Random Alper

Week 311

Last week we were on something of a tear continuously shipping things (it beats continuous integration). As Kars mentioned in the Hubbub weeknotes I was featured in the rather shiny TNW magazine about the subject of gamification. Much to my surprise this issue was filled with blabbering by Gabe Zichermann. It’s not only that we take issue with the way he approaches games, it looks like everything about the man is shameful. You can read unparalleled levels of douchebaggery over at Kevin Slavin and to my dismay even GigaOM is complicit.

To my shame it took me until Friday night to write my second installment of Recess!

I also got in touch with the government of Tempelhof-Schöneberg to procure all building permits for the area which had some disappointing results. More on that later.

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Hosting on Heroku with functioning MX records

It seems to be not completely obvious how to host a website on heroku while at the same time also maintaining e-mail delivery. You would think that this is a very common situation and it would be well documented but unfortunately it is not.

We got a DNSimple account because that’s the way that heroku allows naked domains to function. DNSimple sets up the ALIAS record for you rather easily, but what it doesn’t do is warn you if you have both MX and CNAME records on something. What happens is that the CNAME record always takes precedence as a redirect so your e-mails are then routed to proxy.heroku.com. Something that is undesirably and that DNSimple should warn against.

What turns out to be the best solution is to set ALIAS records for both your apex domain and your subdomains (as proposed here). This way you don’t need a CNAME record anymore that can interfere with other settings. Heroku in their documentation advise you to use a CNAME record, so I’m going to ask them if there are any problems with using an ALIAS for all web routing.

The other option would be to purchase another plan for Zerigo which seems to be heroku’s preferred solution for this issue right now. Again this is rather poorly documented and we would have liked to be informed about that before we chose for the DNSimple option.

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Recess! 4 — Glass

Hi Niels & Kars,

I’m checking in with you guys straight from what used to be Cold War Berlin. Berlin is still in a state of conflict, mostly because of growing pains and a lack of identity (today they started demolishing the last bit of that wall to make place for luxury apartments). An interesting example of that conflict on the streets is the civil disobedience and destruction themed game Camover. The idea is generally that people with balaclavas go around destroy security cameras and documenting the fact to gain points. Now as if that wasn’t controversial enough, an activist associated with it suggested to extend the game to ‘data goggles’ and destroy those of people recording your visage.

Data goggles obviously means Google Glass. Last week we had a brief discussion on twitter about why Glass would or would not be an obvious device to play games on. Say what you will about the video or just compare it to the Microsoft vision of internet connected fridges.

@kaeru @peterbihr It may turn out like the Move controller, a nifty gadget with a couple of interesting games.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) February 21, 2013

I’m well aware of the standard arguments against AR. Kars was quick to point them out. These are very valid, but it is still an experience that can be put to a variety of uses. Just look at the Move controller’s whose limited in- and outputs enable a game as interesting as Joust of which the depths have not been exhausted yet. Similarly the hardware affordances of Glass should yield at least one interesting game.

What is the most annoying part of Joust is finding enough controllers to play it with. If Glass reaches the Android like ubiquity that Google is obviously aiming for, we can expect a very rich ecosystem to arise around this. These games will be mostly very boring, poor conversions or techno-wankery such as for instance Ingress but we should not rule out that there may be one or two good ones to pop up as well. I’ll take something that’s half as fun to play as Zumbie looks to be.

Straight up game development of course is not the most interesting thing that such a platform offers. The changes in our social interaction that such hardware engenders will probably be the most interesting hooks to build interesting playful interactions into. So the loony activist above was not that far off the mark, but let us try to be a bit more constructive.

- Alper

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