Andy Baio’s gotten a hold of an entire backup of an Infocom shared network drive from 1989, and it includes a look into the history of the aborted sequel, and a peek at what it would have looked like:

MILLIWAYS or RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

Takes up where “Hitchhiker’s” left off. Manufactured planets, Deep Thought, white mice, time travel, 1001 verb tenses, digital watches, the Frogstar, Total Perspective Vortex, the End of History! (Does Douglas really want to work on this at this time? Does it matter?)

1. It seems natural to include a scene in the restaurant, Milliways. Could be a bit of fun: strange parties, unctuous compere, self-introducing food. Perhaps there’s an object there that you need to get. (It could be a SPORK, a spoon with sort of forky tines on the end. Or would that be a FOON?) It could be a vehicle from the car park — Marvin has the keys. If you manage to re-enter Milliways at another time (oops! on another occasion), you will not meet yourself, “because of the embarrassment that usually causes.” What about a visit to the Big Bang Burger Bar?

Full Story: Waxy.

(Thanks Gabbo!)

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I came across this via Kottke. I’ve seen bits and pieces posted about Outside over the past couple months, but this is a good review of a game everyone should be dying to try:

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

The reviewer gives it a 7/10.

ADDITIONALLY, just reading this on the Telegraph website, which goes to show just how peculiar IRL and Outside can really be depending on what tribe you end up playing:

The Masai warriors’ guide to England
by Andrew Pierce

Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England. […]

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people — many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."

The Masai men — who become warriors after tracking, running down and killing a male lion — may struggle with Greenforce’s interpretation of how English law operates.

"For example, if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief."

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I never realized, until reading this, how important the “character alignment” system of AD&D was in my own thinking about ethics:

Personally, I know that some of my earliest thinking about moral philosophy came about through heated discussions about the Character Alignment Graph in the AD&D Players Handbook. Where earlier versions of D&D mapped the moral code of individuals in the game as Good, Neutral, or Evil; AD&D was a little more complex:

For the uninitiated, “Lawful,” is just that, someone who follows the letter of the law. “Evil,” represents complete self-interest. “Good,” shows a concern for the greater good, for the community over the self. “Chaotic,” represents a total disregard for rules and dogma. For a twelve-year old, this is pretty heady stuff.

I have for sometime decried the blinding limitations of a binary value system. As an artist, even value systems that allow for shades of gray seem limited for mapping the whole of human experience and action. I think we would be far better suited to discuss ethics if we could see it as a color wheel, rather than black and white, or even gray-scale. I suppose it would be too much to hope for a culture of such sensitivity that we could even conceive of a value system based on the Munsell color solid. But the philosophical/artistic/gamer in me thinks what such a system lacks in playability, it more than makes up for in verisimilitude.

Still, when discussing ethics with other gamers, I have taken for granted that I had a model which allowed me to discuss it in “color,” rather than in “black and white.” It is only in writing this post that I have put this all together, and realized why I have such frustration in discussing moral issues with non-gamers. It is because in this arena, like so many others, AD&D is like a Common Tongue (or Lingua Franca for non-gamer academics) for discussing simulation.

Full Story: Honky Tonk Dragon.

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Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died. Jesse Walker writes:

It was Gygax, more than anyone else, who turned Tolkien fandom from a premodern pose into a postmodern, participatory phenomenon: Rather than merely reading about hobbits and elves, fantasy fans could enter Middle Earth themselves and create their own adventures. Granted, most of those adventures tended to sound the same. (If you’ve ever endured a D&Der’s detailed account of how he spent his weekend, you’ll understand what I mean.) But we knew that from the title, right? On one level it’s a liberatory vision, one where anyone can create a world for everyone else to play in. But Gygax gave it a Foucauldian twist: In the end, each of those worlds is still a dungeon.

Obit on CNN.

Obit at Reason.

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The G-spot Episode 19, Wes Unruh discusses DIY Gaming with Casey O’Donnell, a PhD candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And more.

