Let’s say we have a problem in front of us. It’s a simple problem. We’re standing before two closed doors, both mysteries.

This situation is, of course, bunk. It doesn’t “contain” a few requirements. Context, intent, and memory. Let’s adjust the problem.

You’re standing before two doors, both of which are open. One opens into a room hot with fire. Through the other is a room with a still pond in the floor, reflecting the moon, and a table. On the table are greentea cups, bamboo place mats, and chop sticks.

Most people confronted with these two options would choose the latter. The first isn’t all that inviting because we know that it would surely kill or maim. It would hurt; it would blind; it would seer the lungs and boil the eyeballs. The second, however, invites with its mooncalm and its impression of conversation, relaxation, and pause. If the reader can see these two options then the description works. Memory comes rushing in to help solve the problem. I know fire and I know calm. The situation here rounds out with experience.

But I must have come to this fork with some intention, some reason for ebeing here. This question may be resolved by “how” I got to the fork and what lies beyond the fork, some goal, perhaps, or an escape.

The scenario lacks one thing that I may have brought with me (although this is in many ways a programming issue): an orientation. In order to pass into either room I follow a direction, following some orientation. In IF the standard is cardinal orientation: north, northwest, and so forth. In the typical IF environment, I may type nw at the cursor and pass into flame or moonlight, but am I really moving northwest? In IF I move with a dual orientation: nw and through the door, but which one orients the traveler with more coherence or context?

>nw
You are in the moon lit room.

>enter
What room do you wish to enter?

Is nw good enough? This is a rhetorical question because I’m not just moving into the moonlit room, I’m supposed to be entering that room for a reason. But what is the reason? Perhaps in this IF the right room to pass into the hot one?

Chris writes

I’m going to look through some of my material and try to find some details like this for a historical event and try to put something rough together. My largest concern about creating a historical teaching tool is to have it be not only interesting to the student, but also acceptable for use by the powers that be.

I’d suggest that the more way out you get the better. Go with it if you think it’s too crazy. I’d also suggest you bone down on NPC issues. How about a little conversation with Ben Franklin to get things going or Lee on horseback. I’ll have more on this as we go ahead because I’m right in the middle of a space that makes an environment for a student to learn how to consider writing evaluations and to practice the fundamentals of value claims and a lot of thinking has to do with what a student “might” write at the cursor, as in

If this . .

>

Then this or that (thinking, what is going to happen and what can I write. Down deep the student of any IF is thinking what is possible at the cursor given what I’ve done and what I need to do, whatever the “inventory” and given a “map.”

The value claim area will deal a lot with “haptics” in the abstract environment, haptics going to the idea of touch and the touch sensation, “reaching out to feel the dry hair on top of” and so forth. Making the abstract a “virtual concrete” space with consequences is a tough deal but fun nonetheless. At the moment the student player is in a room that changes with each step and filled with monitors. I’m working only on paper, writing the possible commands and the scenario and the teaching object all as I move ahead.

At the cursor the next step should always be an analytical decision.

It’s too bad but Media Lab Europe is on the path to closure.

More here.

January 10, 2005:
Weakened bones, radiation-damaged cells, spacecraft malfunctions — when you think of journeying through space, these are the threats that come to mind. Yet, there’s another issue equally critical.

That issue is teamwork.

Astronauts don’t travel through space by themselves. They go in pairs or threesomes or even larger groups. Maintaining a successful team in a risky, isolated environment calls for finely honed people-skills. It means that astronauts must develop a keen awareness both of themselves, and of the way they interact with those around them.

This is a NASA and new media issue with interesting consequences on the design side. The approach

includes an interactive simulator set onboard a virtual space station akin to the International Space Station (ISS). It allows an astronaut to role-play interpersonal conflicts on the computer. For example, the simulator might present this situation: one crewmember (represented by an actor) accidentally damages a piece of equipment, and asks a crewmate (the role assumed by the astronaut working through the program) for help in concealing the damage. The astronaut decides how to answer the request, and then the program responds, based on that answer.

