Show and tell

06 April 2006

Matt Webb’s talk at Goldsmiths on Scfi he likes. On the plane to ETech, Matt showed me these slides. It was really interesting to hear him narrating the whistle-stop tour of the slides; I’m very glad to now have the chance to go over it all again more slowly. Plus, to click on the links.

I got a nice email from MacDara today regarding my mention in the Guardian. I spoke to Aleks after Technology 2.0 (albeit briefly – would have loved to have chatted longer) and didn’t realise that things would go this far, but it’s flattering to see. Infovore, for those of you who might be coming here having googled the word, is just the name of this domain and blog. It’s a made-up word that roughly describes my attitude to data around me: gobble it up, spit it out later.

And I’ve been thinking about show-and-tell, about something coherent just on “stuff I like”. Something on gaming, perhaps. A lot of people I know are interested in games, want to engage, but you know, it’s a big medium, you’re playing a lot of catch-up.

I got asked at ETech a few times what my favourite game was. I can’t answer that question truthfully – I have many – but I always gave the same response, explaining it away as my favourite example of “what modern games can be“.

That game is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The original Prince of Persia was one of the first games I played, when I was seven. When I first played the seminal Tomb Raider, it reminded me of the joyous acrobatics and minimalist combat of PoP. POPSOT was the final piece in the puzzle – the Prince rendered truly, accurately, joyously in 3D. But it’s so much more – it combines remarkable play mechanics, a character that’s a delight to manoeuver, with a remarkable streak of storytelling that’s only really possible in games. It fills me with a glow when I think about it; it’s a truly sensuous game, a deliciously controlled aesthetic, and in its short, linear, seven-eight hours, it contains multitudes.

So, right now, I’m thinking about what titles you need to play – not for completism’s sake, but to get a hold on where games are now. Where they came from. What we mean when we say “games”. And what they mean for everything else.

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Getting Naked

05 April 2006

So apparently it’s Naked Day today. Strip away your CSS, show off your white bits.

It’s only right I join in, given that my day-job now is writing the leanest, most accessible XHTML/CSS I can, and that, more to the point, I spent a fair while trying to make this site vaguely accessible if you can’t see the stylesheet. So here we are. Raggedy-bits and all. The stylesheet will automatically switch back to its “International Klein Blue” look on the 6th April.

(The site is, of course, now back to normal)

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Black review

02 April 2006

In which I review Black. Another games review, up over at Pixelsurgeon. I didn’t like it much. Technically wonderful, entirely soulless. And I really tried hard to like it, too. Ah well. I traded it for Advance Wars DS before the California trip. Now that was a good idea.

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Hacking the user interface through tags

30 March 2006

I’ve been thinking about tagging a lot recently. One particular thing came to my attention yesterday, and I think it’s worth noting in public.

Users use tags to hack the UI. Tagging isn’t just metadata; it’s metadata you can use.

To wit: a friend mentioned that one of the problems he had with Flickr was that you couldn’t see al the photos from a particular date. Oh, but you can, I said, and showed him the Archives page which does exactly that – it lets you trawl through photographs by date. It’s a really nice piece of design, in fact, so if you’ve never looked at them, go and check them out.

Of course Flickr lets you see things by date – it’s one of the key pieces of data it associates with every picture. Yes, there’s some confusion between “date uploaded” and “date taken on” but that’s dealt with – Flickr lets you view by both.

My friend hadn’t found this supposed lack in functionality a hinrdance, though. Instead, he’s just tagged his photos with a tag for the year (eg ‘2006’) and, sometimes, a tag for the month (‘September’). He’s not the only one – hunt around Flickr for the preponderance of tags like ‘200506’ or ‘20031224’. Lots of people do it.

Why do they do it? Two reasons. Firstly, they’re adding data that they either don’t think is there or that they can’t find. Even though Flickr stores date information, and they can see that at the bottom right of each picture, if they can’t manipulate that data – if they can’t pivot around it – then they store the data in a way they can use it – they stick it in a tag field. And that leads to the second reason: they’re making something to click on.

Making a tag is like making a shortcut button. One click on “2006” shows me all my pictures from 2006. So does the “archives” function but it’s not quite as fast, to be honest, and not as immediately intuitive.

This is true of all tagging systems – tagging makes links, that’s they way it works. So as well as using tags to store data, tags get used to extend and build upon the user interface. As a developer, this has an unexpected bonus. If you see lots of tags emerging storing data you already track (such as dates), consider that the method for accessing data by date might not be obvious (or simple) enough. And if you see enough data of identical format being tracked – often in the form of machine-readable tags, such as geotags, then perhaps it’s time to consider adding a new feature. Tags are a great way to track how uses actually make use of your service.

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Cruel but informative accidents

29 March 2006

Staplerfahrer Klaus [low-res WMV], or Fork-lift truck driver Klaus. A short German film, spoofing industrial safety videos, by looking at a young forklift driver’s first day at work. “Cruel but informative accidents” occur, according to the blurb.

Yes. Yes, they do. Entertaining – whilst the style is spot on, the sheer messiness of the accidents and the cheapness of the gore has an endearing, shlocky charm. Very, very, very funny; it deserved all the awards it won. Go and watch it (warning, contains strong gory violence by anyone’s standards. If you put a chainsaw on screen, it has to go off, you know).

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Universal currency

26 March 2006

So we watched Shallow Grave tonight. My second time, Alex’s first; I’d largely forgotten it, so enjoyed it afresh. Anyhow, Alex later asked me what I would do if we had a roommate die with a big stack of cash. I suggested calling the authorities immediately, whilst Alex took the next train home with the money.

Then she commented that she liked David’s plan, securing the money in bonds. I suggested buying Apple products. Alex initially, dismissed this, but I explained:

iPods are universal currency. A Shuffle to two Nanos, two Nanos to a big one. We can launder money through them and they almost hold value. Plus, they’re not much bigger than hypothetical £250 notes anyway.

So if you ever see my suitcase explode, and a thousand iPods go flying everywhere, do be respectful; I’m in mourning.

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