Alterati: Adam Gorightly part 2.

Occult of Personality: Lupa on Therioshamanism.

Phase II: Paul Laffoley part 2.

Point of Inquiry: Keith Stanovich - Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. New one this week. See also PI’s interview with Church of Satan high priest Peter Gilmore on science and Satanism.

Plus Ultra: Sue Shifrin-Cassidy, author of The World’s Greatest Email.

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“Hello world. Welcome to For Tax Reasons, the animation studio of hip hop artists Ben Levin and Matt Burnett. In case you didn’t hear, animation is the fourth element in the hip hop tree of life. I don’t know, this is ridiculous. And speaking of Jesus. Here’s a new short, just in time for the holidays, called IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR. It’s the tale of three nerds who turn a nativity scene into a LARP battle, and various acts of sacrilege ensue. We conceived it around Thanksgiving of 2006, and hoped to have done in time for X-Mas. Well, we kind of underestimated how horribly tedious animation is, and lo and behold, it’s November 2007 and we’ve got 6 minutes and 36 seconds of animation that we didn’t really plan on devoting a year of free time to. So enjoy! Thumbs up!”

(via For Tax Reasons)

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New project from rhizome.org

Torrent Raiders is a dynamic network visualization realized through the idioms and aesthetics of arcade-style video games. Driven in real-time by the activity of bit torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders takes place on the ad-hoc networks created by bit torrent users. Torrent Raiders playfully addresses issues of domestic surveillance and intellectual property by putting players in the role of a mercenary copyright enforcer, encouraging them to capture evidence against peers on torrents in order to collect bounties. Players assist in the distributed surveillance of these torrent swarms, sending information to a central server where it will be used to drive further visualizations of this information. As a dynamic visualization exploring privacy, piracy and surveillance, Torrent Raiders challenges Internet users, content pirates and government spooks to examine their allegiances and mistrust their computer connections.

Download from torrentraiders.com.

(Thanks Wes).

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That’s the cover of my 2nd book - Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games - used in conjunction with an article theorizing about a possible connection between ARGs and the sudden, mysterious deaths of two young and apparently quite talented artists, Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.

I guess if I were only interested in selling books I’d be happy, as the prominent placement of the cover on this Dreamsend blog and the subsequent interest and coverage it has generated has resulted in a surge of sales in both this and my first book. But under these conditions it just doesn’t feel right. I’d rather not have the sales created by this blogger’s insensitive and often just plain stupid speculation about the deaths of these two people.

Full Story: Alterati.

Update: See also This Alterati article.

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I actually thought I’d posted these before, but I can’t find them in the archives anywhere. They are older interviews, but they’re a good introduction to DeLanda.

From the Zero News Datapool:

Don’t call me Gaia. The Gaia hypothesis is a very interesting point. […] Philosophically, it is a terrible mistake. It is a terrible mistake precisely in the neo-materialist sense because it takes the metaphor of the organism, it sees life, living flesh as the most magical thing that happened on this planet. This is of course a chauvinism, a kind of organic chauvinism on our part. It takes the metaphor of the organism and applies it to the whole planet. Now the whole planet is alive, that what Gaia is. Not only do you call it an organism, you also give it a goddess name just to make sure you are ridiculous enough. The way out of this is to think that the planet is indeed something special, but it what Deleuze and Guttari called a body without organs, which is the exact opposite of an organism. It is a cauldron or receptacle of non-organic life, a body without organs. Because it can be alive in the sense of being creative and generating order without having genes or having organs or being an organism. In my view, the very fact that the atmosphere connected with the hydrosphere can generate things like hurricanes and cyclones and all kinds of self-organizing entities means that indeed the planet, even before living creatures appeared, was already a body without organs, a cauldron of creativity, a receptacle of spontaneously emerging order.

And here’s Erik Davis’s interview with DeLanda from Mondo 2000:

I have my shaman there, since I was like 19, this woman called Julietta. She is a direct heir of a long, long line of Mazatec knowledge.

