Couldn't resist...

Magnetic poetry is one of my favorite things ever. We filled an entire notebook with the results of our kitchen efforts over the years, and titled the tome, "Frost Free Verse." Hah-hah.

So... I couldn't resist posting a local version of this wonderful and elegant Ajax Magnetic Poetry Game here for you TinkerX readers. Over time, let's see what kind of screwed-up crap y'all can come up with, eh? Just grab the wee words and drag 'em around. It's as easy as... well. C'mon, people.

It's great. Show love by visiting Broken-Notebook.com from whence it came.

PlayByWiki goes live

If you've noticed a falling-off in the regularity of posts to TinkerX in the last couple months, it's probably because I've been working on another Web-based project. Or the world has been static and I've had nothing to say. Or you haven't been pestering me and sending me gifts of cheese.

But, probably, it's the other project thing. Along with a gang o' pals and my wife, Chris, I've been messing around with the idea of hosting a wiki for text-based RPGs. Over the years, I've been involved in lots of different kinds of role-playing-games, everything from pen-and-paper up through single-player and masively-multiplayer computer versions.

Some of the most rewarding RPG experiences I've had have revolved around the creating of cooperative, text-based adventures, often termed play-by-mail or play-by-email. Over the past few years, this kind of interactive, group text adventure has come online, often using bulletin boards or forums for the posting and editing of text, rather than doing it through email. Termed play-by-post, this kind of cooperative, game-based fiction is logisically easier than play-by-email, as the posts are all published in one central location, rather than distributed via email. It's one step closer to a "shared text environment," which is the ideal for collaborative writing projects.

Which brings us to wikis.

In doing some research for a client on wikis, I came to the conclusion that they are a natural fit for collaborative, text-based RPG play. Because the group text lives in a common environment, it has shared-yet-distributed benefits similar to those of bulletin boards or forums. But wikis have a major (big major; major major) advantage of those technologies, in that they allow editing of the text directly on the wiki page, rather than an updating and re-posting of newer "versions" of the story as it progresses. In effect, the text truly "lives" on the wiki.

Wikis are generally also much more free-form in terms of their linking structures and page creation abilities. The top-down, parent-child-grandchild "tree" structure of most Web site navigation plans is not appropriate for large numbers of large groups of people who each want to build their own, organic spaces. Wikis grow more like coral than like trees, with clumps of pages growing where they need to, linking when they need to, and being deleted when no longer needed.

Yes, it's less organized. From a "web-master-centric" standpoint. But since there isn't supposed to be one web-master, that works out pretty well.

So I spent quite a bit of time looking for the right/best wiki engine/farm to host a cooperative, group-based RPG wiki. I had a couple major requirements.

Permissions: First, and probably most importantly, it needed to have a permission structure that allowed for the creation of users within groups, and page-level view/edit/create permissions for those groups. You needed to be able to say, "Group 'A' can create and edit 'Group A' pages, but not 'Group B' pages." Sound easy? Try and find that wiki engine yourself. Many have no permission structure -- they are completely open. Some have a simple, two- or three-tiered structure that allows or registered users to edit pages, but visitors to view only. Very few have anything approaching the complexity necessary to assign users to groups and allow them to have group-specific, page-specific permissions.

WYSIWYG editing: It may sound... non-geeky. But I think we're past the stage where people, even grognards, will casually put up with entering in a bunch of paired <b> codes </b> to make text bold. I don't know if you've ever added or edited an entry on the Wikipedia, but they use a wiki engine called MediaWiki. Now, I'm a huge fan of the Wikipedia -- as you may guess from all the links I throw at it from here -- and MediaWiki is a great piece of software. But the text editor is still, in 2006, basically Textpad. To make text look like anything, you need to mess with a bunch of codes. I don't mind. I'm a giant tool. Huge geek. But most folk? They get turned off by having to use a bunch of funky codes to make stuff look nice. For example, to make text look like this:

Related Methods of Role-Playing

• Play-by-mail gaming


• Play-by-Internet

You have to type in this:

== Related Methods of Role-Playing ==
* [[Play-by-mail gaming]]
* [[Play-by-Internet]]

Rather than using some nice selection tools a-la MS Word or every other text editing program we've been putzing around with since 1988.

Now... there is a reason for this code stuff, and I'm not ignorant of it, and I don't want hate mail from the wiki-text purists out there. Yes, text formats by code is much cleaner and easier to interpret for the wiki engine. Yes, if the WYSIWYG editor is "bad," you can end up with horrible, junky HTML. Yes, it's hard to throw a layer of interpretation between the site and the user and that violates another philocophical principle of wikis involving touch-barriers, etc. etc.

