Tag Archives: technology

history and development of lan groups

Posted on by October 3, 2012
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↑SWALWELL, MELANIE. 2004. ↑The history and development of lan groups: An australasian case study. [.pdf | 160KB] ↑Proceedings of the ↑Other Players Conference, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. 6-8 December 2004.  abstract: Few research projects have inquired into Lanning, the practice where gamers play multiplayer games with and against each other, usually over purpose built local area networks (LAN), or Lans (the exceptions are Swalwell, 2003; Jansz). Lan gaming is not only an important precursor to newer forms of networked gaming; it is also an evolving form of gaming in its own right. This paper … Continue reading →

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from pong to planet quake

Posted on by October 3, 2012
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gamemodding as post-industrial unwaged work ↑POSTIGO, HECTOR R. 2003. ↑From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-industrial transitions from leisure to work [.pdf | 88KB]. ↑Information, Communication & Society ↑6(4):593–607.  abstract: In the closing weeks of 2002, video games were featured in various popular American news publications and media outlets such as Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek and Time Magazine. It is becoming increasingly apparent that video games are no longer child’s play, but rather that they are poised to become a major entertainment form for the twenty-first century. Social analysts and media scholars must begin to formulate an understanding of this emerging … Continue reading →

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desperately seeking phil

Posted on by November 24, 2011
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Philip K Dick is missing. […] a state-of-the-art robot named after the author.     The quirky android, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner. […]     Robotics wizard and lead designer David Hanson built the robot as a memorial to Dick, whose 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the 1982 classic Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford. […]     In Blade Runner, set in a Los Angeles of 2019, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckhard, a Blade Runner or policeman whose job is to track down and terminate escaped human … Continue reading →

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time machine cuba

Posted on by October 3, 2012
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  Within every human individual there is a personal eclectic conglomeration of ambiences and narrative content built from a lifetime of experience, assimilating information, and digesting popular culture. When this conglomerations are shared by a group of people, we deal with the metaphorical and symbolical web which we call ‘culture’. The latter is constituted, built and rebuilt by ever-changing, interlocking feedback loops of the associative kind. William Gibson not only “has tapped right into our collective cultural mainline”, but delivers a personal account of how ‘culture’ is generated within the individual. Here’s a quote from his essay ↑time machine cuba—I … Continue reading →

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animac

Posted on by October 3, 2012
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  The picture above is a “photo montage featuring a dancer with body mounted sensors controlling real-time animation on the ANIMAC, 1962, Denver.”—another pre-cyberpunk cyberpunk-image. Weird coincidence—provoked by my entries on Tron and the interaction with SFAM, I remembered that there was a student-project in gamedesign which culminated in writing a full-fledged 3D-engine. The final product was a racing-game based on the solar sailor seen in the movie Tron. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything about it on my HDD, so I went on searching the Internet. During the search I stumbled over ↑A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, … Continue reading →

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technology underground

Posted on by October 3, 2012
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  ↑GURSTELLE, WILLIAM. 2006. ↑Adventures from the technology underground: Catapults, pulsejets, rail guns, flamethrowers, Tesla coils, air cannons, and the garage warriors who love them . New York: ↑Clarkson Potter.  The technology underground is a thriving, humming, and often literally scintillating subculture of amateur inventors and scientific envelope-pushers who dream up, design, and build machines that whoosh, rumble, fly—and occasionally hurl pumpkins across enormous distances. In the process they astonish us with what is possible when human imagination and ingenuity meet nature’s forces and materials. William Gurstelle spent two years exploring the most fascinating outposts of this world of wonders: … Continue reading →

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spooknik

Posted on by October 10, 2012
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On 4 October 1957 ↑Stephen King was at the cinema. Together with the other ten-year-olds clustered around him he watched the morning performance of ↑Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Just as the flying saucers started their attack on Washington D.C. the movie was interrupted and the houselights went on. Pale and nervous the manager entered the auditorium. “‘I want to tell you’, he said in that trembly voice, ‘that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it … Spootnik.’” (↵King 1993[1981]:21) For the assembled post-war kids a world crashed. The world of US-American … Continue reading →

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real life half life

Posted on by October 14, 2012
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There’s a lot said and written on immersion into alternative or even virtual worlds, on people getting lost in gamespace or the Internet’s interactive realms, and so on. In consequence thoughts about the questions arising with these ‘other realities’ fly into every direction. As the ‘cyberanthropologist online among the gamemodders’ I deem myself to be, I am especially interested in how the Cyberians themselves tackle this issues. The people I am affected to appropriate all kinds of related artefacts and then artistically slap the demarcations between meat- and cyberspace around with a large trout—big time. Aaron Rasmussen for example thought … Continue reading →

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multiplayer bullet time

Posted on by October 14, 2012
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  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 →

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keyboard

Posted on by October 2, 2012
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Since already several years the casemod-movement [that is the hardware-modification scene] has powerfully whiplashed back into the hardware-manufacturing industry. The feedback out of the rows of the ‘end-users’ stemming from their creativity in the appropriation of computer hardware gave birth to a whole new branch of hardware-/parts-, and peripherals-producers and retailers. Again the main thrust to this development is the computergames-market. The man-machine interfaces obviously are crucial to gaming, so little wonder that new designs, or even innovations pop up in said sector. Interestingly enough the industry’s strategy is not to invent completely new kinds of input-devices, but to modify … Continue reading →

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