Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:22 pm on 1/22/2009
First it was Betamax. Our household didn’t choose it, but if it had been up to me, we would have. I was ten years old. My dad had just announced we’d be getting a VHS deck, and I remember looking up at him – not many memories of that, we were already close to the same height – and arguing that all sorts of people said that Beta had better picture quality and was more durable. I felt confused and powerless when he wouldn’t listen. Within months the available Beta rentals at Five Star started to thin; within a year they were gone. I felt kind of at peace with that, probably because I had no trouble renting anything.
Then it was the Mac. In 1986 you either had a PC and could play all the games, or had an Amiga and could play mysteriously awesome games no one’d heard of, or you had some other shit and were a loser who hung out at friends’ houses a lot. Don’t get me wrong, we had great stuff at home – we had HyperCard – but we didn’t have status. The arguments didn’t happen to us so much, because there “wasn’t” an Internet yet, but on one notable occasion a friend and I had finagled an invite to the home of a girl I had a crush on, so we could set up her stereo; some other kid who was there started talking smack about Macs for no real reason, and somehow I got sucked into fighting over it feebly with him while my undistracted friend accomplished all the useful, girl-impressing tasks. Yes, I learned to program, sort of, with HyperCard; yes, Defender of the Crown had a certain majesty in black and white when it (finally) showed up. Yes, the Mac II made things a lot better. Still, none of us Mac users of a certain age ever forgot – our superiority was not a real thing. We cooked it up ourselves; when we went out in the world, it had no currency.
Then it was the Sega Master System. I hope I don’t even need to say more. (Space Harrier, though: yeah. And Great Volleyball, out of which my brother and I wrung a truly odd amount of fun.)
Now it’s the T-Mobile G1. All I see is iPhone app announcements and developer opportunities, in the music blogs, the game blogs, the web-dev blogs. The Android platform gets some dap too – it’s evident that this time I have at least picked Sega, not 3DO – but that doesn’t help me when I have to fight with the G1′s camera again, or stumble through the Market looking for something, anything that doesn’t suck ass (illiterate app comments scrawled on the listings like they’re bad YouTube videos), or watch performance slow and slow as I get further from my last hard phone reset. Yes, it’s not that much longer until the apps will get better, but let’s be honest: they’ll never catch up. I abandoned all my noble open-source principles as soon as they failed to reward me. I want an iPhone so bad.
Last month I was at the mall finishing holiday shopping and saw that my shiny new phone was out of power again – I must have left GPS on by accident, damn my eyes – so I stopped into a T-Mobile store to borrow a cup of the ol’ juice. They kindly offered me a power adapter by the G1 display, and I soon found myself in conversation with a prospective buyer, talking the phone up. The social pressure of being in a T-Mobile retail store that was doing me a favor is only a partial explanation. I suddenly recovered all my moral dudgeon against the locked-down, anti-user iPhone and its monopolistic store full of 99-cent farting applications. I told this guy about the $400 unlocked dev version of the phone when the sales guy’s back was turned. I talked about the coming paid apps. I talked up all the promise that I wanted so much to believe in again.
In summary: OMG I HAVE SUCH TERRIBLE PROBLEMS (soon we will all be checking Twitter from the fucking bread line)
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 1:41 pm on 9/1/2008
Like everyone, I am blogging less and Twittering more these days. Follow along if you care to.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 5:00 pm on 7/6/2008
Here at long last is the compilation of my Twitter notes from George Lakoff‘s talk at the Bagdad in Portland on June 12, 2008, about his new book The Political Mind. I tweeted these all as quotes, but they aren’t exact, so if something here enrages you, check with me first on whether he actually said it or not. Also, I’ve had to edit this pretty heavily to make it make any sense at all, as Twitter apparently drops a lot of your messages when you make two pages’ worth in the space of 30 minutes or so.
Many thanks to Prof. Lakoff for coming to town, and to Powell’s Books for hosting the talk. (And if you haven’t, please take a gander at my summary of the first chapter of Lakoff’s germinal manifesto Don’t Think of an Elephant – it may help all this make sense if you aren’t familiar with his prior work.)
