cityofsound

Woody Guthrie's copyright notice

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

http://www.dithered.com/archives/200206.html#18_2

Swallows and Amazon.co.uk

Been away for a week in splendid isolation in Norfolk; in a tiny 150-year-old cottage on the coast, without TV, without phone, without Internet(!).

Though confusingly in the East, Norfolk is kind of like the Mid West of England, minus the epic scale (an oxymoronic analogy?). Almost Illinois-lite. Huge skies glowering over unreal flatland; 18thC wooden windmills dwarfed by a field of their elegant contemporary electricity-generating descendents. Marshland suddenly surrounding rows of tiny one-up-one-downs built for farm labourers in the mid-19thC and now sporadically containing tourists. Twitchers in matching kagoules watching Marsh Harriers perform at 50ft, whilst the USAF and RAF scream around 20000ft higher (not a little unsettling, given the current situation). Sand dunes offering gritty-eyed protection-of-sorts from the salty whipped sea fret. Amidst widespread cliff erosion, forgotten hotels and abandoned WWII gun emplacements slowly fall into the arms of the welcoming North Sea. Tiny villages with oversized medieval churches (remnants of early wealth through wool and land). Plenty of psychogeography to conjure with (links to Vikings, Denmark & Holland, in place names like Ostend & various '-burghs'; and in that it was once the same thing); later links to the founding fathers of the US, many of whom came from Norfolk way: in that broad accent, language itself (those '-burghs' again), and a shared emphasis on God-fearin', exacerbated by the bleak climate, exposed to raw Northern currents.

Jonathan Raban (one of the finest writers on 'place' there has even been, imho) is brilliant on the quiet yet pervasive English Christianity his father practised as a vicar in East Anglia/Norfolk - a countryside where the weather and landscape is gentle compared to the US, but raw compared to the sheltered rolling hills of much of England. This, as opposed to the wild religious fundamentalism of the mid-West of America, generated by the insanely inhospitable climate, with biblical-strength storms and inhuman temperature extremes. See Raban's 'Passage to Juneau' for more. These two areas feel linked none-the-less, almost as if similar cultures in neighbouring petri-dishes, exposed to varying degrees of climatic intensity in order to test humanity's reaction.

So, in a week when the English countryside allegedly moved to London, I decided to go the other way. And there's something about real country life that's hugely appealing for a week every 52, where your only thoughts of an evening turn to peeling spuds and gathering wood for the fire, odd salvoes from civilisation garnered from Radio 4.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not about to go all mild-mannered libertarian, a-huntin' and a-fishin' and a-startin' Design classes at the Village hall. An episode of The Vicar Of Dibley guest-starring Ted Nugent. For me, the lack of grass is always greener. I'll always prefer city life, and everything it stands for (words which may come back to haunt me on the seemingly inevitable arc towards middle-aged conservatism - if they do, you can shoot me on sight). However, the isolation afforded by holing-up in the middle of nowhere is hugely compelling from time to time. Ironically it's usually a luxury accessible to only the urban elite these days, whether in Maine, Provence, or St. Ives - and for people like me, via a lucky freebie from girlfriend's aunt's friend.

Anyway, I've been able to read and read, which is also a huge luxury. Got through some books I'd been meaning to finish for ages i.e. Weinberger's 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' (thumbs up!) and Greg Egan's 'Permutation City' (thumbs in a parallel dimension!); hugely enjoyed Chip Kidd's 'The Cheese Monkeys' and Herrimann's 'Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1926' (connection, readers? Both covers featuring lettering by the God-like Chris Ware); re-read some classics in the light of recent thoughts (Stewart Brand's 'How Buildings Learn'); and started Barabasi's 'Linked' and the second edition of Erik Spiekermann's and E.M. Ginger's 'Stop Stealing Sheep'. Brief notes on these to follow.

Dot-Bomb Fall Out

Two recent(ish) pieces reflect on dot-com culture.The Morning News piece - like pretty much everything there - is particularly beautifully written. Over at E-Sheep, the message is delivered rather more directly.

"Today is my last day at a web design company I've worked for since August 1999. In the span of three years, I have ..."

The Morning News: Quitter

"Like it or not, we are fish, adapted to life in one particular pond ... The E-Commerce Pond"

Barracuda: The Scotty Zaccharine Story [req. Flash]

The Aural UX of Driving

"A car radio that plays the throaty sound of the classic car of your choice in synch with your driving could make any rusting old hatchback sound like a Ferrari, or even a Harley-Davidson, its inventors claim ... Jay and Jason Plugge of Sunnyvale, California, lament the disappearance of "the endearing and unique audible sound signatures" of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s classic cars and motorbikes. They blame new engine technologies and noise pollution controls that have concentrated on reducing road and engine noise. But if a quiet and serene drive is not your thing, the Plugges' hope their patent will resupply the "rumble and throaty sound" of what they call the "muscle cars" and hot rods such as early Corvettes and Ferraris. And best of all, the noise is kept inside the car"

New Scientist: Radio gives mighty roar to quiet cars
Perhaps you could use 37BetterMotors-like interface to decide which car you want to be today?

Shirky on Broadcast & Community

Even here, though, there are significant obstacles to hosting community, obstacles peculiar to the nature of media. Much of the discipline a broadcast organization must internalize to do its job well are not merely irrelevant to community building, but actively harmful.

