Passively Online Multiplayer - life as a game!

Yesterday as I surfed around for info on Bill Burroughs and I came upon a blog page about Justin Hall's visit to Lawrence, Kansas in 1996. If you're not familiar with Justin Hall he is one of bloggings most prominent personalities. Justin began blogging back in the earliest days of the World Wide Web, and his blot, links.net, was a hugely popular, highly intimate record of Justin's living adventures. I read his blog frequently, and had actually read his piece about Burrough's many years ago.

I had stopped reading links.net a few years back, round about when he moved to Japan, even though Justin continued blogging from there (of course!). After reading over his Burroughs' piece again, I decided to catch up, and clicked on the homepage link. Surprisingly, it didn't look like links.net whatsoever. It turned out Justin stopped regular blogging a couple years ago.

Justin is the dude on the left

So, what's he up to these days? Well, he'd always had a big interest in gaming. In fact, he'd worked for a year or two at Gamers.com and later he contributed to Game Girl Advance. Now, it seems, he has been developing a game himself (well, him and some of his cool, geeky pals). And not surprisingly, given Justin's hyper-interest in the web, the game he's invented has everything to do with the web. And again, given his populist soul, everyone can be a player.

The web and video games are merging. All of information space is a shared multiplayer adventure. I am working to make that merging happen faster by developing "Passively Multiplayer Online Games" where your history of web browsing defines your online character.

The game is called Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) and it's basic gameplay consists of its players web browsing. It's really just as simple as that, with a few tricks and treats thrown in for good measure. All that is required to play is a sense of adventure, and a simple little Firefox add-on. I signed up right away. After all, I've got a fairly heavy web surfing habit so this game is right down my alley.

You can read a whole lot more about Passively Multiplayer here at the game site. Read some of the larger theory documents about the game to really get a sense of where its creators are coming from. Of course, PMOG has its own Wiki.

V-Tech Rampage Creator Demands Payment to Remove Game

GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive

In the history of video games, perhaps in the history of the Internet, this is something never seen before: an audience held hostage.

The jerk who created this game used the lamest excuse in the book - "it's my right to free speech".

His site seems to be suspended due to billing reasons. Possibly his monthly bandwidth was exceeded by curious people wanting to check out the game. If so, that's kind of a shame.

Crap like this should simply be boycotted.

Google To Track In-Game Behavior?

Google and ???? watch every other aspect of online behaviour so it comes as no surprise that they finally as going to survey online gaming behaviour in a big way.

See article

Google believes that it will be able to track in-game behavior in order to determine crucial information about an individual's purchasing tendencies. The information gathered in this manner could then be sold to advertisers for a pretty penny, we imagine. The details of the patent state that Google will be able to monitor people playing on any game console that hooks up to the Internet, including the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Wii.

I assume they just forgot to add "PC". Or maybe they're already listening in as your team goes to plan the bomb in Counter-Strike?

User Group video presentation of purpose...

I like what this woman says, and I like how she says it...

Fascinating story about the early days of computer gaming...

SpaceWar

In December 1972 Stewart Brant, one of the luminaries of the San Francisco hippie scene, watched as a bunch of computer geeks (or "bums" as he calls them, as in ski bums, or surf bums) enjoyed late night forays into computing centers to play a hack they'd created called SpaceWar. By that time this underground computer bum phenomenon had been played for nearly nine years by rebel computer programmers.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on...

October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI's PDP-10 computer. AI's Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen which says only:

THIS CONSOLE AVAILABLE.
He logs in on the keyboard with his initials: Click clickclickclick click.
L1,REG
CSD FALL PICNIC. SATURDAY 11 AM IN FLOOD PARK . . .
He interrupts further announcements, including one about the "First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics" at 8 PM, with: CLick ("run") clickclickclick ("Space War Ralph") click ("do it")

R SWR.

WELCOME TO SPACEWAR.
HOW MANY SHIPS? MAXIMUM IS 5.

The Generator Blog

A brilliant collection of generator sites. Don't know what a generator is? Well, check it out, dummie!



