Monday, April 25, 2005

In More Current Beta Testing News...

...the use of ellipses is now back in style. Yes, you heard me...

I'm hopeing to once again do some betatesting for SpiderWeb Software with their latest game Geneforge 3. They are a small ((read v small) as in 1 Man=designer/writing/maker of game, 1 Woman=general manager, 1 Woman= Office Manager)) software company in Seattle, Cal, that make gameplay, plot and immersive games, without all the extra highend graphics stuff you see on shelves today. They release their products not on shelves, but on the net as Shareware, which is registerable to receive the full package (as part of that original download or as a separate mailed cd).

Their games are quite detailed, most of them rpg-based, good to great storylines with high replayability and decent gameplay. The two major series they have done so far (other then their original Exile series which was done while the president/designer was in university I think) are the Avernum and Geneforge series, both unique in their own way. Due to the restricted amount of manpower in the creation of the games, they focus on things other then high-end graphics, which is also great because people with old machines can still play the newer games because of the lower then usual requirements.

Now, I've betatesting twice before for SpiderWeb, once for Blades of Avernum, a scenario-based game offshoot from the Avernum series, and Geneforge 2. Now, its come to the period of time in the game creation process where the company has made a working if untested version of the game, and need simply for a small number of people to bash keys away and play the game for hours each day, so that hopefully they will run into every single bug in the game, point it out to them so they can fix it. This is the aim of the betatesters. Although we don't get paid, and we do have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) saying we won't release to a third party any information WHATSOEVER on the game during the betatesting period, we do get something from the experience of betatesting. Ok, so it may sound kinda annoying, having to play through an entire game with TONNES of bugs, but usually the bugs aren't that terrible, and often just text errors, and not many of them. Often its the balance of the game that gets mentioned e.g. the bad guy at the end is way too easy because of the level your character can be at that point.

In the end, betatesters will end up getting SOMETHING out of the experience. They get the privilege to play the game a good month or two before anyone else on the platform has (which in gamers terms is a lifetime especially when you can rub it into their faces on the game's forum), you get the experience of the actual betatesting by playing through the game and looking at the game differently then you would as an end-user. By scrutinizing the game, you are required to comment on the game engine, story continuity, textual referencing errors, how it looks, the balancing etc. Having done this is a plus when trying to get into areas of work related to games testing and creation, and also means you get to...umm...enjoy the game on a different level.

Oh, and you get a free copy of the game at the end. That's a saving of $50 bucks (AUD). Score.

So this is what I'm hopefully going to be able to do for the next month or so, spending 1-2hours a day steadily going through the game, making a note of problems and keeping them up-to-date with constant emails. Not to mention the continually updated versions that you have to download as major bugs are fixed and encorporated into the game. So you could be playing the game, almost finished and...*POOF* here's the latest test version, you gotta start again. Now that, is annoying.

How does this have anything to do with my uni work? Well...I'm participating .in the creation of this game. Differing from the participation in the forums, where the end-users can discuss what they like or dislike, I get to personally participate in a part of the game making process before it is released to the market, where although I am not participating in the 'creation' of the game content, I am somewhat regulating it.

Should I be required to inform them that I'm talking about this on my blog, and doing some smallish form of perticipatory research during the test, even though I am not in anyway going to disclose any confidential material before, during or after the test period? (not to mention the fact that no-one will probably ever read this). This is an interesting question, although I don't know if i need to answer it, and I certainly don't have enough time while I sit here refreshing my inbox, waiting for the NDA over email.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Tis Becoming of One of Royal Birth...

...to make up completely useless and irrelevant titles for blogs posts.

More of the Research and Trinidadian Shinizzle! - Lab 6 Discussion Chatroom 3

I don’t think we did as well this time in our discussion, because we chose such a narrow discussion window (Trinidad for one, and how to do a project the other). We actually went over a lot of what we said the week before :P oh well. We talked about how Trinidadians seemed to be able to focus on the content and ignore the technology of the Internet, which is really really cool. This section is where I got my idea about media communications, and that you could do a 3d animation or just special effects of someone’s day in a media environment using like a sign wave travelling with them through the day…………nice. Other then that the rest of the chat revolved around continued discussion on ethnographic research techniques using Trinidad as an example. Nothing too exciting.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Developers, Accountable? YES PLEASE - Lecture 7 Post-Op

