This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
With the release of Xbox 360, game designers are bumping up against the uncanny valley problem, where in-game avatars are looking a bit too real for comfort. “When it first lurched out of the mysterious tropical cave and fixed its cadaverous eyes on me, I could barely look at the monstrosity. I’m speaking, of course, of Naomi Watts.”
Interview with Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario Bros, Zelda, etc.
One of my favorite things to do in new cities is to observe how the traffic works. Traffic in each place has a different feel to it that depends on the culture, physical space, population density, legal situation, and modes of transportation available (and unavailable).
Everyone drives in LA and Minneapolis, even if you’re only going a few blocks. In San francisco, pedestrians rule the streets…if a pedestrian steps out into the crosswalk, traffic immediately stops and will stay stopped as long as people are crossing, even if that means the cars are going nowhere, which is great if you’re walking and maddening if you’re driving. In many cities, both in the US and Europe, people will not cross in a crosswalk against the light and will never jaywalk. In many European cities, city streets are narrow and filled with pedestrians, slowing car traffic[1]. US cities are starting to build bike lanes on their streets, following the example of some European cities.
In NYC, cars and pedestrians take turns, depending on who has the right-of-way and the opportunity, with the latter often trumping the former. Cabs comprise much of the traffic and lanes are often a suggestion rather than a rule, more than in other US cities. With few designated bike lanes, cycling can be dangerous in the fast, heavy traffic of Manhattan. So too can cyclers be dangerous; bike messengers will speed right through busy crosswalks with nothing but a whistle to warn you.
In Bangkok, traffic is aggressive, hostile even. If a driver needs a space, he just moves over, no matter if another car is there or not. Being a pedestrian is a dangerous proposition here; traffic will often not stop if you step out into a crosswalk and it’s impossible to cross in some places without the aid of a stoplight or overpass (both of which are rare). More than any other place I’ve been, I didn’t like how the traffic worked in Bangkok, either on foot or in a car.
Traffic in Saigon reminds me a bit of that in Beijing when I visited there in 1996. Lots of communication goes on in traffic here and it makes it flow fairly well. Cars honk to let people know they’re coming over, to warn people they shouldn’t pull in, motorbikes honk when they need to cross traffic, and cars & motorbikes honk at pedestrians when it’s unsafe for them to cross. Traffic moves slow to accommodate cars, the legions of motorbikes (the primary mode of transportation here), and pedestrians all at the same time.[2] Crossing the street involves stepping out, walking slowly, and letting the traffic flow around you. Drivers merging into traffic often don’t even look before pulling out; they know the traffic will flow around them. The system requires a lot of trust, but the slow speed and amount of communication make it manageable.[3]
[1] This is the principle behind traffic calming.
[2] That traffic calming business again.
[3] Not that it’s not scary as hell too. American pedestrians are taught to fear cars (don’t play in the street, look both ways before crossing the street, watch out for drunk drivers) and trusting them to avoid you while you’re basically the frog in Frogger…well, it takes a little getting used to.
Today was a maintenance day around kottke.org. Some long-overdue backups, upgrading the OS and some applications, cleaning up the desktop, getting rid of some unneeded files on the web server, trimming my newsreader subscriptions, going through my spam, the kind of stuff that gets put off because it just doesn’t sound that fun and you can get by without doing it over the short term. I really don’t mind it so much…there’s a certain satisfaction you get in completing such tasks. The crossing off of todo items from a list, bringing structure to a messy situation, tidying up.
A friend of mine (who I can’t link to because he got cross with me the last time I did) has a theory that most modern sports are about tidying up. Put the ball in the goal, all the balls in the pockets, clear the tennis court of any balls, etc.:
Explaining to [an acquaintance] why I like watching snooker on tv so much (she doesn’t: it’s slow and boring), I realised that snooker is rarely tense, and it’s not enjoyable to watch at all: it’s extremely satisfying, relaxing almost. Snooker is a game where you have to make a big mess at the beginning with the break, and then you’re never going to get them all neat like that again, so it becomes a process of cleaning the balls away into the pockets very very carefully. First you put away the red, then the black, then the red, and, oh, I did that one wrong, so now I have to do the pink, and the red again…
Lots of video games are like that as well. Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, Dig Dug, Quake, Space Invaders. Chores too, of course. Two chores I find extremely satisfying are bagging groceries and (especially) mowing the lawn. Getting all those different types of products — with their various shapes, sizes, weights, levels of fragility, temperatures — quickly into the least possible number of bags…quite pleasurable. Reminds me a little of Tetris. And mowing the lawn…making all the grass the same height, surrounding the remaining uncut lawn with concentric rectangles of freshly mowed grass. Despite the gigantic blisters I got on both my thumbs last time I cut the grass, I finished with a euphoric giddyness (perhaps akin to a runner’s high) that was simultaneously calming.
