I like Sudoku. I quite enjoy Sudoku, as, it seems, does a vast proportion of the British population. Various people have, in recent weeks, used up an awful lot of newsprint trying to look at why it’s so popular, trying to out-Sudoku rival publications, and none of it seems very satisfactory. I mean, they bang on about how it appeals to both men and women – as opposed to chess problems, which are primarily male, and cryptic crosswords, which in my experience appeals equally (and usually equally little) to both men and women, but I think they’re missing the point.

The reason it’s popular is that it isn’t a game. It’s an exercise.

When I was on holiday in Spain I read Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic. It was one of the first non-fiction books I’ve read in years. I picked it up off the pile of free, unreviewed books at work, mainly because it looked interesting and thought it might tie into my grand-overarching ideas about histories of play and gameplay.

I was right. And it was also a lot more than that; if anything, it reassured me of my path and approach to life, offered some advice, and also steered me away from some things.

Now, as it was a non-fiction book I was reading relatively seriously, I decided to take notes – or at least as best I could in the succession of bars I read it in, pen in hand, tapas fork in the other. Unfortunately I became slightly too absorbed as I got into it and the notes fade away – although I do now remember underlining a fair bit in pencil, which I probably ought to aggregate with the rest. So a more formal set of notes on the Play Ethic – and, indeed, me jogging my memory to all the bits I found most interesting – is still upcoming.

But there was one paragraph, a third of the way through – after the notes in my Moleskine have all but dried up – that was good enough to write down.

“Somewhere, in the space created by some facility of the next generation of mobile and wireless devices, there will be a need for people to organize their random societal paths into some useful, effective flows (represented at the moment by the blogging movement), waiting for some general crisis of meaning or purpose to bring it all together in a flash.“

Kane mentions blogging but I think he means more; for me, his description calls to mind almost all forms of social software I’ve used (or can think of). The “crisis of meaning” isn’t a crisis of information-overload that can be solved by RSS; it’s a larger crisis, I believe, which leads to a realisation not only that all this information is important, too big, and must be read all at once, but also that it must all talk to each other. And I’m not sure that some uber-social-software will solve that; rather, it seems to be the language of communication, a framework for bringing knowledge together, that Kane anticipates. He’s essentially describing a world built not on the web but on web services; Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, whatever that whole concept is called this week.

Social software, along these lines, facilitates a drawing-together of knowledge – shared or personal. And this sharing is playful, just like the first networks we form as children. The more I think about this, the more I come to this conclusion: social software is inherently playful. Ludicorp, who we all know from flickr and Game Neverending demonstrated that explicitly – but there are so many other companies, products in this sphere that all are playful – full of play – in their own way. Some of them may agree more than others on that point.

Why is play such a useful idiom for social software, and indeed social networks? Perhaps it’s a trust thing. As we play, we begin to trust our playmates, as well as the tools and toys of our play. And trust leads to relaxation – calm found in the state of play – and so we end up choosing to play more often. The Xbox marketing team were having a surprisingly good day when they added that vital final word (signifying not only the market-leading Live service, but a crucial rhetoric for any player) to the console’s slogan:

it’s good to play together.

Clayton James Cubitt posted an interview with Tom Carden to his own weblog yesterday. Clayton and Tom collaborated on a photo-shoot for Metropop magazine, Clayton taking the photographs and manipulating the final images, and Tom supplying generative art created in Processing to be merged with Clayton’s images. It’s an most interesting interview, from an artist as interested in his collaborator as he hopes the article’s audience will be. [via Blackbeltjones]

It’s an interesting survey. You’ll see why when you take it. I’m looking forward to the results of this one; there’s also some pretty neat UI design and programming going on behind the scenes, including what looks like a whole pile of asynchronous stuff on what – for me, anyhow – was the most interesting page.

I’m going to this talk on “The Slacker Ethic” at the ICA tonight. I’m really interested in the topic, and it’ll be interesting to see the panel discussion – after all, they represent three very differing approaches to slowing-down one’s life. Richard Reeves is chairing the event and given his past writing I think he’ll probably have some useful input – as well as being the ideal person to guide the talk.

Pat Kane is on the panel, and I hugely enjoyed his Play Ethic whilst on holiday. My notes are still in my Moleskine; I’ll try and type them up tonight, as well as my notes from the talk. There’s lots of stuff gestating nicely upstairs along this lines – hopefully the event will spur me on. I’ll post again, hopefully tomorrow but certainly by the weekend, with some notes and thoughts.

I’ll be the first to admit my Javascript is pretty lowly. Today I boosted it from “not really very existant” to “working and bodgeable”. My PHP is OK, my XHTML is very good, and my Javascript sucks. Anyhow, I was working on some basic arithmetic stuff and tearing my hair out.

So, I was trying to add some variables – variables I had already successfully multiplied – but they kept on concatenating. How irksome. So I investigated how to change the type of variables. Now, I appreciate the benefits of weak typing and all, but the first article I ran across said “the great thing about Javascript is that it’s not typed at all!“. Which didn’t help a lot. Eventually I found a way of doing it (that wasn’t subtracting the inverse); it was the delightful Number() function. Which doesn’t appear to be much of a function at all.

That was sentence number one. I didn’t think it could get worse, but oh, it did.

So I want to make sure we’re only dealing with integers in this web page. So I investigate how to convert any number to an integer (which will happen onKeyup or onKeydown). And the first (vaguely) helpful article I find says: “Javascript doesn’t have integers. It just has Numbers“. The article went on to explain that you should either round Numbers down or up to turn them into integers. At this point I could have cried.

Still, I got the application working in the end. I’m going to learn more (if only to take advantage of way more DOM scripting and Ajax), but I’m going to have to take it in small doses. Or else I won’t have much hair left.

So Flickr is moving from Canada (which is like the Wales of North America) to California (which is like the California of North America). This is fundamentally a good thing, simply because Flickr got bought by Yahoo who have lots more money and that means more servers and therefore less massages, not to mention it’s good when good projects get bought by companies. Especially be companies who seem to be reacquiring their sense of clue.

Now, obviously there’ll be some downtime. And there’ll be some griping. But the main source of a lot of the griping in this Flickrhelp thread is “I don’t want my data in America“. Now, for one reason or another, many people have an objection to the USA.

My objection to this ridiculous whinging is that they didn’t sign up with Flickr in the first placve because it was Canadian, but because it was cool and online. And online is everywhere, right? If it started in the US, I doubt that there’d have been this outcry to begin with. Things like Terms of Service are relatively complex beasts, and just because they’ll change in future doesn’t mean that anything else will change as a result – or that that change is for the worst. It’s a bit of fuss over nothing, really.

My best advice? Don’t listen to the whingers. People, especially dependents, hate change. Their hatred tends to be irrational and, essentially, wrong. If I’m proved wrong in future, then I’ll eat the first available hat, of course. As it stands: I chose Flickr because it was part of a digital world, not a single country. And I’m still happy to use it – and indeed, proud to use such a kickass service. (Hence all the links to Flickr in this post; it’s Pagerank as a sign of respect..).