Lecture all about ‘Dah giving stuff back to the audience/consumer, making the consumer partly a producer of the content etc’Using Trainz as an example again (AGAIN) Banks looked at something slightly more interesting, the incorporation of fan innovationa dn creations back into the Trainz experience, which is similar to some beta testing that I get to do. To be a part of the creation process for a game makes the game that much more enjoyable to…enjoy. But mostly this lecture was on ethics and how to govern the online community that revolves around the Trainz Experiment. Does the use of this fan content make the fans legit employees and be payed accordingly? Or can they be given rewards for doing this in another way. When I beta test I don’t do it for money, but for the experience, to get the free game, and the street cred from being in a small testing group for a piece of software. Now, if I were to be working as an employee for a larger company as an actual tester, I would be being payed for the exact same thing. But that would be a job, what I am doing with the testing is more like…charity :P Finally, “Developers should be Accountable”. To steal something from the lecture :P

Monday, April 18, 2005

Interesting Observations on Methodological Studies, Amongst Other Things...

Here's some methodological studies for ya...

I took my sister, mum and dad and had them watch an episode of a variety comedy show on cable, where there's a random number of claymation skits ranging from 2 to 180 seconds or so long, for the entire 13 or so minutes of each episode. Now, I'm fairly used to getting things in little snippets here and there, most of my media is viewed through this stupid little interface on my computer, running a video there while I check a news article on that page and open up an image on another page.

Back to the participatory observation experiment...So, I wanted to see how my parents reacted to this show, given that they are both 'oldies' and the show is fairly fast paced without any room for contemplation, things just happen like that and are gone. To my suprise both my parents seemed to enjoy it, although due to the speed of the show there was a lack of the usual wisecracks inbetween jokes etc. An hour later, just after dinner my dad commented 'so, we gonna watch another episode of that robo chicken?' which I take means that he enjoyed it enough to watch it again. Can't really tell with him cause he's the type not to express enjoyement out loud till much after the occurance of the joke, or not at all.

The whole experience with getting them to watch the show was interesting because I automatically thought about something that had been discussed in lectures/tutorials early, the concept that we have altered our media viewing habits e.g. we view snippets of information from many sources while older generations would be more comfortable with traditional large blocks of info. I suppose my parents aren't a perfect example of your average 'oldies', my dad is constantly using the net, whether to check up on newspapers from the states, sports results from the states, surf cams for the east coast or to catch up with old school mates over connections etc. My mum, well, lets just say where she works they have a Mac network, and its BROKEN DOWN. Understandably she only uses the computer for emails :P

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Sick...Like A Fish That's Run Out Of Crackers

I'm sick. Which you would think gives me ample time to blog about class stuff and other related topics. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. I have a few writeups ready to be posted, I'm just taking some time away from the computer this weekend to get better. I'll post them when I get time, there's a few of them, a couple responses to readings, last couple of lectures, discussion in class, etc. The normal stuff. Something else I have noticed is the almost complete lack of updates on a number of my fellow class members blogs..........interesting....maybe they know something I don't? Or I know something they don't...either way I'm gonna go get better.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

More Trainz? I suppose that’s just railway for you… - Lecture 6 Post-Op

I must admit I wasn’t paying attention during this lecture. I can’t lie. upon going back and looking at the presentation slade, Banks (again) made some interesting references to Amy Jo Kim and her three underlying principles, and combined that with a discussion on basically how to set up a commercially viable online community. I’m sure it will come in handy some day. Again he used his Trainz/Auran experiences to talk about what they did. I’m not sure how much more I can say on this, because it wasn’t really that detailed, in my mind the lecture pretty much stated in a long-winded way: ‘online communities will work if your members participate’.
Kinda…well…obvious, no?

We Talked, And Then We Talked Some More - Lab 5 and Discussion Forum 2 Post-Op

That first discussion session went well I think, we deviated from the plan that I brought to the group slightly (“my idea was that for the first 20 or mins we get a discussion going on what exactly we mean by these terms [of ethnographic research], second 20mins on our individual media ecology research, and the final 20mins on how we can use this in our discipline?” (Chatroom, Me, 2005) but that was cool. Banks was on hand to discuss the issues with us, which was great, and I can only assume that we had his attention most of the time due to the fact that we were discussing ethnographic research in its entirety, something that, well, he’s obviously joined at the hip with. Initially we got into discussing exactly what media ecology is, (e.g. the study of media environments), which led to us discussing for a while what exactly a media environment means. Although I’m not enthralled by the prospect of discussing My Restaurant Rules, Big Brother, Australian Idol or the OC, we did find them as useful discussion points in the whole media ecology…umm…discussion.

Cutting a long story short, I brought in an interesting aspect along the lines of talking about a remediated form of television in the act of watching episodes of shows downloaded from the internet. Now, I can’t do this anymore, they’ve gone and taken away the ability to do that, even for shows (See The Daily Show with Jon Stuart) that we can’t get here. But it was an interesting concept to bring up, since all the media environments we had been discussing beforehand were based around a traditional TV watching section, compared to mine which are Internet/PC based.

