BoodooBlog

I was recently asked some questions about my most-followed bot child, and decided to take the opportunity to craft a blog post mostly out of my responses to those.

or: _ebooks Leaves the Nest

or: I Am _ebooks And So Can You!!

After a sprint Monday afternoon, I prepared a proof of concept for my upcoming generative fan-non-fiction adventure based on the works of Slavoj Žižek: Dessert of the Real. I brought it to a local demo night for indie developers, but had little courage (and still less success) presenting it to attendees; I took the opportunity to tweet about it since it was functional and deployed.

How relevant are the username, handle, and avatar next to the 140-or-fewer-character messages in your Twitter timeline? How do the experience and meaning change if content is decoupled from social context? How clearly can you recognize the ‘voice’ of individual people you follow? If you use Google Chrome, you can find out using Twitgnostic.

Tokyo Jungle, a feral post-apocalyptic urban simulation game, is ostensibly about survival; its Challenge system and player affordances wrap that core in ambition and domination. Where the avatar’s need of food is insufficiently compelling, the game dangles carrots in front of the player directly. These carrots and the behaviors they produce are very familiar to anyone living in the pre-apocalyptic societies we know today.

Notes from GameLoop 2011