just read an article about the recent seminar by justin hall on his concept of “passively multi-play online games.” interesting concept.
Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online — and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can’t the whole thing be a game — a social game and a knowledge game? … all calls the notion “Passively Multiplayer Online Games,” and describes it as ” a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”
– original post here
when i had a very quick glance at his ideas, i thought we were talking about the same thing. the crucial role of the element of “play” in our lives, amplified particularly by network technologies. we’re living in the “entiretainment” age.
then i had a better read of it and realised that we were actually talking about the opposite ideas within the framework of network play. we’ve got pretty much the same elements of investigation - play, network, mobile etc - but in the simplest sense, he’s looking at ludus while i’m looking at paidia, the opposite end of the continuum (as suggested by caillois) by means of measuring your passive (turned into active) participation - some people might disagree with this idea since strictly speaking, measuring alone wouldn’t make a paidic experience into a ludic one; i suppose here i’m thinking more in lines of (sub)conscious/unconscious accordance to rules. i consider “games” as rule-binding therefore ludic, and subcategorical to the concept of “play”) - i don’t know if i want to be “in game” all the time. the idea just doesn’t appeal to me. i believe in play but i’m not sure if i believe in games.
anyway, it was fascinating to see “the other side” of what i’m trying to do within what “we’re trying to do.”
my confidence in its ability to satisfy my (very reasonable) expectations grew day by day that i’ve come to casually ignore the whole “remove this device” or “drag it to trash” thing and just plug it out whenever i felt appropriate. ha- big mistake.
a few days ago i lost everything i had on my ipod. it was such a refreshing sensation when i walked outside, and press the menu button and tada- an empty ipod, back to its factory condition. i was lost for words. it was unexpected in every way.
although it was a fault of my own, i started to blame the technology: “well, you’ve never done this before so why did you decide to start being silly now? this is just ridiculous!”
so now i’m a little short on the number of albums on my ipod. i’ve been too busy to go through my computers - desktop and laptop - and transfer tracks scattered here and there. right now i have:
chocolates & cigarettes EP - angus & julia stone
dummy - portishead
french for beginners podcast
high times singles 1992-2006 - jamiroquai
let’s get out of this country - camera obscura
on the rocks! - ego wrappin’
philosopher’s zone podcast
i’ve been listening to the same things over and over, and as a result i’m getting addicted to certain tracks like lloyd, i’m ready to be heartbroken; well come to think of it, all camera obscura’s songs are highly addictive.
anyway, i wished “repeatedly” ipods had wireless data transfer capabilities. no need to plug things in and out. no need to lose all your songs and find yourself outside songless when you could really do with some. i wonder if there are any plans to implement this.
soon there will be wireless electricity.
US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.
original story here
when this becomes reality for everyday life, it’s going to be absolutely crazy in a country like korea, especially with wireless broandband technologies like WiBro. it would be really strange (and dangerous) to walk outside and someone just suck all available (public and private) information about me out of me - or my wireless device, more like. the sensation that i had with my empty ipod would be nothing compared to how i would feel then.
i’ve heard some very good reviews - by critiques and everyday film appreciators alike - about swing girls. i really hope there are still tickets left. would love to see it.
i’ve been interested in japanese culture for a while now.
when i was growing up, i didn’t hear much good stuff about japan. traces of the war still remain in many facets of life in korea. older generations simply do not approve of anything japanese. this is also one of the main boosters of the korean wave in countries like china and taiwan. “japanese culture? no. korean culture? oh well, ok.” sort of mentality.
my initial contact with japanese culture was through anime. i didn’t know that they were japan-made; i was just watching what was on tv. some of my favourites were marco (母をたずねて三千里), anne of green gables (akage no anne), and the future boy conan (未来少年コナン).
marco opening
then i was reading lots of japanese manga, and moved to music, then to literature, film, food, arts etc. one of the things i always do when i go over to korea is to sit at kyobo book store and read books by japanese writers. there are places to sit, and on special days you even get offered little bits of snacks and things (so that you don’t get hungry while reading books for free…?) so i satisfy two different types of hunger at once there. i’d love to read more of japanese books here, but it’s just really hard to find contemporary japanese literature here other than murakami haruki and maybe yoshimoto banana. they’re two of my favourite japanese writers, yes, but it’d be great if we had some more variety going on here. i absolutely love ekuni kaori, murakami ryu, and yamada amy, too.
one of my friends in japan has told me how she can see that murakami haruki’s works could be very easily translated into english without losing much meaning. she said they are “written that way.” my japanese is still shockingly limited, so i’m not quite sure exactly what she means, but i can sort of see how impossibly difficult it would be to translate ekuni kaori’s work, for example. she usually writes in very simple, short sentences. mostly her sentences are not complex or compound types - simple, sometimes fragmented, yet beautifully written.
i bought a book in tokyo on my way back to australia earlier this year. i actually had read a review of it on my way to korea from australia, but failed to locate a copy in any of the cities that i went to - from osaka to asahikawa - so i was delighted when i saw it hidden under some very boring looking novel at a little bookshop in the tokyo international airport. it’s called “inside and other short fiction: japanese women by japanese women.” it’s a collection of eight short stories about contemporary japanese women, written by contemporary japanese female writers. it’s an excellent book.
anyway, i’ve started reading “dance dance dance” by murakami haruki. i’m reading at a very slow pace, as i don’t want to lose myself in reading it and forget about all the work that needs to be done. here’s a little excerpt from the book (page 3):
A mysterious hotel.
