Obama assigns Creative Commons attribution to the change.gov website.

I’ll be tracking, as I commented earlier, the new governments use of technology periodically.

This should be interesting.

Michael Arrington doesn’t have many nice things to say about netbooks. Here’s his claim plus arguments in classic thesis style writing:

I find Netbooks unusable for three reasons: they’re underpowered as PCs, the screen is too small for web surfing, and the keyboard is so small that effective typing is impossible.

I know three people who have them. These three people love them as mobile computers.

Chris Crawford has generated discussion on the question of games and art at NoGD. It’s an interesting classification quandary. First we have what is called a game and then we ask but it is also art. Is an artist a person who does art or who puts paint on a canvas or symbols into lines of verse. I would assume that if a player sat back after a few hours with a game, she could certainly claim that the object is a “work of art,” the experience of which is simply different. A couple of Crawford’s arguments:

First, the individual: there is no question that individuals are better generators of artistic creativity than groups. Throughout history, the most revered artists worked as individuals (although some did work with groups). The individual is the focal point of creativity. Yet the games industry has settled on a system using large teams of workers, with creative control diffused among a number of people. This short-circuits the lightning bolt of creativity.

The second factor is economic. If art can be produced cheaply, then lots of people will create art. Most of that art will be junk, because most people have no talent. But the number of attempts will be so great that there’s a real chance that one of those attempts will be brilliant. Conversely, if art is expensive to produce, then the range of possibilities is narrowed. Fewer attempts will be made and the chances for a bolt from the blue are reduced.

Key to Crawford’s argument is an ecology of risk, boundary, and creativity. I wonder, however, if there are more important questions to ask beyond the one about art, whose trails can be fun, but whether games are or are not art gets us what?

From Gabe Newell at Edge:

It’s been one of the topics that’s been super interesting to us as a group of developers since the original Half Life. At that time, we looked at the shooter genre, which really had degenerated into a shooting gallery, and we believed there was a lot more room for storytelling. The first person perspective really opens up opportunities for storytelling and so we’ve always been interested in the ways in which games can become a storytelling medium.

What we’re trying to do now is to create a shared story that you and your friends can all be part of rather than just the experience that you go on by yourself.

Going forward, we’re definitely going to use some of the things that we’ve learned – what worked and what didn’t work – with Left4Dead not only in multi-player but also in our single player games in the future.

I’m not skeptical. Just somewhat confused about the basis of what might be the conflation of games and, specifically, storytelling. In a game, an avatar or POV character typically solves a problem with the player steering the action and making decisions. You figure puzzles and learn how to move through a world.

But storytelling is the act of telling a story. Authors tell stories in a variety of forms. A group can tell a story, too, by passing the narrative act to another teller at a given time. There’s a difference between story, however, and storytelling. Story is an abstraction, the description of a pattern, like Ode or Sonnet.

The events are trying to give them [the players] a sense of narrative. We look at sequences of events and try to take what their actions are to generate new sequences.

If they’ve been particularly challenged by one kind of creature then we can use that information to make decisions about how we use that creature in subsequent encounters.

This is what makes procedural narrative more of a story-telling device than, say, a simple difficulty mechanism.

This appears fairly straight forward. John and I have considered such an approach in the “Composition” game, where players encounter an opposing force, a metaphor for the teacher of a college course, and this opposing force must “accumulate” in a realistic sequence to provide a “sense of narrative,” which would amount to a sense of purpose in a larger struggle. But we won’t be telling a story. Story elements will certainly provide a framework. In games, storytelling frameworks are critically important.

An interesting post on current editing of the Sarah Palin entry at Wikipedia from Dan Cohen.

I’ve had odd problems with my isight camera ever since I purchased my macbook pro, switching over from a PC after more than twenty years with the IBM and Windows paradigm, even though I got interested in computers in the early eighties with Apple 2es. The problem: I’d open Photobooth or Skype and would get nothing but a blank green screen in the vid-window. The devise appeared to be set just fine in System Profiler.

I decided to try an external camera. I figured that such a devise would be less expensive than shop time and would work okay for my needs. Anyway, it happens that the external camera proved incompatible with the mac. So I downloaded the maccam utility and placed into my Quicktime library. I used the maccam interface to crank up the external camera. Funny enough, both cameras started working simultaneously so that in Photobooth, I was grabbing a distorted image in the video window. I unhooked the external devise and–boom–the iSight camera was working.

I tested further by removing the maccam driver from Quicktime and still the camera worked. I’ve the utility where it is now, though, because now everything’s working fine.

So, here’s the test. Why did the iSight camera start working again?

From the Pew Research Center

Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).

FigureThis web-oriented news segment, perhaps more than the others, underscores the challenges facing traditional news outlets. Fewer than half (47%) watch television news on a typical day. Twice as many read an online newspaper than a printed newspaper on a typical day (17% vs. 8%), while 10% read both.