Annotated Links of Interest: October 31st 2008
Links of interest for October 31st 2008:
- War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production [io9 – Chart Porn] – “There’s been a huge spike in the production of zombie movies lately, and many of them seem to be inspired by war. Everything from 28 Days Later to Zombie Strippers make explicit reference to wartime, as did seminal 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead. Is there really a connection between zombie movies and social unrest? We decided to do some research and find out. The result? We’ve got a line graph showing the number of zombie movies coming out in the West each year since 1910 — and there are definite spikes during certain years, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval.”
- Beatles make digital debut in new game [The Age] – “The Beatles are coming to a game console near you. For the first time, the legendary group’s music will be featured in the lucrative video game market in a deal with MTV Games and Harmonix, creators of the Rock Band series. The game is scheduled to make its debut in time for next year’s holiday season. “The project is a fun idea which broadens the appeal of The Beatles and their music. I like people having the opportunity to get to know the music from the inside out,” Paul McCartney said in a statement. The game will not be titled Rock Band, but will work with the existing instruments – a guitar, drums and microphone. Game developers were cagey about whether new instruments, such as a keyboard, would be incorporated.” (One final frontier for Paul McCartney to get royalties … and, yes, I suspect when this comes out he’ll get a few of my hard-earned dollars!)
- Hulu, Dr. Horrible Make Time’s 50 Best Inventions of the Year [NewTeeVee] – Dr Horrible is a horribly good idea, it seems!
- Election ’08 Fanfiction – US election fan fiction and even slash fiction … Obama/Clinton is one thing, but Obama/McCain … hmmm. [Via Waxy]
Australia’s Twitterati SAY NO to Internet Censorship
As part of a protest against the proposed Australian Internet censorship filter, many Australia Twitter users have changed their avatars to pictures with their mouths gagged or crossed out. Rene Lemerle has created this very Australian collage collating many of these protest avatars:
Can you spot me in there? 🙂 Make sure you’re doing your bit to stop the insanity of the “clean feed”!
Annotated Links of Interest: October 29th 2008
Links of interest for October 29th 2008:
- New chapter for Google Book Search [Official Google Blog] – Google Book Search settles the lawsuit, makes a whole lot of things more accessible (especially if you’re a library or a university) and generally makes books searchable! 🙂 (Read Siva Vaidhyanathan’s excellent summary and initial reponse to the settlement.)
- Warfare game throws down gauntlet to Iran [The Age] – “A Sydney-based Jewish businessman bankrolling a shoot-’em-up warfare game pitting Israeli troops against Iranians says the aim is to “throw out a challenge to Iran” after its President vowed to wipe Israel off the map.
But Kevin Bermeister, world renowned for being sued by the music industry in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit over the Kazaa file-sharing program, said his intention was also to take the war between Jews and Muslims out of the real world and into cyber space. The online multiplayer game, Rising Eagle – Gaza, was officially released as a free download less than a week ago. It earns revenue through advertising billboards peppered throughout the game environment. The game, which contrary to its setting does not include any Palestinian fighters, is an update to earlier versions of the game set in Paris and China. It pits the Iranian Revolutionary Guard against Israel’s elite Golani Brigade in a first-person shooter setting.” - A history lesson in video games [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “The UK’s first official national video game archive has been launched in a bid to preserve the history of gaming. The archive has been set up in partnership between Nottingham Trent University and the National Media Museum in Bradford in the north of England. The gaming industry is now worth an estimated £22bn globally and steps are needed in order to record its development. The archive will be housed at the National Media Museum in Bradford and will include consoles, cartridges and advertising campaigns. “We are going to be archiving video games but it’s not just about the games themselves, it’s also about gaming culture,” said James Newman, from Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Contemporary Play, a research group dedicated to video games.”
- Editor furious over Bishop plagiarism explanation [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “A plagiarism row between deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop and the editor of a book on the party, Peter Van Onselen, has flared again. Ms Bishop’s chief of staff has taken responsibility for plagiarising a speech by a New Zealand businessman when he wrote a chapter for the book, called Liberals and Power; The Road Ahead, on Ms Bishop’s behalf. Now Mr Van Onselen says he is angry with Ms Bishop for saying that the footnote crediting the businessman was forgotten. “It’s not just a matter of them having forgotten to send through footnotes,” he said.
“Even once they belatedly sent those footnotes through they didn’t cover the plagiarism. “Footnoting doesn’t cover the fact that there weren’t quotation marks around exact lifting of words without attribution that came from this New Zealand businessman’s speech.”” (It seems no one’s buying the Bishop defense!)