What it reminded me of was a biological dead end. A genetic retrogression. A freak accient of nature that stranded some organism up the wrong path without a way back. Eveolutionary vector eliminated, orphaned life-form left cowering behind the curtain of history in The Land That Time Forgot. And through no fault of anyone. No one to blame, no one to save it.
The hotel should never have been built where it was. That was the the first mistake, and everything got worse from there. Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine - not to say elegant - mess. No detail seemed right. Look at anything in the place and you’d find yourself tilting your head a few degrees. Not enough to cause you any real harm, nor enough to seem particularly odd. Who knows? You might ge tused to this slant on things (but if you did, you’d never be able to view the world again without holding your head out of true).
That was the Dolphon Hotel. Normalness, it lacked.Confusion piled on confusion until the saturation point was reached, destined in the not-too-distant future to be swallowed in teh vortex of time. Anyone could recognize that at a glance. A pathetic place, woebegone as a three-legged black dog drenched in December rain. Sad hotels existed everywhere, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphon Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic.
can’t wait to get further into the book. a fun japanese time ahead.
a while ago, i read some articles about google’s emerging relationship with korea. i didn’t archive them anwhere - even on my del.icio.us, which would’ve been so easy and a smart thing to do - so i will need to dig them up again, but here’s one of the articles i read then:
Google recently announced that it would invest at least $10 million on an R&D center in Seoul, Korea, reports the Korea Herald, and hire 130-150 researchers. Alan Eustace, Google senior VP for engineering, told the Korea Times that they want to recruit local computer scientists to “further develop innovative search technologies for Korean users and users around the world.”
– Google, Youtube, and Korean Connections @ GigaOm here
google’s share in the competitive search engine market in korea is only 5%. that’s pretty embarrasing for a company that’s managed to turn its name into a verb. you could never replace google in this sentence “just google it or something” with a different search engine name. all the other search engines fall into the second part of the sentence: “or something”
koreanclick reports that unique search referrals in korea are mostly by naver (appx 80%), followed by daum (48%) and yahoo!korea (32%). google’s only at 10.8%. a recent report also shows that to the question “what’s the site that first comes to your mind when you hear the term ’search engine (검색사이트 gumsek saitu)’?,” 59.4% said naver, 10.5% daum, and 7.3% yahoo. In terms of shopping sites, auction was found to be no 1 at 26.3%, followed by gmarket (18.6%), interpark (4.7%), and d&shop (4.2%). you can read the original article here (in korean). ebay bought auction in 2001, but they didn’t change the name; “ebay” is not mentioned anywhere but right on the bottom, where people wouldn’t really scroll down to see. but when i typed in “www.ebay.co.kr” i was taken to auction.
as with the global UCC boom, korean portals are pretty much in the same trend, but i’ve noticed that the korean ones have been doing that for quite a while now. and one of the most interesting things i’ve noticed about naver is that it gained popularity through its “naver knowledge search (네이버 지식검색 naver jisik gumsek).” this is a really interesting service, much like a combination of search engine + wikipedia. kind of like google (but naver had started way before google did) but much neater. korean search engines are quite different - i mentioned this after rachel’s presentation at the AoIR7.0’s doctoral colloquium as well, but if you compare how search results are displayed in yahoo (us or australia) and yahoo korea, you can clearly see the differences. yahoo!korea displays things in this categorical order:
knowledge (users answer to other users’ questions and gain ponts, too)
blogs and message boards
yahoo category
web results
news
hub (tag-based search)
music
videos
images
shopping
yahoo!korea basically ripped off naver’s knowledge service. well, it is in fact a really useful thing to have, and it’s helped me quite a bit every time i was preparing my trip to japan (but some people simply want to know things like “which instant noodle is hotter?”). of course i also used message boards in my daum cafes (clubs), and daum portal has recenly incorporated cafe message board search as well, which has boosted their lagging popularity. people seem to care about what other “normal people” or “netizens” have to say about thier subjects of curiousity.
anyway, back to google, as the first mentioned article says, korea’s not all that attractive in terms of market size. it’s a small country. but there are a lot of r&d centres over there, it’s pretty ridiculous - there seem to be a lot of magazine and journal articles on this topic anyway, so you can “(please insert your favourite search engine’s name here)” it, if you like - there’s ibm, microsoft, sun, hp, siemens, and google, just to name a few.
