Monthly Archives: June 2005

Lousy Headline, Good Body

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I happened across this nice article over on Fast Company. The title royally sucks imo, but the piece is very well written. Thank you, Danielle Sacks.

I have my own theory as to why they used that deceptive headline. First read both my earlier post on Fast Company’s trendy “Design” articles AND the previously unavailable stories I mentioned which are now viewable (just follow the link in that post to find them). Should mention that I think this worthwhile article was also one of the “restricted content” articles and it could easily have been called out in that earlier post of mine based only on its title (lucky for me that I didn’t). Consequently maybe you’ll come to the same conclusion I did about this: bait and switch. Might work.

Advergaming Frontiers

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Via Clickable Culture comes this CBS news/Gamecore story (and a critique of the story) on advertising in videogames. I’ve not played these games yet so I’ve not seen the ads, but have to admit I’ll be diving in soon. However, in the meantime I suspect Clickable is on the mark in its critique. After all, isn’t the whole point of advertising to get noticed? Seems to me someone like a McDonald’s executive would pay good money to get their golden arches into a futuristic game like the Mars colony based Doom3 – it’d imply that their company will be around a long time and be a great long-term investment. What other kind of advertising has such potential? You could even have the bad guys hold “future” corporate executives hostage (bet they’re still caucasian males). If we’re lucky we can just shoot them too and end the standoff with the baddies. Hey, some of us aren’t interested in gameplay interruptus.

Maybe someone should show a proper example of “subtle and inconspicuous” advertising. We could start with branded litter on the streets of Grand Theft Auto (oh look, an IGN website).

Swimmin’ With The Virtual Fishes

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artificial living fish in Second Life

I came across an interesting story couple days ago over on New World Notes (a blog maintained by a Second Life-embedded reporter) about fish with artificial intelligence coded into them swimming and replicating in the simulation. I wanted to see it for myself so logged on today for a peek. Very cool. Unfortunately there were only a few fish left as apparently there was some kind of population explosion which forced the Creator’s unforgiving hand (sounds alot like a Flood story to me). No matter. It was still interesting to see them “swim” around. The pyramid object you kinda see at the bottom of the above image (hiding behind the lowest fish) is a food/sphere “dispenser” and they didn’t stray too far from that. And while they swam around me, they didn’t appear too interested.

My favorite part of the story however is actually in the comments section, where the following line sounded especially intriguing:

A virus was quickly introduced to kill off the mutant fish before they either crashed the servers or they evolved a way of teleporting to the main grid.

That’s classic. You can read the whole story and comments here.

Real Enough To Kill

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Within the gaming community, news of players assaulting or even killing other online game players isn’t really new. And here is a follow-up over on the BBC News website to one story that made the rounds recently about a Chinese player so infuriated over the sale of his loaned, virtual sword that he killed another player.

Now what’s interesting to me is how the general public will shake its collective head in disbelief. Understandable. Murder for any reason doesn’t make much sense to me. But for every “crazy” it’s-only-a-game story, there are doubtlessly hundreds of equally nonsensical ones that most of us now don’t think about twice (and I suspect more and more the evening news doesn’t report about them because they’re not sufficiently sensational to keep advertisers happy). Some possible examples:

– murder over a pair of sporting tickets (just to see something you could probably watch on television for free)
– murder over some cheap family heirloom (that has no value beyond the sentimental)
– murder over drunken comments made at a bar (when words are at their cheapest)
– murder over a sporting affiliation (because not cheering for the team wearing the right uniform is simply a killing offense)
– murder due to jealousy (because when you love someone, you have to control them and sometimes kill them)
– murder over skin color (because… well, just because)
– murder over religious beliefs (…!…)

So can someone explain to me how killing someone over a virtual sword is any different than the above? I’m having a difficult time segregating.

Mercedes DCX

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Biomimetics isn’t really a topic I cover here, however two other areas seem to be increasingly tied to it. The first is the RepRap project. That makes sense to me since creating objects free from manufacturing constraints allows forms and solutions more like those in nature. Hard to beat Mother Nature. I’ve always been fascinated with the internal structure of bird bones for example – they’re strong and beautiful at the same time.

The other area is industrial design. As the 3D tools used within the profession become both more powerful and increasingly user-friendly, it’s only natural that forms will become more expressive and draw from a larger pool of inspiration. Mother Nature has a big pool and is pretty inspiring.

That said, I came across a short Yahoo photo blurb earlier this evening about Mercedes’ new concept vehicle – the DCX. Okay. Pretty funky. But not enough information for me to get really interested and bookmark the link. So leave it to WorldChanging to put some meat on the story’s bones in their write up. First, they have a more informative story on the vehicle. Second, they discuss the development of the vehicle (gotta love that). And third, they have some great links, including one to the Mercedes presskit. Awesome. And from that kit I grabbed the following images:

Mr. Boxfish

DCX virtual windtunnel

DCX structure

The Mercedes DCX

The top image I have to post. Even a fish deserves his/her 15 minutes of fame and being the inspiration for this vehicle qualifies in my book (we could use more fish in place of some characters in the news lately, imo). The second image is near and dear to my aerospace engineering heart. The third image got my attention because it both reminds me of those bird bones I mentioned above, and because it looks like an RP model. And the fourth image needs no explanation.

Now go read the article over on WorldChanging. But take that comment regarding the shape/coefficient with a grain of salt… a big reason for high drag coefficients are the seemingly minor things: non-flush surfaces, antennas, side mirrors, aso. I don’t see alot of that on this concept. All other things being equal, a flattened wedge does have a better coefficent (profile drag is the largest component of the overall equation). However, if you go sticking a bunch of aerials on that wedge and have mismatched surfaces all over and…. well, you get the point.