serial consign

The last week has been quite hectic! I'm in the midst of rebuilding Vague Terrain in Drupal, exploring some exciting new opportunities and knuckling down for an impending crunch at my day job. Despite all this activity, I've been diligently working through some great writing and media. Please note the following:

• _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, a new blogging project by the prolific poet/theorist Mez Breeze. Mez launched Augmentology this past April and she has quickly amassed an (expectedly) idiosyncratic series of posts which explore notions of presence, identity and play across a variety of gaming and social media platforms. Mez is in the midst of expanding the scope of Augmentology by inviting a number of guest contributors to provide content for the project - these will tentatively include: Joseph Delappe, Howard Rheingold, Azdel Slade, Trevor Dodge and Shane Hilton. I've also been invited into the fold, and I am excited at the prospect of further exploring some of the themes I've touched on in my previous posts on gaming.
• Last week Mitchell Whitelaw tipped me off about Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture, a paper that he recently co-authored with Troy Innocent and Mark Guglielmetti. The essay explores the implications of social software (facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) and some of the counterintuitive percepts and phenomena made possible by immersion in digital space. I found the discussions on death in gaming and character deletion particularly engaging.
• The video archives of the recent Software Studies workshop/symposium at UCSD have been posted. The two dozen or so pecha kucha-style presentations provide an incredible window into the current research projects of numerous top shelf digital theorists and practitioners including Jordan Crandall, Warren Sack, Nick Montfort, and many others. I've only watched a few videos thus far, but I found Ian Bogost's presentation on the forthcoming Platform Studies project quite fascinating.

I've been anticipating the release of Spore for a long time, partly from the nostalgia of having "grown up" with (in?) SimCity and Will Wright's later work, but mainly because I think the game will be a very convincing thought-experiment in scale, emergence and interface in gaming. I'd like to highlight some comments made by Will Wright in a recent video interview, as I consider this commentary great advice for any designer. When asked about the "intelligence" embedded in the recently released Spore Creature Creator, Wright had the following to say:

Most people when they use 3D editors, they approach it you know, just very mechanically. Here's a tool, here's the ability of the tool, but if you think about a tool as entertainment you go about it in a totally different way than [when considering] a tool as a tool. So that's why we wanted every tool in Spore to be as entertaining as a toy, so they want to be toys first and foremost and by being a great toy, it automatically becomes a great tool.. and then you get a lot of people using it, making lots and lots of stuff.

This notion of "playability" is evident when manipulating the interface of the Creature Creator as the application offers users the ability to engage in sophisticated parametric modeling without it even feeling like work. The above image illustrates an editing function which allows the user to alter the length of their creature via pull-taps located on either end. In activating this operation you are presented with an x-ray view of the underlying skeletal structure of your beast. It is important to note that this information is not so much graphical, rather an actual physiology that determines how the character will walk, run, fight, etc. The Creator Creator is full of interesting 3D modeling widgets for placing, moving and aligning body parts and all of these operations are extremely intuitive. I haven't felt so immediately comfortable operating a 3D application since the first time I used Sketchup and while users are not modeling from scratch in Spore, the diversity of the "anatomy library" coupled with the flexibility of the interface for placing and manipulating these organic building blocks offers an incredible amount of control.

If you're interested in learning more about the Spore Interface I highly recommend spending some time with the demo version of the Creature Creator (available for both Mac and PC at the official site for the game) and if you are feeling a little more hands-off in your curiosity, WIRED posted an overview of the software earlier this month.

Thanks to Jim Rossignol for tipping me off about the Wright video interview via this Rock, Paper, Shotgun post.