Clay Shirky: Broadcast Institutions, Community Values [as emailed from Shirky.com, but also seen on the excellent Foop] Clay performed a version of this essay for those of us at the BBC a coupla months ago. It was absolutely fantastic (as was the preceding address by Steven Johnson) - shook up quite a few in the room (hopefully). Note to self: I had an odd idea about trying to find a relationship between the life and death of online communities (seems worthwhile trying to map/predict the shape over time of such things) and Elliott waves, on which there was a blinding article in New Scientist recently. If anyone wants to follow that up, go for it.

Shifting Layers of Sound

Interesting layered approach to music in online multiplayer games:

"The human mind is designed to recognize recurring patterns. This is how we learn to identify things in the world -- through our senses in an organised pattern: Recurring sounds, visuals, smells etc. Unfortunately, recurring musical patterns - otherwise known as loops - start to get annoying after a while, especially if they go on and on and on. Even though the music doesn't draw any attention to itself, the pattern that it is repeating will ... Our solution to this problem was to create a tool that allowed us to combine many small samples of music into a continuous track ... It allowed us to create a single track built up of many smaller pieces which were combined on the fly to create an ever-changing soundtrack."

Gamasutra: The Music of Anarchy Online: Creating Music for MMOGs
[Gamasutra may require registration, free. not sure these days]

In The Details

"History is to New York City as bird watching is to anywhere else � if you have some idea of what to look for and a good pair of eyes, it won�t matter where you are. You�ll see something. And not just something, but something with a story behind it, something that someone has probably written volumes about, has studied from every angle and can present a five-hour disquisition on with short notice. Something that you have most likely never, until now, given a second's worth of thought to. Something like streetlamps. Those who have read Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist know that even an item as banal as an elevator carries with it an entire culture, a body of knowledge, a taxonomy to rival Linnaeus."

Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist is a fabulous read, as is this Morning News article on the lampposts of New York City. The Morning News: Crooks and Longarms

Vice City Soundtrack Albums - 7 of 'em

Two things I said recently: a) no more posts about Grand Theft Auto for a while, and b) "music industry wake up", in response to the potential for music within/around games. The former is patently nonsense. As for the latter:

"Rockstar Games and Sony Music Entertainment proudly announce a landmark collaboration to release the soundtrack for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Rockstar Games and Sony Music have joined forces to release seven simultaneous soundtrack albums on October 29th concurrent with the launch of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system in the United States. The soundtracks will be released on the Epic Records label."

"The Grand Theft Auto: Vice City soundtrack albums will be the definitive 80's music collection, with each album containing musical tracks from one of the numerous radio stations featured in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Each album will replicate a station from the in-game 1980's radio FM dial, ranging from Heavy Metal and Soul to Hip-Hop and Pop Ballads. Players will once again have the ability to tune the radio station in every car that they carjack to one of many stations of their choice. The radio stations in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City will feature the largest selection of music ever assembled for a video game with over eighty staggering tracks from artists such as Judas Priest, Blondie, Flock of Seagulls, Kool and the Gang, Hall and Oates, Grandmaster Flash, Cutting Crew and many, many more that span the entire musical spectrum of the period."

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Emergent Gameplay

Last post about GTA3, honest. But a recent mini-article at Gamasutra.com caught my eye, not least because its title included the 'e' word. From a session at GDC Europe, called Systemic Level Design for Emergent Gameplay, led by Harvey Smith of Ion Storm Austin. Harvey outlined a basic form of emergent behaviour in more complex games - essentially, players discovering/creating ways of playing not foreseen by game designer.

"The sense of possibility that players talk about when they play Grand Theft Auto 3 -- or any game that tries to make a really in-depth environment where the world is not just full of one-to-one interactions that were prescripted -- is a very powerful thing. It's empowering to the player. The gameplay itself becomes largely about exploring the possibility space. So yeah, we think it's pretty innovative. As game worlds get more complex, keeping this angle going will mean that every game experience will be richer and richer."

Conversations from GDC Europe: Bill Fulton, Zeno Colaco, Harvey Smith, at Gamasutra.com.

It's a short piece at the end of a longer series of interviews, and Gamasutra might require registration (free), but interesting. Particularly interesting parallels with other forms of emergence.

[also a link in the above article to a Microsoft .doc entitled User-centered Games Design - looks worth a read]

History & Game Moves in GTA3

Matt Interconnected Webb has been posting about games recently, including a reference to an earlier piece I wrote on Grand Theft Auto 3. Matt closes by saying:

"At the very least making a move doesn't just alter the physical pieces-on-the-board representation, it adds that move into the history of the game. But more than that a move may change the rules themselves, as a side-effect, without the player intending it."

To respond to a bit of what suggested here, in terms of my earlier post, GTA3, in a very basic way, does appear to have a notion of game history altering the space within it - and in a sense 'what you can do there'. Though these are not really rules as such, as in formal boundaries, but rather altering the space (via the various characters' actions within those spaces) ...

What this boils down to in GTA3, is that I can no longer kerbcrawl through St. Marks (the Mafia district) because of the numerous previous offences I've now committed against the Mafia. I now have to do a mission which involves driving through St. Marks. I was offered the mission earlier in the game. I could've taken it then, but ignored it in favour of pursuing a different (more central) narrative thread. Having followed that thread, I'm now finding it extremely difficult to 'go back' and do the other mission. Because it involves driving through St. Marks (where Mafioso hitmen seem to enjoy standing on street corners waiting for me, with big guns) ... so I have to drive like Schumacher (with Uzis blazing) to avoid them. Which is my own fault, natch ...

But I like the fact that 'the city' has now actually changed - in social topography, if not geographical (though GTA3 also changes geographically, but on a more linear tip). My mental map of the city now features a glowing danger sign hanging over St. Marks ...

Like I said, a very basic development ... but something I think.