I’ve been meaning to add some more stuff to the “about me” section for a while now. Inspired by our visit to the Game On exhibition this morning, I thought I’d put together a list of my favourite computer and video games.
Game On!
Today’s adventure for Alex and me was to visit the Game On exhibition at the Royal Museum. The exhibition first ran at the Barbican in London, but has only just now moved out to the provinces.
The exhibition bills itself as “the first major UK exhibition to explore the vibrant history and culture of video games. Focusing on key developments between 1962 and 2002, it’s an in-depth look at gaming’s fascinating past and limitless future.” (From gameonweb.co.uk). And it really is. Far from being just a random selection of games and consoles stuck in “hands-off” display cases , the exhibition space is genuinely beautiful. It is filled with bold primary colours, posters that explain the history and context of the games, and above all: dozens of monitors and console screens running original games on original hardware, from the 1970s right up to the present, with controllers so you can actually play them yourself!
The exhibition explores the cultural phenomenon of videogames. It doesn’t attempt to explain it–that’s left to other forums–but it shows you where it came from, and how it has evolved over the years.
The fact that it’s fully interactive is entirely appropriate to the subject matter. Films and books are passive media: you can display them, and you can observe them from a certain distance. But videogames are meant to be played. The very essence of a game is that you are involved with it, and that you have control over the story that is being told–even if the story is something as simple as “two opponents hit a ball back and forth between them.” Just as, if you want to understand the modern novel, you have to have read literature from other centuries, if you want to understand the modern videogame, you really ought to have played its ancestors. Game On allows you to do this.
But it’s not just a contextual, educational experience. If you played videogames as you were growing up, the exhibition is a blissful nostalgia trip. And if you’re too young to remember the eighties (and most of the people there this morning were children and teenagers), then it must be interesting to get your hands on all of predecessors to the PS2 and GameCube, and see what all of the grown-ups are on about when they talk about the “good old days” of gaming.
I had a blast. Even though I didn’t get to play many of the games (Alex wanted to be held for most of the time), I’m one of these strange folk who enjoy watching other people play videogames almost as much as playing them myself. If you enjoy games at all (and live near enough to Edinburgh), get yourself along there. (I’d recommend getting there early, though, and on a weekday if you can. Even by mid-morning today it was well busy, and some of the more popular games had queues.)
The Microcontent Client
An interesting and important article on where “web content” is currently at, and where it is going. It takes in content creation, aggregation, tools, and the culture surrounding all of these. (Via DollarShort.org)
“The microcontent client is an extensible desktop application based around standard Internet protocols that leverages existing web technologies to find, navigate, collect, and author chunks of content for consumption by either the microcontent browser or a standard web browser. The primary advantage of the microcontent client over existing Internet technologies is that it will enable the sharing of meme-sized chunks of information using a consistent set of navigation, user interface, storage, and networking technologies. In short, a better user interface for task-based activities, and a more powerful system for reading, searching, annotating, reviewing, and other information-based activities on the Internet.”
I certainly find my web habits moving in the direction outlined in this article. I skim, I scan, and I have twenty-three browser tabs open as I’m writing this. Opera suits these browsing habits of mine: tabs, mouse gestures, opening new windows in the background, search functions integrated in the address bar, the ability to quickly turn images of/on… All of these functions make it a lean, mean, browsing machine.
Linux: why?
I’ve been running with SuSE Linux 8.1 for just under three weeks now, and the niggles are definitely setting in. They were there from the start, really, but I was enjoying the challenge of dealing with them, finding workarounds, and tweaking the system.
But perpetual fiddling palls. I don’t own a computer so that I can spend all my time messing about with its innards. I do like to do some actual work on it every now and then. (“Work” includes simple stuff like browsing the web and email, as well as more serious projects.) It’s a question of content: do you love a tool for its own sake, or for what you can produce with it? Do you buy an Xbox because of its spiffy hardware, or do you go with the PS2 because it has the games you want to play?
So let me take a look at what I can do with Linux, versus what I normally do with Windows:
Mo’ Better RSS
Okay, this is the RSS aggregator I want: NetNewsWire. But it’s only available for the Mac. Damn.
So who’s out there doing a similar three-paned thing for Windows or Linux? Am I going to have to write my own?
RSS
Especially for Spence, I’ve put up an RSS (0.91) feed for this site.
To keep track of all of the blogs I read on a regular basis, I use the “Open all Folder Items” feature in Opera. I have all of my regular reading in a single bookmark folder, and the “Open all…” feature allows me to open all of these, in separate tabs, with a single mouse click.
But then I have to read them all, which is taking longer and longer the more new blogs I read…
RSS is the obvious solution to all of this. In theory, you have an application that scans the RSS feeds for each blog, and then displays all of the new headlines, in an easily scannable way. Then, you can click on a link to go to any entry that looks interesting.
The only problem is that I haven’t found an RSS aggregator that I like. I’ve tried AmphetaDesk and Aggie, but they just don’t strike me right. I think that for the moment, I’m just going to continue with the Opera way, until my list gets really unwieldy, and then I’ll put the effort into writing my own transforms and stylesheets to produce Aggie/AmphetaDesk output I can live with.
But just because I don’t use an aggregator, doesn’t mean that other people don’t. I imagine that if you use RSS as your primary blogscanning tool, you probably get a bit annoyed whenever you come across a blog that you want to follow, but that doesn’t have an XML feed. Especially when they’re so easy to implement. And especially when Movable Type provides you with a default RSS template already…
Ulp. Excuse the laziness please, and thanks to Spence for the prod.