April 2005 Archive

I've been playing NetHack since the beginning of the year, at least once a week. I've not got past level 8 (out of around 40), I continually die from: falling off of horses, being surrounded by killer bees, starving to death, or maybe getting mashed to a pulp by a Uruk Hai, being bitten by puppies, 'Yet Another Stupid Death' as it is known. Evidently I am rubbish at it.

Nethack is a 'solo' Dungeons & Dragons type game, and is a classic among 'rogue-likes' - the name for the genre. The game is huge, constantly varied, and has over 12 classes (warrior, samurai, priest, magician, rogue etc.), an ever changing map, and a fan-base of *nix heads at rec.games.roguelike.nethack for those of you who are savvy enough to use usenet. But best of all it's free!

No, best of all, the entire world is described only using the ASCII character set! (Your character is represented by an "@", and for all intents and purposes is like some evil design college assignment).

Either download it (NetHack Website ) or watch someone else play it live on internet (telnet://nethack.alt.org then press w and select a game to watch from the list. Better than telly.).|

Everything is slowly going meta: 43 things a social-software website, post stuff you want to do with your life, shows you other people who are doing the same thing. Funny, wholesome, touchy-feely internet waste of time type thing?

No.

According to: 43 Things Wikipedia Entry its a cover for the development Amazons new advertising engine. Genius! Now thats the way to do market research. Next I'll find out Half Bakery is an R&D tool for Proctor & Gambol. |

The tools we use shape the things we make.

This seems pretty obvious, I suppose. If you have nails, wood and a hammer, there is a (albeit a very large) finite number of things you are going to be able to construct with them. I mean, you’re not going to get a cake, are you? The art of photography is radically different to the art of painting, in both cases the process is guided almost entirely by the tools (a notion, somewhat unfashionably lablable as ‘craft’).

I’m becoming increasingly interested with this in terms of software, it seems to me that inherent in most software are particular ways of seeing ( a phrase I’m stealing wholesale from John Berger’s book Ways Of Seeing).

These ways of seeing might be discerned in terms of ‘affordances’ (a term used in product design, a handle on a cup affords the user the ability to hold it, the big empty bit affords the user to put things in it - more in Donald Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things ). Perhaps this is why people try to use word-processors as DTP software, because it almost does the job. You can put text in, change its colour, move it about a bit, make it bigger, smaller, change the font and print it out. What more control do you need? Well, colour seperations are one thing, and reasonable control over typography and exact positioning and the use of layout grids, including bleed and crop handling are another.

I love similies, so here’s one: its a bit like using a cup as a shovel. However, there are physical differences between a cup and a shovel that really rather stop me trying to swap their jobs. Mostly its the length of the handle. In the world of software, the physical interface is exactly the same (keyboard, monitor, mouse, printer), so there is nothing to stop me making this category error .

This may not seem all that important, but it has had fundamental impact on the way the web has developed. Not only that, but may also cause a great deal of inefficiency and subsequent annoyance and dissatisfaction in the (post-post) modern workplace.

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

The evolution of the Shop/retail environment, as model for interactive media. From counter-service to basket to supermarket. Parallels to navigating the information- space of IM, Narrow heirarchical options (high-street of 50 years ago - compared to wide, open structures (todays supermarkets).

People are now used to differentating and making choices about a wide variety of loosely structured, but openly visible defined options very quickly. The illusion of choice and control, in comparison with service-led (mediated) retail environments (i.e. old counter service). Change in perception of value? (commodity items vs. tailoring).