All that being said... 98% of the people out there just want to highlight their text and click on a big, fat "B" to make it bold. And I think that a wiki dedicated to cooperative writing should be friendly like that.

Those were the two biggies. User/group permissions and WYSIWYG. There are bunches of other little things (like price...) that entered into it, but I needed a wiki engine or host or farm that could do those two things.

Gosh, I tried like heck to find an Open Source wiki engine that would do the trick. No soap, polar bear. Not yet. If you know of one... ping me. At some point in the future, I may change over. But for now...

I ended up going with EditMe. It was a close race between them and JotSpot.

JotSpot has a ton more cool plug-in tools at this point. And, with my bro, I'd created a wiki there for the use of one of his (John's) clients. Nice stuff Jot's got. But, in the end, EditMe's permission structure was better, and their editor was a tinch slicker and smoother. There's a few things Jot's got I wish they had, but the two biggies are the two biggies.

So. With a host in mind, we set up www.PlayByWiki.com. Originally, some friends and I thought we'd just use it to implement various play-by-post type games based on existing RPG systems; D&D, GURPS, Everway, etc. But then we started thinking... we've always played text-based RPG games based on systems that were designed for pen-and-paper.

What we need is an RPG system designed from the electrons-up for text. Rather than forcing a great tactical game like GURPS into a role it wasn't really designed for, why not invent a system that is meant to exert exactly the kinds of forces one wants in a text based game? Instead of concentrating on hexes and actions-per-second, such a game would focus on character and plot points.

And so, on top of building out the wiki for the general use of groups who want to play whatever-the-heck-rules they'd like, we've also been designing an entirely new RPG system, Ninth Sigil, for use specifically in text-based, wiki-centric games.

And what a lot of fun we've had doing so.

It's not done. It will never be done. You never really stop "picking" at it. But it's ready enough to show people and call a "public beta." So, if you like, take a look and let us know what you think.

I couldn't find any real examples of RPG, text-based, wiki hosted games on the Internet. I'm sure there's something out there. But the Web abhors a vacuum. And I abhor not having an easy way to play these damned, 2-year long text games with JB, Stu, Ed, Bill, Jo and Kirke. And whomever else wants to jump on board now.

The voice said: "If you build it, they will come." Well, I ain't building it. You have to build it yourself. But that's the whole point of RPG games. So... if I let you build it, will you come?

We'll see.

 

Anti Yo Mama

This is basically a cut-n-paste of a comment I've made at www.Lit.org. where I post some of my writing. It's in response to a piece written by one writer who had recently visited live with another, and who was very touched by her friendship. So much so, that she wrote a poem about her. Which touched off a spate of semi-humorous, "Let's write poems about each other!" All in good fun, all for laughs and merriment.

But It reminded me of something my brother, John, and his good friends Zach and Abe did in highschool. Back then (and, I assume, now) it was a fun/cool thing for the guys to totally rag on each other. Call each other, and each others' mamas and girlfriends and teams and neighborhoods and whatever, all kinds of names. Huge, long, extended versions of the, "Oh, no! YOU SUCK so bad that you've got your own event horizon!" jokes back and forth.

Though, perhaps, they were jokes of a somewhat less astrophysical nature...

Anyway... one of them three pointed out one day that everybody ("everybody" meaning "including lots of people we look down on") did this "cutting on" their buddies. So... how much fun is that? Instead, they (and a few other of their friends) started doing the opposite. They did, "No... YOU'RE AMAZING!" bouts.

Every itteration of which would get more hyperbolic...

"You couldn't get fired from a job if the boss caught you in bed with his wife. He'd just thank you for helping to improve his gene pool. You're THAT AMAZING!"

"No... YOU'RE MORE AMAZING! Four-out-of-five regression therapy handwriting experts agree that the cross-bars on your lower-case 'Ts' indicate not only that you were Cleopatra in a former life... but that you TOTALLY ROCKED THE NILE!"

And on... and on. Sometimes, well... He's my kid brother, so I have to rag on him. John, if you're tuning in:

"You're SO AMAZING!!! When you were born in 1969, that event alone caused a realignment of the cosmos such that disco began to die. Were it not for your birth, we would still be dressed in lime green and dancing the Hustle. YOU'RE AMAZING!!!"

