May 2013
20 posts
2 tags
Recess! 13 – Game Design as a Nihilistic Endeavour
I have a current shtick that says that game designers harbour no illusions about human reality. Designing and testing a game on people reveal the murky depths of human nature in a way few other pursuits do. Take even the simplest game with the possibility of deception and it will often devolve into the horrible treatment of one player for the advantage of another.
I’ve been enjoying reading...
2 tags
Don’t release anonymized datasets
There is no thing as an anonymized dataset. Anybody propagating this idea even tacitly is doing a disservice to the informed debate on privacy. Here’s a round up with some recent cases.
Re:publica
Just today Berlin visualization outfit Open Data City published a visualization of the devices that were connected to their access points during the Re:publica conference earlier this month. The...
2 tags
Week 321
The week before last was filled with theater, a full 9 hours of it which should last me for the rest of the year. I wrote the one negative review you will find of ‘Krieg und Frieden’ as a result of it.
I also spent quite a bit of time struggling with German bureaucracy to be able to request a new Dutch passport. It’s always a fun thing to do.
And add to that the fact that I was in the middle...
2 tags
Almost hit and run
The turn above from Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße into Schönhauser Allee yesterday around 19:15 is where I almost got hit by a woman driving a black car with license plates LDS HS 179. Shaken but not too shaken I pursued them up the street to demonstrate my discontent and to write down the plate number.
I should have seen that they weren’t going to stop though they usually do but this was rather...
2 tags
Moving into KANT
So that cat is out of the bag: I’ve taken up residency at KANT, the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering. Peter who you may have read before on The Waving Cat just wrote the inaugural post on our freshly pressed Tumblr (tweets are still forthcoming).
I’m in the process of moving over, getting my things in order and doing all of my other work, but I do believe that we have struck upon a...
2 tags
Week 320
The week before last started out with me still in Paris sampling the local coffee scene which has been improving massively over the past year or so.
Telescope already was nice:
But with the addition of Loustic, French coffee can finally be taken seriously again:
Most of these places seem to be run by English speaking expatriates and they are also mostly frequented by the same. This was...
2 tags
War and Peace under the shadow of the Apparat
I’ve learned my lessons: I will not go to traditional German theater anymore and I will never again book a play without first checking its duration.
Yesterday night I went to the Volksbühne to see Krieg und Frieden, five hours of 19th century Russian war drama, by the Centraltheater Leipzig as part of the Theatertreffen. I had been listening to its soundtrack by Apparat for the past months. It...
2 tags
Week 319
This week was the week where we were in full sprint for the pilot launch of KAIGARA. Besides that we had a dinner off NEXT with some people involved and some speakers. What I managed to catch from NEXT’s program while working was nothing short of splendid. Bruce Sterling’s talk has been shared widely and I’m eagerly awaiting Anab Jain’s to be published as a video (the slides are already there).
...
2 tags
Week 318
Unbelievable how many weeks behind I am on these. That’s not wholly intended, but the last couple of weeks have been a bit busier than usual. This was the week of April 15th which I spent mostly in Amsterdam.
I spent a full day with the team on Tuesday working on KAIGARA:
I drank very awesome coffee that Angelo had brought back from his road trip along the west coast of the USA:
We celebrated...
April 2013
18 posts
2 tags
The Flexibility of the Dutch Language
Something that we noticed during my recent study of the German language is the tremendous promiscuity of Dutch with English which goes even further than I had previously noticed. We all know the usage of many English words in Dutch as if they were our own, but I wanted to pay attention here to a special case: the fully imported verb.
These are present in phrases such as:
‘Hij kon het niet meer...
2 tags
Week 317
The week before this on Monday (almost two weeks ago), I went to a lecture by Graham Harman. Notes on that were blogged in a timely fashion.
That week also involved a one-day trip to Munich to present on the work we did for a client there. More on that on the Hubbub blog in due course.
Thursday I worked at the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering next door. I really love how...