The Generator Blog

Rightwing Narco's Family Paid $83 Million to the U.S. to Avoid Prosecution

U.S. Government profits from drug trafficers paying to avoid prosecution. They were hoping to keep this cozy arrangement secret. Haha, no such luck this time. See full story in
The NarcoSphere

SUBLIMINAL CINEMA - Teen-Age Devil Dolls --

Teen-Age Devil Dolls

1950's propaganda at its best (worst?). Interestingly, it states that youth hard drug addiction skyrocketted 2000% between 1948 and 1952. Why?

60 Minutes to Impact: eSports Hits Home

// Amped eSports - 60 Minutes to Impact: eSports Hits Home

I've played against some younger kids who're pretty amazing. No doubt one day I'll be kicking myself in the butt that I didn't go the manager route and sign 'em up on exclusive contracts. Ah, the opportunities missed!

Going for broke with the coke

Coke Researcher does personal particpation study, and becomes all-consumed in the process.

Article is from Monkey, a coalition of professionals, users and ex-users from the Greater Manchester area of the United Kingdom.

Octogenarian Gaming Goddess

Well, I just had to laugh: Old Grandma Hardcore

Although on a serious note, I've been fantasizing for years about one day retiring to an old folks' home with an awesome LAN room. I won't let the kids put me in any home but one that has such a facility.

War on Drugs a Big Success

Article by Michael S. Rozeff

For the State, for politicians, for government bureaucracies, and for many others, the War on Drugs is a big success, a program for other government programs to emulate.

For all these reasons, it is not hard to understand why in 2005, the U.S. continues its War on Drugs, even though it inflicts ever-rising harm on many U.S. citizens with no countervailing good to the public at large.

For all these reasons, it’s not hard to understand that when the authorities totally fail at the futile aim of preventing individuals from using selected molecules, when they inflict enormous damage on citizens of the United States, they are succeeding in the War on Drugs. They are accomplishing their aims.

The War on Drugs exemplifies the State strangling the society it governs. It is government of the State’s minions, by the State’s minions, and for the State’s minions. For them, the War on Drugs is a winner.

Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS paper on Injection Drug Users

20051212UKIDU.pdf >News Release

“Governments that limit access to needle and syringe exchange, to opioid substitution therapies and related services do more as endangering the lives of injecting drug users, their sexual partners and children,” says Carmen Tarrades, development officer at ICW and former injecting drug user: “These governments are actively supporting the spread of HIV and AIDS. They make the HIV pandemic worse.”

Website

Human Rights and Prisoners who inject drugs

Article

"The authors argue that prisoners who inject drugs have a right to access harm reduction measures - those that reduce the harmful consequences of drug use without necessarily reducing drug consumption. ... Ultimately, this approach benefits not only prisoners but also prison staff and the public, and does not entail lessening of the safety and security of prisons."

Gaming fanatics show hallmarks of drug addiction

"... excessive computer game players showed classic signs of craving when they were presented with [game related imagery] from some of their favourite games – they desperately wanted to play, expected to feel better once they did, and fully intended to indulge again as soon as possible."

Would gamers stop if it gaming was outlawed?

Full article

Keeping the Door Open: Dialogues on Drug Use

I recently had the opportunity to attend an excellent conference in Vancouver entitled Beyond Drug Prohibition: A Public Health Approach

A significant paper was released during the conference by the Health Officers Council of British Columbia which outlined a rationale for a comprehensive system of drug regulation to replace the current criminalization "war on drugs" approach.

You can access the paper, A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada, here

Absurdities & Atrocities

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities- Voltaire

Enjoyable Rant ... you've heard it all before, but it always bares repeating... read it like its poetry... it flows with a horrendous cadence.

The Strange and Seedy Case of Marc Emery, Canadian

Article

From the Los Angeles City Beat:
“The whole business proposition was to raise money to start a revolutionary botanical movement to destroy the U.S. drug war and to stop this vicious gulaging that goes on with our people,” he says, adding, “So I was very good at what I do, ’cause the DEA noticed.”
- Marc Emery

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans by Michael Parenti

In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane---but not a single life was lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

DOD Source ... as good as gold now.

PickItUp announces he's finished his bug fixing.

Official thread