! – were multiplayer games, more complex game designs have exponentially increased the challenge of handling social dynamics and understanding the many issues arising when players interact on more ambitious scales.The Other Players conference addresses multiplayer issues – massive, large, and small.

The possible list of topics includes but is not limited to:

• Multiplayer game design
• Multiplayer/collective aesthetics
• Social issues in multiplayer gaming
• Multiplayer interface issues
• Cheating and grief play
• History and development of multiplayer games

[MyResearch] 2 representations of a same thing

Those two pictures represents where the CatchBob players went. I am trying to add this as a news layer above the EPFL map…

[Research] Polyblog discussion with ifeedyou

Today we had an interesting discussion with Jerome and the KIS (people in charge of the EPFL weblogs). The point was how to improve the Polyblog project.

Fab, Patrick and I have to work on service specifications.

[Space and Place] Nobody living underwater

Talking of freak watching, I was wondering whether there are people living underwater (some kind of eco-tech organized secret society) but it seems that it’s only limited to video-games. I googled but nothing interesting emerged…

It is strange since there are some plans to build underwater hotels like the one in Dubai…

[Reminder] Coordinates of the EPFL map

Coordinates of the EPFL map

$maxX = 533715;
$maxY = 152714;
$minX = 532660;
$minY = 152220;

[MyResearch] CatchBob Data Visualization

I finally computed old data drawn from CatchBob. The first picture shows our path on the campus. The second depicts the number of area visited (Patrick and I worked on a php file to parse the raw data, then we used R to compute the visualization). As we can see on the second figure, we drew a bounding box that just took into acocunt the area where the players went (this is an issue, we should reconsiderate this because it will not be possible to compare all the groups if we keep this). The third figure shows where player A (above the x axis) and player B (below the x axis) sent their messages.

[TheWorld] Casual Surveillance

It is the second time, I got this message on my cell phone: “Hi! I found your phone number, could you call ma back?”. This reminds me an old txt Watching the Watcher Watching You (1984-85 NPI/Appa Teleworks I):

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THIS ON YOUR FAVE RAVE PHREAK BOARD:
“LEAVE ME A PHONE NUMBER AND I WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU..WE CAN TRADE SOMECODEZ…”

THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY BLOTTED OUT OF HIS GOURD, OR HE IS TRYING TO GET SOME INFO ON YOU! FEDS WANT TO KNOW PEOPLE AND KNOW AS MUCH ABOUT THEM AS THEY CAN WITHOUT GETTING FOUND OUT. SO, DONT MESS WITH THESE KINDS OF PEOPLE.

[Space and Place] Ubicomp: no expansion of the smut industry?

fredshouse questions the fact that the very field of Ubiquitous Computing have no sex-related applications…

Museum guides, elder care, memory prosthetics and ornithology, for sure. But how about teledildonics?

- Maybe ubicomp isn’t the right kind of medium…
- Maybe it’s too early. There are almost no commercial ubi-products, and thus no real channel exists yet for delivering the goods and taking money in return
- maybe we haven’t reached the right level of sophistication in our thinking about ubicomp’s potential imprint on the sensual fabric of society.

[Research] A blurry statistical guide reminder

This is my ultimate statistical guide. It is just a snapshot of a stat summary… It is about how to select statistical tests.

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[Weird] Geneva Fluffies

A very odd situation in Geneva, absolutely not clue about what this is.