What they found out, was:

1. It's more fun to do this ( good for you)
   


2. There's more creativity involved (more good for you)
   


3. It's funnier (to your buddies and the audience)
   


4. You all end up feeling better when you're done (good for everyone)
   


5. Nobody punches you in the teeth (good for teeth)
   


6. Chicks dig it much more (good for you and the chicks)
   

All good reasons to give mad props to the AMAZING John, Abe and Zach.

Spammers go to Hell

I have a liberal philosophy about hell. Or at least an odd one... We can go into it in detail some other day, but it boils down to a loving God that gives people every chance possible to accept the benefits of love, forgiveness, mercy, grace, friendship, sharing, peace and understanding. If you want those things, you get to live forever with Him and with other people who want those things. Obviously, if you don't want those things you don't need to accept them, and you go somewhere else.

Classically, we've called that place, "Hell." There's a "game theory" version of religion that has some invisible monitor counting up sins vs. good deeds, and, in the end, you get a ticket or a pill and you might be surprised with the outcome:

"What? I'm going to Hell? Oh, crap! I didn't realize that poking my brother right near his head and whispering, 'I'm not touching you... I'm not touching you...' was such a big deal! Jeez-o-Pete... WHAT??!! Saying 'Jeez-o-Pete' counts as swearing!!??? Dang. I do belong in Hell..."

I don't believe in the game-theory version of Hell. I believe it's an obvious choice. Same as the choices here on Earth, but more obvious. You know, like Paul said: something about us seeing though a glass darkly, but afterward, all shall be made clear. So -- now, here, today, the benefits of doing good are sometimes... fuzzy. We want conflicting things. And some of them may "seem" good, even though we know they aren't "really" good. We have the choice to do all manner of bad stuff, from wee little piddly Jeez-o-Pete stuff, up to great evil on a momentous scale. I believe that how we live our lives now prepares us for how that choice will seem to us when it is made "more clearly" come the veil be torn assunder.

If we consistently choose to do evil, then good will look like a bad choice. Being in a place full of lovey-dovey, hugs-r-us, earthy-crunchy, tell-me-all-your-problems, everything-is-forgiven types for eternity would look like... what? to someone who has indulged a life of complete self-centeredness and contempt for others. It would look like... Hell!

So. Maybe the place is just one place. Maybe to good people, who have lived a life of love and forgiveness, spending eterninty in a place where that is the norm is called "Heaven" and seems like music on clouds. Maybe to bad people, who have lived a life where love feels like being invaded and forgiveness is a kind of judgement, that feels like pitchforks and fire.

Either way, spammers go to Hell. Period.

I got 24 pieces of comment spam yesterday. So...

I've just installed "Did You Pass Math," a neat little captcha-like utility that will ask you to solve a 2nd grade addition problem (2 + 4 or such) before completing your comment. I like it better than the words-in-pictures, because those utilities require me to install two plugins (one for the captcha, one for the image translation), so this one passes the Occam's Coding Razor tests of "Sweet!" "Lazy!" and "Elegant!" We'll see if it works.

In the meantime... you spammers out there would do well to consider how your souls will fare in the everlasting backwash of eternity.

The message is the

I'm not going to get all McLuhan tonight. Don't have the time. But I'm increasingly moved, impressed, amused and freaked out by the way in which things are other things.

When I first heard, "The medium is the message" -- McLuhan's seminal aphorism -- I thought, "No it ain't." I was about 16 at the time, and the idea that the message wasn't the message was appalling to me. Sure, the medium was important. But the medium "is" the message? That's just too... too. At about 21, I admitted that, perhaps, the medium is a large part of the message. That the medium pervades the messages. That the statement was meant to be broad for effect. That, that, that... Feh.

By about 30, I was convinced. The medium is the message. Yes, Marshall... you were right.

And I wish you were alive, now, to see the what's going on with Web mash-ups, Web 2.0, the seminal-web, interactive-metadata, call it what you want. But it's just... well, MM would have simply said, "cool."

There's an old math game you play, where one person lists numbers in a sequence, and the other person then has to figure out what the next number is. 2, 4, 6, 8... 10! Right. 1,2,3,5,7...11! Well, here's one for you:

3, 3, 5, 4, 4, 3, 5, 5, 4, 3, 6, 6 ___

What's that next number? Don't scroll down until you give yourself a bit of a chance here.







































Give up? It's 8.

Why? Because the numbers in the sequence equal the number of letters in the words for the numbers in the sequence. Hunh? Like this:

one = 3 (o, n, e)
two = 3 (t, w, o)
three = 5 four = 4 five = 4 six = 3 seven = 5 eight = 5 nine = 4 ten = 3 eleven = 6 twelve = 6

thirteen = 8

See? Numbers are words. And words have numbers of letters. That's a double transposition.

