Long before I encountered gamemodding I already had fallen in love with desktopmodding. The better part of which can more accordingly be called -tweaking, as most of this discipline’s alterations do not dig too deep. Instead they scratch the surface, sometimes very effectively, sometimes only on the level of cosmetic surgery. Above you can see the result of my very first attempt at customizing the looks and feel of the graphical interface—replacing the recycling bin by a big white telephone. I keep that toilet bowl since years, through time it migrated to every new machine of mine—though a lot … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2005
In ye olde days of ↵MPHQ, multiplayer for Max Payne was an issue. First the possibility of making a mod comprising a multiplayer mode was seriously discussed in the forums. [Then the topic became a nuisance, and finally a running-gag played on ↵n00bs.] Quickly it became clear, that it was impossible to achieve for certain reasons: from the technical side lack of access to the source code was a powerful argument, the problems arising with ↑bullet time another. The essential knack lies in the very concept itself. A player going into bullet time gets the decisive advantage from it, … Continue reading
Today I augmented the very first chapter of maxmod’s projected chapters, which is called ↵access—straightforwardedly worded: I beefed it up without adding much content, well there’s some new text, and now I am pimping it shamelessly. It may not have been a great idea to conceptualise the chapters right out of the mælstrom of my consciousness at an early stage of the project. But hey, online everything is easily to be changed and changed again. Everything at my website and weblog is to be understood as work-in-progress. With the aptly named chapter ↵access I attempt to tell my first encounter … Continue reading
Sometimes my babbling indeed hits furtile ground, so I had to update my blogroll: ↑anthronaut [astronauts, argonauts—got it?] is a weblog by “an Anthropology undergraduate student at the LMU Munich. Starting from July 17th 2005, I´ll spend two months working in a warehouse in Istanbul. This weblog is a sort of “field diary” for the length of that stay and maybe longer. I´m going to publish here my working experiences and my reflections about Turkish culture in Istanbul, the one in the enterprise itself and also about Turkish culture and identity in the context of migration.” Hell, I am touched. … Continue reading
out of the box—anthropology put to use Not just since the ↵gates for anthropology were unshuttered at Redmond, ↑corporate anthropology and applied anthropology is striving. And not since just yesterday parts of anthropology are appropriated by kin and not so kin academic provinces, e.g. the discipline ‘marketing’. ↑Markus Giesler’s research is a perfect example. Markus is a young assistant professor of marketing—the fusion formula “(ethnography+Internet)+consumer research=rigorous and pathbreaking research, new marketing and consumer expertise relevant to business and business leaders” earned him the title of being ↑l’anthropologue des cyborgs among the Canadian press. Anthro clearly is hip. In consequence of … Continue reading
Due to heavy comment spam I remove the comments function until I’ve fixed the matter. Nothing of the comments so far is lost—everything will be back online soon. UPDATE: Thanks to g33k of the w33k and general blogwizard ↑KerLeone, digital MD, the comments are up and running again. w00t! … Continue reading
For everybody harbouring a piece of cyberculture inside the depths of the mind getting connected to the Internet is vital. Obviously. This banality starts to get interesting when one is obsessed with questions like that one: What machine shall I connect to the Internet and via which path? Yesterday ↑KerLeone managed to connect an ancient Toshiba 1200XE laptop to the net via a cellular phone and published the ↑Retro Wireless Blogging Tutorial [in German] explaining the feat he pulled off. In my ↵project’s abstract I wrote that I will set my fieldwork-results into relation to the appropriate parts of the … Continue reading
  Well, I dare say that I am doing multisited ethnography, on- and offline. Attending ↵LAN-parties is a perfect occasion to assimilate game- and modding-culture. In consequence I today registered for the ↑Fighternight 7 and restarted my ↵Q3A-training. I already attended Fighternights ↑5 and ↑6, and have to say that they were perfectly organized, enjoyable, and very, very interesting events. The quality of organizatrion already hit me when, way back in March 2004, I had registered for #5 as I instantly was furnished with adequate information and a foolproof description of how to get to the location in Bavaria’s hinterland. … Continue reading
It is my innermost conviction—at least for now—that the metaphorical and symbolical web which we call ‘culture’ is constituted, built and rebuilt by ever-changing, interlocking feedback loops of the associative kind. Never will we be able to draw a complete picture of those, but sometimes the sociocultural anthropologist will have the chance to have an indepth glance on some of them loops. In respect to cyberculture, I guess I just stumbled over one. Does anybody remember the 1983 movie ↑Wargames—starring a then youthful ↑Matthew Broderick? The movie’s story was about some hacker-d00d (Broderick) who hacked himself beyond the firewall of … Continue reading