blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

Via Boing Boing

Hung out in Second Life tonight with a few friends – thanks Aram for the invite, that was very interesting and inspiring.

During the discussion, Joachim Stein said something very interesting: that the introduction of space brings chance back into the digital world. Think about it: you can hardly e-mail anyone by chance, yet you can meet someone in the street because you happen to walk down the same street. You don’t have to have adresses or locators because your bodies share the same physical space and distances are varying. The same paradigm is being re-introduced in SL where you can quasi-physically bump into people by serendipity. Same might go for the introduction of information into physical space. When we are traceable in space, our informational personas suddenly get assigned a location and might miss each other by just a few meters (could proximity over time become a decisive factor when judging a relationship between users?).

I’m finding this particularly intriguing since it is very close to what I tried with time in Blinks & Buttons – using the informational traces of space and time to introduce links between people through serendipity.

Arrived yesterday, haven’t installed it yet. I think the idea is just wonderful and I really hope that lots of people will use this and thus make networks available where the telcos succeeded in persuading café-owners in charging 8 € per day. I really hate this pseudo South-American revolutionary attitude that they wrap the whole thing in, though.

I took some time today to play around with, or rather in Second Life. I actually went to the American Apparel store and bought some underpants since I was naked, somehow I had managed to lose all my clothes. It’s very well designed, kind of modernish. There’s even free beer (didn’t know what to do with it though).

I spent a few L$ on that and then went on exploring a bit more. I still don’t really know what to make of this, but I can’t really shake off this creepy feeling which SL gives me. On the one hand, it is truly amazing what people build and how much effort they put in there. As a whole, SL is probably the most astonishing thing around these days. On the other hand though, there’s so much weird things (and I mean really weird) around that it makes the whole thing like a giant dream to walk around it. It’s as if people use 3D and scripting to materialize some kind of collaborative subconscious and then charge you for renting real estate in there.

AA goes Bauhaus in SL

Interesting proposal

Need clothes

Much better

Back from Copenhagen. Enjoyed it a lot! Some snippets and quotes from the conference, also a try in a public scrapbook –

Secrecy is the enemy of innovation (George Dyson)

Google is allegedly trying to optimize their server farms in a way that they will never be idle but constantly optimize the databases – they will dream.

In Africa, it often is the case that you get perfect reception in the middle of nowhere but you will have to drive for hours until you can recharge your phone.

There’s a Science Fiction Handbook which is supposed to be wonderful for designers.

In Romania there’s a village in which several of the houses from the TV-show Dallas have been recreated.

Places need stories.

Since the introduction of the computer, we had been playing alone for 30 years.

ASCII-art was allegedly invented by teletype-operators in the 1920s who were sending graphical Christmas-cards.

The IGDA published a white paper about alternate reality games.

Social is the new God. (Charles Leadbeater)

The industrial way of value exchange is going to disintegrate rapidly.

This morning I received two SMS-messages from Day of the Figurines. One read “you put down a defibrilator. you collapse to the ground. you’re unable to move.”, the other “you start to shake with cold and find it hard to decide what to do.”

It’s been a few weeks since the game ended and I guess they turned on the server in another location which then started to fire off some more messages by mistake. Either way, I found that really, really uncanny and it gave me an idea why alternate reality games might not seem too inviting to many people.

Blast Theory kicked off their Day Of The Figurines yesterday at Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin. Part of the players: Constance, my gender-bending Miss Marple.

Hi there, glad you made it. From now on you can find the blog here and the feed at: blog.plugimi.com/?feed=rss2.

There’s more nifty news coming but that requires a bit more hacking on my side.