Avida is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research. In lay terms, Avida is a digital world in which self-replicating computer programs mutate and evolve.

From the Digital Evolution Lab at MSU.

I can feel myself about to win an award soon for ugliest weblog on the internet. I don’t know what it is about the look of things but I think the size of my laptop screen is bumbling my sense of what things should look like, if that makes any sense. But the way I’m thinking about design has a lot to do with my search for a new laptop, a journey that isn’t going all that well, and one that’s not all that necessary at the moment.

On a particular machine, a component is missing; on another, same thing. Why doesn’t IBM slip some Firewire into a motherboard or two on their Thinkpads? Why is the Dell machine that seems like a nice fit suffer from the same absence? Why can’t Sony add some stoutness to their keyboards?

I will be adding a reading list onto the right hand sidebar soon and a photograph I’ve been meaning to take somewhere there too for a little more frivolous color and corner balance. Ah, the scales of things, one place to the next.

I’m not skeptical about Google and the loading of texts onto the Internet. See Guardian’s “Top libraries to go online . . .”. This isn’t exactly news. It may be a good thing. But how the search and retrieval will take shape over the next decade is going to test the idea of “digital books.”

We can always OCR paper-form texts into digital form, but what is the workable model: “image” as in Bodleian or Perseus hypertext? I’m always a little tickled by the almost unreadable static scanned pdfs of pre-1990 articles on databases.

Something to look forward to: interesting maps.

Susan Gibb at Spinning sums New Media 1: Perspectives up quite nicely in this post. Here’s a large slice of analysis

Perhaps one of the reasons that I more readily accepted the perspectives of the new media course is that it closely aligned the future with the past, tracing a historical record of narrative through art, language, literature and cinema. This (as has oft been seen here) is the manner in which I personally absorb new materialby relating it to the past or what is known and familiar, and building it up from there as well as applying it backwards in time to get at the roots. Snips of films, artwork through the ages, comic books, and computer generated productions such as video games and movies where computer animation was of primary importance were shown and explained in their use of media methods established by both the story and the particular advantages of their nature. The basics were throughout each medium; story arc, plot points of conflict, scene change, environments, and resolution, yet each was dependent upon a different means to get there.

Breaking down the story into segments of time and environment, lifting the layers to discover how they were interleaved to make it whole, seeing the work in its barest form and fully clothedthis is what impressed me most; this and the fact that it did not rob the story of its impact by seeing the parts disassembled.

From there, I took the learning back into my own world of what I consider realitythe trees, my home, the people I run into dailyand could look beneath the surfaces with some sort of x-ray eyes that penetrated to the core of common sights that otherwise are just existing without special notice taken.

To learn the nuances of one means of communication is to better understand the others. To learn them all concurrently is to understand the human mind itself a little better than before, and to question where it can go based upon where it has been.

Susan grasps the “teaching team’s” intent in bringing the course and program forward to the Tunxis community. She tells the “plot” of the course. She grasps the importance of the conceptual nuance (and I think she remembers some of the sticky moments).

I commend her leadership and performance in the course and her willingness to learn and teach.

From Susan Gibb

I found myself totally immersed in the story (to be covered in another entry) and anxious to move through the dense fog and woods, past dead vans and pickup trucks, to follow a road into a town where some great secret was waiting to be revealed, questions answered–the usual goal or mission-oriented purpose of “my” journey. The element too of point of view, and user involvement to the point of becoming the character will also be covered later.

Just for the sheer joy of control–and this is what appeals to me most, and why I should never, ever, ever have gotten my little fingers on the keyboard in the first place–and the wonder of what will happen next, as indicated by a fadeout to transition in a new scene, was more that most–but not all–books can provide with the turning of pages. The heart-stopping excitement of having a creature suddenly pop up in your “visual space” and threaten your protagonist would be hard to emulate by words alone (again, it’s been done by Poe and many others) and there’s only the pause button to relate to the closing of the book and if you can manage to think of it in time to save your ass.

Follow her series here.