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:49 am on 5/3/2008
As long as I’m bloggin’ it up: for those of you who missed, or irritatedly switched off, my flood of live tweets from this past weekend’s unstructured talk by Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud at Stumptown Comics Fest, well, here you go.
These are my paraphrases of McCloud’s comments as they went by, so if something he “says” here strikes you as horrible, be sure and check with me to make sure it wasn’t my fault. Thanks!
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:32 am on
Through no fault of my own (note: lies), I have spent a humongous amount of time on web forums in the last year. And really, they’ve always been a part of my web diet, but only in rarefied varieties – the run-of-the-mill phpBB-style forums have never been to my taste. They just feel a little bit wrong to me, like somebody is trying to hide something in a honeycomb of twisty little text boxes all alike. (It doesn’t help that people keep trying to use phpBB and its clones as blog engines. Stop that!) And increasingly, the form of forum discussions in general have started to feel stultifying, like the hammer that makes all computer-mediated communication look like a nail. An overwhelming, unfocused nail.
Forums don’t consider human needs very well. Typically, they let you know how many postings are new to you (which we know from our experience with email to be a source of nothing but stress for most people), but that’s about it. About the only helpful thing they offer to do is tell you via email when someone’s replied to you. The rest of the time, when they aren’t busy burying you in an info-snowdrift, they are exemplifying every problem and then some from Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. (Haven’t read that? Do it now. Seriously. You won’t be sorry.)
It gets even worse when you set loose a lot of game designers. They (okay, we) start trying shit like “okay, everyone, only women post in this thread! Oh, and also, the notice to that effect will be in the same tiny type that the forum software uses for the categories you don’t pay attention to.” We mean well, really, we do, and experimentation is sorely needed. But without code to back it up… as often as not, humans have to intervene, and for all kinds of reasons, that makes for an emotional bear trap waiting to snap shut (usually on small game).
We sorely need actual tools – not just ideas, but tools – for shaping conversations. We need well-thought-out ways to take conversations that go off topic apart into different conversations. We need to give people the ability to restrict a thread to certain posters when they start it (transparently, please – if all we wanted were drama, we already have LiveJournal). It would be trivial to allow thread-starters to set a pace for the conversation – specifying a maximum number of replies before the thread closes to all but the thread-starter, giving them a chance to catch up and open it again. Or some other way. Or every way we can get somebody to write a plugin for. But as far as I know, no one’s even trying.
A bunch of people in the forum communities I’ve been frequenting are excited about a site called Tangler, which seems to just be a place to create your own forum, except Web 2.0′ed up in a bunch of little ways. And that’s helpful as far as it goes, but I’m like, this is all it takes to excite people? (Even though I know that what really has them excited is the simple fact that they can make themselves a new space that isn’t overwhelmed with people yet, and thus get sweet relief from the chore that a busy forum quickly becomes.)
Of course, I can’t do all this bitching without explaining why I haven’t cut some code myself to try to address these issues. Two reasons: 1) I still really need to cut back on unpaid programming projects, and 2) the sorts of problems that need solving in the forum space are not generally problems that anyone wants to admit that they have, let alone pay anyone money to have solved. People tend to think that totally free, unregulated conversation is what makes the Internet great. They are half right, and in the big picture, their half is undoubtedly the most important half. But the other half is holding all of us back. Shapelessness – lack of constraint, that is, and therefore lack of structure – too often saps conversations of all of their power to change things. When you’re lucky, you have human leaders to take charge of forums and keep them on the rails, despite all the social heat they end up taking for it. And that might always be the ideal case.
It’s possible that you can’t add much in the way of conversation-shaping constraints to forums, without making something that isn’t a forum anymore (you know, the same way that email sucks, but if you fix the problems it stops being email and having the strengths of email.) So really, this post is a plea to all of you, to try thinking about forums and how they came about, and what purpose they serve, and about whether we can do some refactoring to better serve those needs. Reading Shirky’s essay, linked above, would be an excellent start. Another start might be to look at the kinds of constraints that people apply to forums explicitly for the purpose of playing games, because games are in the end just social interaction with rules… just like forums.
Here’s a fascinating play-by-forum-post game inspired by the Myst series of adventure games, and here’s a forum that does a lot of play based on tabletop roleplaying games as well as a lot of talking about the play-by-post medium.
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