Interactive Australia 2009 Report
The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia have released their third annual survey of the state of videogames and videogamers in Australia, Interactive Australia 2009. From the key findings (PDF):
• 88% of homes have a device for playing computer or video games.
• 68% of Australians play computer or video games.
• 46% of gamers are female.
• The average age of an Australian gamer is 30 years.
• 84% of Australians aged 16-25 compared with those 50+ play computer and video games.
• The average adult gamer has been playing for 11 years.
• Half of all gamers play daily or every other day, a quarter play once a week.
• The average game play session is one hour.
So, in line with international trends, the majority of Australians play videogames, there is close to a gender balance, and far from being exclusively for children, the average age for a videogame player is well into legal adulthood at 30 years old. Moreover, most adults see videogame play as something that should be supervised:
• 70% of parents in game households play computer and video games, 80% of these parents play them with their children.
• 78% of parents say an adult is present when games are purchased for their children,
• 92% of parents say they are aware of the games played in their homes.
• 75% of all computer and video games classified in Australia are G or PG (Classification Board).
Also not necessarily surprising is that most adults in Australia presume that there is an R18+ rating for videogames (there isn’t):
• 63% of adults do not know that Australia has no R18+ for computer and video games.
• 91% of adults (including gamers and non-gamers) say Australia should have an R18+ classification for games.
• 17% of adults in game households admit to having pirated games in their collections with nearly 10% of all games in Australian homes being illegal copies.
If that 91% figure isn’t clear evidence that the ratings system for videogames in Australia desperately needs and overhaul to, at the very least, include and R18+ videogame category, I don’t know what is! More to the point, if that last figure about game piracy isn’t directly related to the censored, or entirely banned, videogames intended for adults being downloaded in their original form, then I’ll eat my digital hat!
The final finding that stood out for me was:
• 75% of gamers say interactivity in games makes them more educational than other media, 89% of non-gamers say interactivity makes games more violent than other media.
Despite there being no conclusive evidence as to what impact the interactivity of games ‘really’ has, it’s noteworthy that most players presume games can be both educational and can cause more violent thoughts than other media (presumably viewed as more passive). You can view the full Interactive Australia 2009 report online as a PDF.
Annotated Links of Interest: October 28th 2008
Links of interest for October 28th 2008:
- Putting Privacy Settings in the Context of Use (in Facebook and elsewhere) [apophenia] – danah boyd’s sensible and timely reminder about Facebook’s ridiculously complicated and confusing privacy settings: “Facebook’s privacy settings are the most flexible and the most confusing privacy settings in the industry. Over and over again, I interview teens (and adults) who think that they’ve set their privacy settings to do one thing and are shocked (and sometimes horrified) to learn that their privacy settings do something else. Furthermore, because of things like tagged photos, people are often unaware of the visibility of content that they did not directly contribute. People continue to get themselves into trouble because they lack the control that they think they have.” [Via Jill] (These, incidentally, are among the reasons why you won’t see any pictures of my son on Facebook! Flickr, where I retain copyright and can actually use meaningful privacy settings, is far preferable!)
- Google considers local centre [Australian IT] – “Google has quietly dispatched a team of experts from the US on a fact-finding mission to decide whether it should establish a data centre in Australia. In the past few weeks the team of about five Google US employees had been involved in high-level discussions with local data centre providers, sources said. The meetings are believed to have been led by Simon Tusha, who labels himself as “Google’s duke of data centres”. A Google-run data centre would be positive for the company’s operations in Australia as it sought to increase its penetration of the large education sector.”
- Microsoft to battle in the clouds [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Microsoft has unveiled a cloud computing service, in which data and applications will not be stored on individuals’ computers. The new platform, dubbed Windows Azure, was announced at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. The platform was described by Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as “Windows for the cloud”. … The move sees Microsoft taking on established players like Google and Amazon in the rapidly growing business of online software. The aim is to allow developers to build new applications which will live on the internet, rather than on their own computers.” [Check out Windows Azure; but Dave Winer’s not impressed.]
Multicolr Search Lab
There’s nothing better than an innovative new search tool which really adds functionality not previously available. I’m a Flickr aficionado, but sometimes finding pictures with just the right colours can be a nightmare. Or, at least, it used to be a nightmare: enter Idée Inc‘s nifty new Multicolr tool which allows you to specify single or up to ten different colours and return results from Flickr in which those colours dominate. In the test above I looked for blue and white combination and came up with plenty of excellent images. Dinosaur Robots have given Multicolr a good test run and the results are impressive. Even more impressive is the fact that Multicolr’s default settings search for photos and images licensed under the Creative Commons! Finding stylist photos for reuse has never been easier! 🙂
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