Shaun Inman’s Mint stats package contains a great easter egg. Just key in the Konami cheat code (up up, down down, left right, left right, b, a) and you’re greeted with a custom graphic. More old school video game-inspired easter eggs on web sites please.
Photos from Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego project, in which he takes photos of gamers and compares them with their in-game avatars. More photos and an article about Cooper and his photography.
In-game space station recently purchased for $100,000. The game, Project Entropia, lets players earn real-world cash in the game, so it’s not such a silly investment. (via cd)
Processing applet in which an adaptive population plays tag. “If a member plays tag well (when they’re it, they tag others), they’ll live longer.” Prettiest game of tag I’ve ever seen. (via proc blogs where you’ll find lots of neat Processing-related things)
Informal investigation of video game addiction reveals that it burns bright and fast but stops suddenly. I’ve noticed the suddenly vanished compulsion with my game playing as well. (via rw, i think)
Winerd (wine + nerd, get it?) is a board game that involves wine tasting and looks like a cross between Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and Asshole.
Timeline of video games, mostly business-related. But holy crap, Hunt the Wumpus (a game I had for the TI-99) was invented in 1973? Cool.
Clive Thompson enjoys the miniest of mini games, one-button games (more here and here): “video games that have a single button to control all the action”. Many of the mini games in Wario Ware use only one control and only last 3-4 seconds.
I know you’ve always wanted to play Memory with pictures of me from Flickr and now you can. Memry works with any Flickr tag.
Troyis is a game that utilizes chess moves (just the knight/horsey actually). Easy to start, difficult to master.
Fascinating and disturbing realistic drawings of Mario and Luigi. Some things you can’t unsee. (via alice)
Cory Arcangel has gone INSANE and is offering original signed posters of his work for like $20. The posters feature the haunting landscape of the old school Famicom driving game F1 Racer.
Interview with Edward Castronova, video game economist. Quite an interesting thought from him about using MMORPGs to test economies and social systems. “I think the smart thing for the US state department to do today is build a game about Islam but make it a democracy. And set it up so that every 16-year-old from Morocco to Pakistan can go into that world when they get a computer. Not say anything overt about democracy but have them play — have them vote, for example.” (via bbj)
The citizens of World of Warcraft are being infected by a disease that got out of hand, just like in the real world. “Blizzard recently added the Zul’Gurub instance to the game, where Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it’s a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn’t be shocking when some players come back and haven’t been cured.” (via waxy)
Helvetica vs. Arial. Two of the world’s most popular typefaces battle it out for supremacy.
Kevin Bacon talks about the game named after him in which you try to connect him to other movie stars based on movies done together.
We ran across the nerdiest board game today called c-jump, the computer programming game. More info: “Skiers and snowboarders line up at the start location and race along the ski trails. Spaces on the board show statements of programming language. First player to move all skiers past the finish line is the winner.”
Update: here’s the game’s web site. “This game eliminates intimidation of many kids and their parents, bored by the mention of ‘computer programming’, often associated with visions of geeky guys glued to their computers.”
If you’ve got a Rubik’s, yo, this will solve it. Check out the link while cubist revolves it… (thx keith)
Among laparoscopic surgeons, those who have played video games in the past are significantly faster and less error-prone in a surgical training exercise than those who have never gamed. Even better were those who are current gamers…they realized 30% gains in speed and accuracy over their non-gaming counterparts.
This NY Times article on the popularity of sudoku puzzles in US newspapers had me confused because it really didn’t explain what the heck these puzzles were and I’d never seen one before. Luckily, Wikipedia to the rescue.Ben: a Flickr version of sudoku.
Interesting idea about having specific end dates for online games, instead of them ending when they fail. As Alice notes, time constraints will likely make for some interesting gameplay, especially in the later stages of the game. (via rw)
The competitive Scrabble world is starting to see some top-notch players for whom English is not their native language. At he highest level of competition, “Scrabble’s secret is that it’s a math game: board geometry, strategic decision making, probability and chance.” And sometimes it’s better not knowing English so the player can focus solely on the memorization of patterns and gameplay. Interesting stuff.
As near as I can tell, Super Mario Bros will be 20 years old on 9/13/05. Happy! Mario 20th.
Ten ways in which MMORPGs will change the future. “For now let’s just say it’s the most instantly gripping, involving and demanding entertainment technology ever invented. The addiction rate appears to be about twice that of crack Cocaine.”
MMORPG and the Dunbar number. “Overall, these statistics still support my original hypothesis in my Dunbar Number post that mean group sizes will be smaller than 150 for non-survival oriented groups.”
Stay Connected