Who cares? See the pictures of the letters at the top of this post? It was created using a Flickr mashup called "Spell with Flickr." You type in a word, the code (pretty simple code, too.. no offense) finds Flickr pics that match for pics of those letters. Voila! You have words made of pictures of letters.

That's the second Flickr mashup I discovered today that treats pictures as something other/more than the sum of their pixels. Krazydad's Colr Pickr lets you choose a color from an RGB wheel and see thumbnails of random Flickr pics with high RGB saturations that meet your selection criteria. There are also buttons on the bottom that let you see Flickr images with various other filters like flowers, graffiti and macro.

Some will see this and say, "Yeah... big deal. Just another way to search. A bit more intuitive and intelligent, but is it really that big a deal?"

I say... it's getting there. It's getting close to a large "McLuhan Moment."

Numbers are words are letters are pictures are colors are flowers are close-ups of graffiti. If the medium is the message, and we are rearranging the medium on-the-fly... if the medium is mashable...

The message has always been open to interpretation.

Now... are we at the point where the medium is, too?

Spore: primal ooze to prime directive

I'm not going to pimp for specific commercial software products very often. Especially not ones that aren't out yet. And really especially ones that aren't out yet and are getting a ton of press elsewhere. Also, I'm not playing anywhere near as many video/computer games as I used to. See: having a kid and trying to keep up with two blogs and other creative projects that aren't games.

All that being said, Spore looks... well... insanely awesome.

30 minute gameplay video here.

The Ouroblogos

John Moore, over at Brand Autopsy, has a good post with pointers to a recent blog-off between Robert Scoble and Shel Israel on one side, and Werner Vogel on the other, with color commentary from a bunch of other blogs as well.

Basically, Scoble and Shel went to Vogel's house (Amazon) to talk about corporate blogging. According to Vogel, they weren't prepared to discuss the subject deeply and seriously enough. According to Scoble/Shel, Vogel was rude. Blah blah blah, several million blog pings (including this one) later... we have Battle of the Blogs... etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam. I left the following comment at Brand Autopsy for John:

My favorite writing teacher at school, Dan McCall, liked to say that all great writing is always about two things: whatever it's about, and about writing.

Great marketing is always about two things, too: whatever it's about, and marketing. I look at this back-and-forth about blogging, and think to myself, "Isn't this an example of exactly the kind of discussion that blogging is *supposed* to foment?"

The fact that we're blogging about blogging (and now, with this post of John's, blogging about blogging about blogging... my god, it's the Ouroblogos!!!) makes it difficult to see (the reflexivity paradox; it's hard to think about thinking)... but nonetheless true -- it's the reflection of the thing in the thing itself.

The blog proponents say that blogging increases transparency, promotes communication between/among customers and employees and helps communication happen more naturally. OK. Didn't all those things just occur within this set of "dueling blog-o's?"

The "we're-less-than-convinved" crowd says that blogs will open the kimono too far, expose internal personalities that are better left on the inside, give vent to "non-professional" conversations and unleash all kinds of unproductive chatter that is irrelevant to the actual marketing of products and service. Didn't that happen, too?

Yes. It did. A condradiction? Not at all.

And why is that? Because like any marketing medium, blogging must be judged based on (here I go again) goals. What do you want to accomplish? What, specifically, do you think blogging will do for you? What are the costs and benefits? What are the risks? How do you mitigate them?

Is blogging a great tool? For what? Toasting a cheese sandwich? No. Sucks for that. For building a high-performance, massive, worldwide retail sales empire. Nope again. For bringing many more customers to a specific, "long tail" subject than you could possibly have ever garnered through previous, traditional communication channels? Hell, yeah! For letting narrow, vertical groups of customers, partners and employees know what's going on in areas of interest? Yep again.

So. Did I enjoy this blog-wrastle? Sure did. Why? It was meta in the extreme. "Blogs Gone Wild." I think I'll turn this comment into a post on my own blog just so I can come up with either a pic of the Ouroblogos or Scoble vs. Vogel on the cover of a mud wrestling VHS tape.

Am I adding to the noise? If so, I am clearly admitting it and so that makes it OK. Right? Going into the irony with full and complete knowledge and my cup on...

I don't know about corporate blogging at your company. That's not what this post is about. My point was, and is, that blogging, like any other communications tool, need to be examined within a context of goals. Doing it because it's "fun" is BS. Not doing it because it's "scary" is just as BS.

I just got a huge kick out of all the high-level navel gazing. Going to work on my illustration of Ouroblogos now...