I hate mysticism. I’ve always hated the whole idea of taking psychedelics and then going, “Western science is bullshit, let’s turn to Eastern philosophy.” I always strive to have a materialist explanation for what’s going on. I always thought that matter had much more to it than just this inert stuff that sits here. And now I’m being proved right.

Think about the Game of Life [computer-based cellular automata developed by mathematician John Conway]. At first the rules of interaction of the little cells in an abstract space were so simple that everybody thought it was a game. Then they found ladders and glider-generating guns spontaneously forming. So this tiny, abstract, stupid space all of a sudden began exploding with possibilities.

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ARG Net has an update about lonelygirl15 (Previously on Technoccult).

The letter from “the creators” is incredibly lame. To quote New York Times blogger Virginia Heffernan :

I don’t know what to add, except UGH at the “it’s not lies or a coherent mystery; it’s all a fascinating artistic jeu d’esprit” idea. I think Jayson Blair might even have tried that one.

In fact, I’d rather that The Creators were more serious–more mysterious–more even, hm, Thelemic about it all. I mean that, whatever their ideology or frame of mind, I wish they showed more heart for the actual stuff of the videos; I don’t quite see, for example, how sloughing off Bree as the “magical faerie spirit in all of us” (or whatever that was) is going to win them any allegiance over here, where Bree–the character AND the live being playing her–were what originally excited us.

In other words, I didn’t set out to see a big art experiment. I set out to get to know Bree. And it’s not fair to make it sound as if that’s an infantile motivation for looking at the vids, or as if higher minds would understand that the lofty call of filmmaking qua filmmaking supersedes the draw of a fictional character.

Dickens was careful not to tell his crazed, besotted fans: “Little Nell’s not important! She’s just everygirl! It’s me! I’m a WRITER! And the novel is a NEW FORM!”

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The white-hot spark of a YouTube user named LonelyGirl15 has set the dry timber of the summer Internet community ablaze. Ostensibly the video blog of a teenaged American girl named Bree, the 23 videos posted so far have chronicled a budding romance with a boy named Daniel, but there’s a twist: Bree’s family is very religious, she is home-schooled, and she has pledged a “purity bond” with her father. Even stranger is the fact that Bree’s religion is never named, and in fact on various comments on YouTube she has said that it is not mainstream - “We’re not Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or anything like that.” There’s also a mysterious picture of famous occultist Aleister Crowley on Bree’s bedroom wall, above a candelabra which she’s vehement that Daniel not light. And wait - that Crowley picture is new - it used to be something else (could that possibly bear a resemblance to Baphomet?) A dark twist, indeed.

Full Story: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

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R. Buckminster Fuller foresaw a need for a world peace game as an antidote for war games, and it’s eventually lead to osGame’s “Global Simulation Workshop.” Twenty teams, representing geopolitical regions, multinational corporations, and non-profit organizations, work together or in competition to manage the earth’s resources.
Link.

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Who first said “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”? Was it British comedian Marcus Brigstocke? Was it Kristian Wilson of Nintendo Inc in 1989? Or was it Karen Price of Nintendo in the same year? Or perhaps it was the design portal k10k?
Link.

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Rez, for the Playstation 2 and Dreamcast, is designed “to create a sense of synaesthesia” by combining trippy visuals with pulsating techno. The article mentions “vibrations” a couple times too, so I assume it will also be taking advantage of “rumble packs.”
Link (via Fark).

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There’s an article on Shift.com about a new piece of software called Vebharis. It’s a 3D game that generates fractal music.

In it, you’re investigating an artifact that leads you to a meeting place between two worlds, where different species communicate through music.

Link

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Joseph Matheny, who has been bringing the Incunabula Papers and the legend of Ong’s Hat to cyberspace for years has announced he will author his final chapter of the Incunabula Papers titled Game Over? The final chapter will apply game theory to the Ong’s Hat fiasco and will question whether it is really over.

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