Aesthetics: November 2008 Archive Page

In the past, I have pointed out copy-editing weaknesses at Story Book Forest at Idlewild Park, in southwestern PA.  When I was last there, shortly before Halloween, my son stopped in his tracks and said, "They repainted the Little Miss Muffet Sign!"

And he was right... they repainted some of the signs. Just now, when I was clearing out my camera's SD card, I noticed I had a set of before and after photos. Here's one sign in September 2005:


Here's the same sign in October, 2008.


I must say I rather miss the webbing, and the lettering for "Little Miss Muffet" is almost illegible. (What's the deal with the vines?) The new sign omits the period after "whey," so that the revision is now a run-on sentence. But at least the egregious "besider" error has been fixed.

Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I read suggested it was pretty lame. I'm very cautious about putting hard work into creating content in a proprietary format that I can't export (ahem). 

I recently downloaded Sketchup 7, which is the latest version of Google's 3D design tool, but the free version still doesn't have an easy way to export your models to other formats.  So I'll probably delete Sketchup from my hard drive (after I've made screen shots of the models I've created, so that later I can re-create them in Blender3D, which offers an insane number of import and export options).

Wired reviews Mirror's Edge

When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot -- precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you.

What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of parkour, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it.

The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic.

This will be an interesting update for all the dissertation chapters that have already been written on Lara Croft's virtual body.

So what exactly are the barriers of entry for great thinkers (or groups of thinkers) to leave their mark on games? What must happen for games -- or interactive entertainment, if you will, to mature as a medium?

While no one knows the answer to this question, many people (and companies) have stepped up to the plate to attempt to bring games to the next level. The Nintendo Wii has been a monumental development in the games industry, not because of its innovative technology, not because is has helped get people off of the couch, but because of the way it has changed the audience.

My mother, who claimed she could never play games, frequently plays Wii bowling with my aunt. A substantial amount of Wii owners claim that it is their first video game console. This means that, by taking away the buttons that confounded my mother and replacing them with movement-based controls, Nintendo has opened up the possibility that games could be for people other than kids. -- Brice Morrison, Gamasutra

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are killing our own chances to have readers in the future or be remunerated for the scholarship we do. It's not only about the modest royalties that faculty authors may or may not receive, it's about the principle of valuing each other's scholarship and editorial work. I order good, attractive and useful paper-and-binding books or textbooks for my classes because I want there to be a system in place to support my work as an author and editor in the future.

If the paper and binding book vanishes as a dominant commodity, as it seems to be, maybe the new virtual system of book distribution, reproduction and delivery will allay some of the problems I describe in relation to photocopies and PDFs. It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? -- Christopher Conway, Inside Higher Ed

Via

The FPP -- first-person painter! I wish the creator hadn't chosen to go eerie with the mood, that seems like cheating a little... it's so easy to go scary. Still, it's beautiful And it's an XNA-developed title. Interesting.

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.