Almost a rally. Some coverage of game design from Skotos. And even some discussion of Intellectual Property.

August 7th, 2003

"I'm sure that many of you are familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I usually think of most psychologists as crack-pots, but often they get the gist of things. The idea is that humans have a set of progressively less essential needs. If you need water, you don't care about food, if you are starving, you don't care about shelter, and so on... up the pyramid. At the top is a category called, "Self-Actualization." This is the hard-to-define area of what you want when you are otherwise satisfied. I know a certain person who claims he achieves self-actualization when he causes people to laugh and spurt milk out of their nose."

-Scott Holliday Alternate Winning Conditions, Storms on Cloud 9 - Skotos

August 21st, 2003 God in the console is a discussion of religion in video games. Although brief I believe it is a good overview of the subject.

August 25th, 2003 While reading, yet another, article at Skotos I came across this gem:

"In actuality the problem of information in today's society goes beyond just the Internet. We're plagued with information. We see previews of movies, spoilers for TV shows, and cheat sheets for games, each defining what a story should be without us ever seeing it. I can't say if I've ever actually seen Frankenstein or not, because I know so much about it. A co-worker reported a similar experience with Monty Python & the Holy Grail — though he knew almost every scene, when he finally saw it at the theatre he realized that he never had before."

-Shannon Appelcline Modern Myths, Part Four: Legends Live, Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities #83

August 27th, 2003 The BBC has the right idea regarding intellectual property. BBC Archive on-line?

Also, go read Soze's Blog He has a link to a great article on Prof. Steve Mann.

August 28th, 2003 I would love to be a writer. I've been reading up on story telling technique, and I setup a Karnak research shelf with those terms. I pulled approximately five links from their update yesterday, and came across an article on endings. Although the article provided no real guidance, it did provoke thought and suggest three books on writing. So, using my Context Menu Book Search, I popped on over to Amazon to check the reviews. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood was out of the running after the first three. I even marked one of the reviews as helpful. The article, however had a different link to the book. Included on the Cambridge University Press item page for the book is a sample chapter [pdf]. I think that it is now safe to say that not only can you not judge a book by its cover, Amazon reviews are also not reliable.

Do not know if I've mentioned this before... I've got an idea for connecting Amazon ranks, reviews and what's related with a library card catalog system. The goal being to ease the burden on researchers attempting to get a wider view of a subject. If you include usage statistics within the library, especially if you could coordinate the students' book use with classroom performance, you could further enhance the recommendation service, possibly pulling obscure works into the spotlight while weeding out irrelevant or unhelpful texts. This may also cut down on deals between faculty and textbook publishers, since student behavior would hold some influence in the process.

I make a habit of reading a book before seeing a movie. However, while talking to Jim, of Soze's Blog, today he proposed the opposite behavior. His argument is that if you haven't read the book you have no, or at least lower, expectations for the movie. This struck me as a unique viewpoint, and I had to stop and think about it. I know that The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and even a part of The Two Towers were basically ruined for me when they deviated from the book. Two movies he pointed out were Sphere and Jurassic Park, I never read the books, but I heard the same complaints from other people. Maybe we should all take his advice and see the movie first. I don't know what I'm going to do when Ender's Game comes out.