So yeah, overall it was an interesting chat, hopefully the next one will be slightly more organised….probably not :) We decided we would talk about a few things next time, 1) how you would set up a research project to do ethnographic research in an online community based ecology, and 2) discuss the Trinidad reading in relation to media environments and ecology. Shall be interesting.

Drawing Attention to Something Cool To Download...

...and its legal!!!!

A band called the Decemberists have released a video clip (that's pretty damn sweet) as a TORRENT DOWNLOAD. Yes...here's the link to their page that tells you how to download it...http://decemberists.com/16mw-torrent.html

and their main page http://decemberists.com

I think there's something with this, as MTV and its second iteration becomes less and less a videoclip haven, the releasing of video clips as torrents is a brilliant idea!!! This way it can spread by word of mouth, and i think they've commented on triplej that they've had a tens of thousands of downloads so far!!! The combination of A) a really kickass song B) really kickass video clip C) ability to make people aware of its existence D) and making it available as a torrent download seems like a really really really good idea!

So, how about designing a website that is like nforce.nl, but only for videoclips and audio that is intentionally released by bands etc for distribution over torrent. Anyone wanna help? Not sure if this is already happened anywhere else, but I'm happy to try and get one up and running!!! Dave?

Monday, April 11, 2005

A Methedelogical Approach to Methedelogical Research - Prep for Lab Session 5

Yes...we are going to discuss how to participate in participatory research...

More specifically, our group of 4 are going to discuss in our next lab online discussion session Methedoligcal Research, specifically Media Ecologies and how people study these. I'm not sure what I'm going to pick yet. We all decided that it would be good to come prepared with something a little more specific individually so we can use that as examples from each of us individually.

I was contemplating doing something about anime and its conversion into english etc. Given that I don't watch much TV, and the episodes I do watch are... *cough* downloaded *cough*, I was thinking of doing it about this. I mean, I don't have to admit I do this, just research into it :P I'm sure the rest of the group will come along with info on Restaurant Rules etc, but I think it would be good to look at non-tv based watching of tv programs, e.g. the downloading of anime such as Naruto on the net and the media ecology around that (torrents, fansites, etc). I'm not sure if its illegal to download these anime shows. I think the first season just got licensed for release in the US (URG, DUBBING!!! YUCKKKKKKKKK!!!!), so its possible that as the seasons get licensed it will slowly become illegal to download :P or not...oh well.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Get Onto the Street and Shout... BE REASONABLE - Lecture 5 Post-Op

Oh, lovely….activism…and Online Political Activism at that. This harkens back to the US election last year (yes I am originally from the US, so I followed that election really closely along with this one) when in the lead up to it there was a very large amount of online activist sites, mostly on the democrat side, trying to get WBush not re-elected. What they did, they did in 18 months (moveon.org etc), which is amazing because the right had taken a good few decades to create such an engine to power on the election campaign. That’s probably my personal connection to this weeks lecture, although I am creating an activist blog website like thing in one of my other classes, but that is ages away from starting let along finishing. This is the location of the final product, it'll be there when its finished:

Exposure - An Activist Site

Also, I have a link in my blinks section to something called the News Dissector, which is a, well, political site, but it isn’t biased in that it hits out at both sides, whenever either does something dodge (US politics still). This of course means the site usually hosts articles on dodgy stuff done by the Republican side cause their dodgy stuff is a lot more obvious atm. I mentioned this site earlier, and it has finally come in handy!

Onto the lecture, I hadn’t actually known about the different versions of the Internet, which really I should have. Too bad about the Brisbane Indymedia site, real bummer when things like that don’t work out :( I have done a number of classes that used the concept of Tactical versus Strategic media use, so that was kinda known-known. The different politicisations was interesting, e.g. of Culture (in the case of music activism) as well as informational and political.

I have no idea why it has changed to this font, no meaning intended.

I also just realised that I performed my own form of political activism on a weblogs earlier on, with my 'article' on smoking' here.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

deviantART - Virtual Community Exercise

I already posted on deviantART. This is a copy of what I had to upload for my virtual community exercise. Forgive me.

devianArt is an online arts community. It is a community because we are there to share a communal interest and aim, e.g. art and the discussion and commenting on art. It is without national borders, as it is open to anyone around the world that has access to the net. The community has a slogan, ‘Where Art Meets Application’, I’ve got no idea what it means but it sounds cool. Most people in my experience sign up to DA to chat to people from around the world about their art or others art, to get inspiration or to find stock images for their own work. There are multiple ways of communicating with others on DA, you can comment on an individual piece of someone’s artwork, on one of their journal post, a general comment on their main page, a personal note directly to a fellow user that others won’t be able to read or on one of the many forums.