the korean government’s agenda to turn korea into the R&D Hub of North East Asia seems to have worked. why korea for r&d? here are some reasons:
strategic location
(between two largest economies of the world, china and japan)
cultural proximity
(to other asian countries: traditional and contemporary. the korean wave phenomenon has hit the whole region and beyond, from japan to uzbekistan)
brains, or qualifications
(oecd’s report, education at a glance 2005, reports that tertiary education attainment rate of koreans between 25-34 is 47%, and the country is one of the highest performing in student performance in problem solving)
supportive environment
(the government wants you there and will offer you subsidies and tax benefits)
nice infrastructure
(transport-wise and more importantly, the broadband. if you want to see the future of broadband, or the future broadband lifestyle, go to korea)
sustainability
(labour’s still cheapter than first-world countries, and cities are becoming more livable for creative class - foreign and local alike)
it all sounds lovely and beneficial for everyone. but i’m also hearing (or reading, more like) a lot of concerned voices coming from korea. they’re saying that those r&d centres are not contributing much to developing korean r&d sector. some main reasons behind this opinion include:
most centres function independently to the existing r&d sources in korea; in other words, there’s not much interaction between the KOREAN education and r&d sectors and the foreign-owned.
most workers at those centres are actually koreans; it’s just the same r&d power repackaged, rather than dynamic interactions amongst different multi-national sources.
and lastly, it appears as though korea is used as a testbed (for its techno-social and geographical advantages) and “development,” rather than “research” centre. after all, r&d includes two aspects: research and development. in the cyclical process of r&d, the egg comes first; from there chicks are “developed” into hens who can lay more super eggs later.
so i’m not quite sure what google wants from korea, other than looking at what’s going with contents and users in this exotic world built upon broadband. i hope that korea continues to shine technologically and culturally, and people - rich and poor - get to benefit from all that’s happening and is going to happen. korea will have to be careful so that they don’t get sucked into “the system” and spat out before they realise that they’ve lost most, if not all, of their eggs. my humble suggestion is that korea should watch out for their “palipali” tendencies - getting things done in a rushed/hurried manner. this charactersitic is seen in every facet of korean society, and has contributed to some amazing phenomena and developments; but after all, you can’t break the egg and pull the chick (or chicken, even) out, or sell off your farm for a quick gain before the eggs hatch (well, you can, but it’ll be a shame). can i just point out that i really hate using metaphors… well, i did it anyway just for a change.
there were so many other things that i wanted to include but i thought i had better things to do than perfecting my confirmation document. i managed to have about 14 hours of sleep in the past five days, and the last day of this madness, i couldn’t think about anything but rice crackers for some reason. i couldn’t get my mind off the subject. the texture, some wrapped in seaweed, some green, some glazed, the saltiness, the cracking sound in your mouth … it wasn’t even that i desired to eat them. it was just everything sensory about them that completely occupied my mind. i suppose writing your confirmation document is not such a sensory experience other than feeling the stiffness on your shoulder, dry eyes, constant hunger that is usually dealt with food that’s edible at its best, and dry skin (and mind), so it was very natural that my mind was craving for sensory experiences like a junkie.
in the literature review section, i didn’t include Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow. below is a summary of the main feautures of this concept (from wikipedia):
Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible).
Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
Distorted sense of time - one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
I didn’t include this in my lit review for two reasons:
although i was writing about some of the major theories of play, i wasn’t really planning to include “every single one” of them.
i’m not quite sure how applicable this theory is in a multi-tasking environemnt like life we live today. we’re pretty much creatures of what Linda Stone terms “contiunous partial attention” and i’m not quite sure how relevant flow theory can be with mobile communication, particulary because i want to shift attention from “mobile games” to new, more intrinsic forms of play that are afforded by the mobile phone - for example, emerging forms of play through mobile social networking. i don’t know if it was a mistake to not include him, but then again, it was a draft, of a confirmation document, so i don’t really think it would matter at this stage.
on a slightly different note, if you’re interested to see flow theory in action, check jenova chen’s site (http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames). i absolutely love “cloud” - i became so excited and emotional while playing it. i saw it being played on a bigger screen at ACMI in october this year. kids and big kids seemed to be very much enjoying the game.
on the last day of my own “confimration writing hermit camp” i found myself thinking, “think about all the things that you can do once this is done, jaz! like, marking!”
well, it’s true. i’m here in my office, marking exam papers. once this is done, i will get on to the website work i’d really like to finish asap, and a chaper outline for an upcoming book on cultural economy. when that’s done, i’ll finally be able to make some slides for my confirmation seminar, and very quickly go to melbourne for the digital natives in australia & korea conference and of course, koko black’s chocolates and laurent’s bread. it’s going to be pretty hectic till i leave for korea for my sister’s wedding. but i’m enjoying the business very much - perhaps i’m in flow.