2 tags
Recess! 10
I played a bunch of Ultratron over the past couple of weeks. It’s beautiful pulsing dance of bullets that lost its charm somewhere past level 100 where I thought I had the game beat, but everything keeps on repeating ever faster. That was eleven hours of obsessive pleasure (according to Steam) followed by emptiness.
Something that does give me a lot of meaning recently but which you probably...
2 tags
Week 316
The week before this is getting a bit boring, but as soon as the current project is over I promise that adventures will resume again.
German lessons continued even with one of our participants being back in the Netherlands:
Sun was enjoyed at last after the gruelling Berlin winter we had to endure:
And my laptop crashed again during the week and this time because I had already performed all...
2 tags
Graham Harman at the Universität der Kunste
Last Monday I heard Graham Harman give the International Flusser Lecture in Berlin. The lecture was in German and for me as a non-native speaker somewhat hard to follow, but the present Germans loved it. ‘The English dominated academia’ seems to be problematic for them.
Harman put Heidegger, McLuhan and Clement Greenberg through a comparison and treated their views on the surface of things and...
2 tags
Add provenance to your bitcoin
I had penned some notes about bitcoin before the entire thing exploded last week. So it seems that everybody is blogging pretty much everything about bitcoin there is to blog. So trying to see if I have some points that are still worth publishing.
Provenance
The main improvement over a physical currency, is that with a digital currency you can in fact track all transactions. This is in fact a...
2 tags
Week 315
We’re in the middle of a big project, so pretty much everything is that right now. In between some small things happen, but we’re rather busy shipping right now.
I did post the answer to the most frequently asked question I get, which is how you actually pronounce my name:
And in between stuff I dropped in on this book presentation at c-base, which was pretty weird:
And I had a strange...
March 2013
30 posts
Kitsune: Recess! 8 – Cardboard Inspiration →
karsalfrink:
Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games.
Dear Alper and Niels,
This morning I read the news that Jason Rohrer has won the final game design challenge at GDC. A Game For Someone is amazing—a boardgame buried in the Nevada desert, intended to be played in a few…
Short and sweet!
2 tags
Highlights from the Elementary Particles by Michel...
This was an interesting read and only strengthens my resolve to read most of the things Houellebecq has written.
It required no creativity, no imagination and only the most basic second-rate intellect.
It would be true to say that in the last years of Western civilization it contributed to a general mood of depression bordering on masochism.
Happiness is an intense, all-consuming feeling of...
Hotel am Krater - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Reise →
2 tags
Recess! 7 – Game Gluttony
Dear Niels and Kars,
This week I bought Ultratron and played that a bit. It looks like a solid 2D shooter like I haven’t played in ages. Before that I played bunches of Ridiculous Fishing and Spelunky which Darius Kazemi has kindly translated into HTML5 for us non-Windows users. And that’s only this week. I’m playing so many games right now. The amount of new games being released is also huge....
2 tags
Not their mothers and fathers
A new large scale German drama series has been making the rounds on Twitter this week called ‘Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter’ and it is interesting though flawed. I haven’t seen a production with these production values on German television before and I think we should see more of it.
The series is somewhat schmaltzy (see the screen capture above of bullet casings landing in slow motion on a group...
2 tags
Who owns the future?
In Conversation: Jaron Lanier and James Bridle On Who Owns the Future? from The School of Life on Vimeo.
I have just watched the above conversation between Jaron Lanier and James Bridle in Conway Hall organized by the School of Life. The event was to mark the occasion of Lanier’s new book “Who Owns The Future?” (Guardian review) and the conversation focused on some interesting ideas from it. I...
2 tags
Taxing data is not crazy
There are some interesting similarities between a recent proposal commissioned by the French government and the book out by Jaron Lanier just now “Who Owns The Future?”
Both analyses signal the dominance of corporate actors in a big data world and both suggest new methods of taxation as a potential solution to the problem. An article over at Forbes explains the commission’s proposal by Nicolas...
