Cyberculture: November 2008 Archive Page

"It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online," said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report's lead author. "There are myths about kids spending time online - that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age."  -- MacArthur Foundation

Some details:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on "hanging out" with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Significant findings include -

• There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
  • Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.
  • Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
• Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.
  • Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
  • The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.
• Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.
  • The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
  • Young people respect each other's authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
• Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.
  • Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
  • Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.
  • "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant - subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

I'm already aware of much of this. Knowing that students would rather learn from peers, I've added more group work, and I've added a requirement that students in my advance media classes publish a screencast about their final project to YouTube.  In future classes, I'll have students review those videos as part of their research process. 

My younger students (in the entry-level class) are generally much more excited about new media than the upper-level students (some of whom either barely tolerate or openly loathe the "new media" component of the "new media journlaism" program).  I've got to watch my lower-level students closely, so that I can adapt the upper-level classes to their strengths, and keep that process going throughout the major. That means I'm probably going to have to introduce more experimentaton in the lower-level classes, since I've got to cast a wider net to find out which techniques are the most productive.

A federal jury delivered a mixed verdict today convicting a Missouri mother of misdemeanor charges in a nationally watched cyber-bullying case in which the woman was accused of using a fake MySpace account to torment a teenage girl who later committed suicide. The jurors, however, rejected more serious felony charges against Lori Drew, 49, who was involved in a hoax on 13-year-old Megan Meier. The panel deadlocked on a conspiracy count. (LA Times)

This is a complex issue. While it's easy to wish that they throw the book at a grown woman who participates in a scheme to torment a young girl, an important component of the prosecution's case was that Lori Drew violated the terms of service (TOS) for using the MySpace service. How many of us click "I Agree" without carefully reading the text? The Electronic Freedom Foundation argues that bad things could result from a conviction based on a TOS violation.

Wired has some good background, reminding us that bloggers had a hand in publicizing the case.

Jason Scott has started a new blog that will discuss the progress of his documentary, GET LAMP.  Here's a good entry on the contents of Steve Meretzky's basement.

As part of the GET LAMP project, I've been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in the early 1980s. And Steve was one of the big designers at Infocom, creating or co-creating some of the most lasting games in the genre: Planetfall, Sorcerer, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall... and then went on after Infocom to make many other classics as well. He is a towering figure in the games industry, recognized as one of the greats, among other designers who have produced one-tenth his output. But beyond his place in the history of text adventures, he's also acutely aware of the history of text adventures, and the process, and the trends of a gaming industry.

A poll is just a starting point for discussion, not an ending point that proves any one argument. With that in mind...

Results indicate that the Internet is the most trusted news source among all age groups, and overall, more trusted than newspapers and television news combined. FOX News is the most trusted news source on television and The New York Times is the most trusted national newspaper outlet. Three out of four people feel that news coverage is biased, and that media coverage influenced the outcome of the Presidential election. (IFC / Zogby PDF)

How long has this been around? I just noticed it.  Google's user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven't had the chance to play with it. I'm not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google's search results, so I'm going to have to read up on this before I play with it.

SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. You'll see your changes whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes.

Looks like it's got two parts... in one, you can signal your approval of a site by clicking the up arrow button, and in the other you can click the X to remove it from your results. And you can also leave comments (here, I've clicked on the speech bubble to open up a comment box.)

How will these various affect the results Google returns in response to different searches? I want to know that before I start using it -- I might X out a site that's very good, but that I already know about, if my goal is to find NEW sites that refer to a certain term.

Do I want to type my critical commentary into a Google box, rather than keep it on my blog (where I can keep an eye on it)?

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).

It's pretty cool to see a Chronicle of Higher Education blog covering text games:

It's noon and you've still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it's been months since you've last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she's out the door and flying back to Australia if you don't finish the paper by the end of the day.

What's your next move?

This is the premise for Violet, a text-based computer game in which a graduate student is the main character. As the student, you must fight through countless distractions and solve a number of puzzles to finish the paper in time to save your relationship. The story is told by Violet, who allows you to examine objects in your office and ask for hints.

Created by Jeremy Freese, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, Violet recently won the 14th annual Interactive Fiction Competition.

[G]ames are inherently about exploration, in the abstract sense of discovering strategies and options, seeing how rules interact and so on. And yes, you can summon screenshots of Warhammer halls bigger than the Taj Mahal, or mountain vistas in Lord of the Rings Onlinethe Other: societies wholly different from mine, cultures built on assumptions so divergent from my own that I hadn't realized they were assumptions.

This, for me, is why playing MMOGs doesn't feel like travel. They offer too little of the Other.(Allen Varney, The Escapist)

The latest issue of The Escapist

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.

The votes have been tabulated, and we have our winners! Congratulations to the top three games, Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies, as well as to all authors for entering. And a big note of thanks to everyone who judged the games. The full results are available below. (IF Comp 08)

See the results page.

I heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting.

This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop.

Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old son wanted to play, so we fired up another computer for him.  I taught my daughter a few moves, which she then taught to her brother.

Now they are alternating turns (with some fussing and complaining, but no more than usual.)

Peter: "Oh, man! This the hardest game and the most fun puzzles I've ever played"

Carolyn (glaring at me) "Daddy, are you done blogging? Now, daddy? Now? Daddy! You said you'd let me play Bloxorz on your laptop! (Singing a song) Now, now now... now, now now.... now now now?"

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

The web today is not the same as it was during the last presidential election.

Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations covering them.

For many viewers, the 2008 election has become a kind of hybrid in which the dividing line between online and off, broadcast and cable, pop culture and civic culture, has been all but obliterated.

Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama's comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage -- from Comedy Central to BBC America.  David Carr and Brian Stelter, New York Times

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for "Mark" ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. (Wired)

Just a few days ago, I submitted a conference proposal that asked whether academic blogs are the new five-paragraph-essay, so this article comes at a good time.  Here's the concluson:

Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

As a writing teacher, I'm perfectly happy to hear that bloggers are expected to write good prose.

I don't plan on giving up my own blog anytime soon, but the fact that so much energy has moved to feeds and commercial social networking sites -- the Wal-Marts of the blogosophere -- means that I have changed what and how I write on this blog.

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.