There are three types of accounts at DA; Member, Subscriber and Prints. Members have full access to their own gallery, upload and commenting abilities for no cost. Subscribers are those that have paid a subscription fee and get extra features such as a calendar, shoutbox etc. Prints is an account you can pay for in addition to allow the sale of selected images from your gallery to other people. All of these accounts allow you to manage exactly what information is released to fellow deviants about yourself, from as little as your handle, to detailed information about your likes/dislikes, true name, location, etc. I’ve been a member since the end of November 2004, got a nice group of colleagues going and have recently begun creating a series of images I hope to stick somewhere up around Uni.

Finally I’d have to say as an artist community with over 11.3 million individual submissions, deviantArt is successfully creating an atmosphere where one can upload their work and receive constructive criticism and encouragement on them without fearing an unjust flame war or discrimination.
The link to my deviantART can be found in the sidebar.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

A Steaming Pile of - The Crap List Mailing List Exercise

The Crap List was created to keep everyone up to date on TISM (This Is Serious Mum) and related news. It also has the additional aim to pass on as much crap as possible, was going to put a link here for an urban dictionary page, decided against it. Random things appear every so often from the list, simply because someone was bored, found something funny on the net and decided for some reason we would want to see it too.

I originally signed onto the mailing list after I saw my first live TISM show. I quickly found out you never know what the people here are going to say next. The regular posters are the few (5-6) original contributors that were around when TISM began, or at least have been seeing TISM perform for longer then the rest of us. They like to think of themselves as all high and mighty, and if they’ve put up with the list for that long then they might as well be. I’ve only posted a few times for introductions etc, but you have to watch out or they will bite your head off simply for the fun of it.

There aren’t really any rules, there’s no real singular discussion topic that is constantly talked about (because TISM hardly tour more then once a year anymore). Sometimes there are polls; most of them are along the lines of: ‘Which state is the biggest hole?’ The traffic levels of this group are low, but that’s mostly because everyone on it is trying to have a life.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Imagine a Pile of Paper...the Size of Mount Everest

Now imagine a desk, with that pile placed on top of it. That, is not my table.

The small table next to that one is mine and it has two small stacks of books and papers on it. The two separate stacks are labeled 813 and 631. Now, 813 is the larger of the two stacks, and will require the most effort to work through. 631 is slight smaller, but is also going to require some effort to work through. Now imagine that someone has stabbed a pen through each of your hands into the table, mere cms away from those stacks, and started to feed you expensive chocolate (or tacos, whichever you prefer). You really need to get through those stacks, but you're in equal measures pain and pleasure that you are stuck immobile in that position.

That's me at the moment, and I don't feel like blogging much. Too much work for other subjects. I'll update with little things every so often, the mailing list and communities thing, and I'll do a half ass job at the discussion forums in class (I'll prob act up the whole way through them to mask the fact I couldn't be screwed staying on topic, and that I'm actually researching for other things at the same time).

Ok, I'm off for some semi-peaceful slumber, to wake upon the morn and realize I have a shitload to do. Then try like hell to get back to sleep, eventually realizing its futile and decide to move to Moscow. I'm packing my winter wear now.

For something different, go to my DeviantArt page.

Friday, April 01, 2005

A Fabulous American...

Yeah yeah, sucky title. I know. I'm actually refering to the latest blog I'm linking to. It's American McGee's very own :P I've long been a fan of McGee since he broke away from first id then EA. Anyone who can do that is fine in my books...

And he makes the most freaked out wicked games ever, like American McGee's Alice, and soon to be Oz and Grimm. They are...well...utterly twisted and dark versions of classics, so no wonder he has been quoted as saying "I want to be the next Walt Disney, only a little more wicked."(<--wikipedia rip). Link will soon be up on the sidebar, racing for train at the moment :P I also want to get Scrapland, a recent addition to his portfolio, but I'll have to see wait to see what other people think about it first before I dish out a hefty $70 AUD (~$50USD) for it. Unless of course he is willing to send a copy of it to me for cheaper :)

Check out his games next time your in a store! or searching for a bt...which is actually a good time to bring up bittorrenting. Some may not know, but P2P software such as Napster, and Morpheus aren't the only ways to share files and info over the web. There are multiple other ways, most of which are seen as being 'ethically illegal' as they allow the sharing of virtually any and all files in a digital form with anyone else on the www without the attachment to a peice of software...or at least not much of one.

More on torrents and stuff later! TAHA!