Coverage
Blogging has been the subject of many long conversations for me this week – particularly since Justin posted his intense personal account of the anguish that living one’s life in a public, confessional manner can generate. People ask me: What’s that guy’s problem? Is he faking it? Is he crazy? Has anyone told him to try a diary? Like, a notebook?
What I ask is: Did you know that he’s the second link on Google, for “Justin”, after Justin Timberlake? I jest, of course, but I think it’s important to remember that for all its pitfalls, communicating in this form has real potential.
Most blogs read like an open letter to whoever is interested… kind of like listening to a stranger converse with someone on the bus. Or at least, converse with themselves. People who talk to themselves (however odd) are often pretty interesting… and being heard is powerful!
As televised/corporate/mainstream media moves closer and closer to real-time or “live” and “reality” footage – what is the difference between ABC’s coverage of bloggers as 2004’s people of the year – and a home-made video blog entry about the star of that program? Youngest or no – she’s getting a lot of fulfillment and satisfaction out of these communications… and I think that rocks.
—
It continues to be incredibly cold here. I spent most of the day indoors, working on equations and visualizations (to figure out what the hell was going on). Rob was kind enough to aid me in this quest – and then, give me a ride home.
It was snowing – but was so cold that the snow froze into tiny pellets… too hard to form larger crystals, or stick to the ground. Heavy, they headed to the pavement, where gusty winds sculpted them into beautiful patterns… like a fluid dynamics or particle simulation gone mad. Dangerous, but beautiful!
—
A bunch of first-time readers wrote in this week… often focusing on my video game writing. And I realized that although I’ve been playing a bunch of new stuff, I haven’t taken the time to write down my thoughts.
Between the Urbz GBA and Riddick, I’ve been thinking a lot about simulation and characters. I’ve really noticed the punch that Riddick gets from using Vin’s shadow, voice and likeness (grounding the character in a style and attitude that is larger than life, yet somehow… authentic) and how the lack of this grounding makes the Urbz feel kinda plastic, or flat.
I’ve also noticed how flattness in a sim-oriented game (as when the prisoners in Riddick repeat lines to you even after you’ve done some craaaazy dangerous exploit) really work against this grounding. So when it happens in the Urbz, I don’t mind nearly as much. That tradeoff (between game-ness and character-ness or … mis-en-scene-ness) is really interesting to me.
Also on my mind: the unintinded gameplay consequences of poor UI or a lag in information delivery. Because I didn’t recognize that a two-pixel-wide strip of pipe hanging from the ceiling was a shower, I spent several in-game Urbz days boosting my hygiene meter by washing in a public sink. This, combined with a few other mis-handled data points gave me an unexpected taste of homelessness (or… travel in 1997’s rural China).
But it was interesting, to game the “live a productive life” system this way… to think about how little I could actually “buy” and still get along. If I could make an Urbz mod, it would be all about living on garbage and panhandling for change. Desperately Seeking Simoleans? You could dress as Madonna, hatbox-suitcase, and everything.
