Wednesday 25th of March. Thinking about the seminar yesterday at the Pervasive Media studio which really was about pervasive media, a couple of guys doing wonderful stuff with mediascape, GPS tracking and web applications such as twitter sms mobile phones, all that sort of stuff. I think that my favourite was the bowler hat hide and seek that they did where they had a GPS device on a bowler hat. Inside the hat were instructions for the game somebody wore the hat the GPS from the hat was loaded up on to google maps if you were playing the game you could look on the hat find out where the hat was and if you came across it on the street ask the person wearing it with a specific sort of password ‘excuse me sir or madam, I believe you are wearing my hat’ or words to that effect, very English very sort of understated, and sounds like a huge amount of fun. They had other games like hunt the moose were one of them was dressed up in a moose suit same tracking device did a two or three day walk and people had to go and try and track and shoo the moose with a mobile phone camera. In both games the moment that you had either got the hat or found the moose you would take a photograph to record the event and upload that onto the site associated with the game. with the hat game the longer you wore the hat the better, and at the end of each day of play the one who had worn it the longest got a prize, so it had that sort of game element. There were more complicated and more complex social games that they had been devising some of them quite expensive with actors and actresses based around locations. The feature of a lot of them, all of them really is that they were one offs and they took time and energy from the makers who are currently working on the wherewithal to create games that anyone can play at any time devising their own games using the tools that these people are creating so that is sort of the next step. It made me think quite a lot about ideas around games play, playing games and a lot of initially childhood memories of hide and seek and sardines and tag all those sort of things the fun of playing those came back to me. Fun that I have basically lost these days I don’t do that at all maybe I am just not in the social situation to do it. But also in the early 80’s playing tag with the American and British military chasing the Cruse which in many ways was a very similar sort of game probably involved quite a lot of the same technology although we didn’t know it at the time. All those thoughts going round in my head. And then on to the Arnolfini to a talk, another guy who’s name I have forgotten (Michael Bauwens) who is an expert and visionary in peer to peer technology and he really was giving a broad view of possible future scenarios where this technology has brought about basically and end to our current social order and the creation of a new social order based on peer to peer where giant corporations can no longer operate and if you give freedom to large groups of individuals you get a great deal more power, a great deal more productivity, and a much better end result. He was pointing to Firefox over Internet Explorer and Netscape other examples of that ilk where small companies or small groups have beaten big companies and he was thinking of it in relation to countries as well where the power of the state is diminished by peer to peer but the actual structure he was thinking might be much more cohesive if we can get it right but he pointed to a fairly extended period of difficulty before that is going to happen. It is all pretty scary stuff really, he wasn’t talking so much about the technology as to the social aspects, how people operate, how groups operate, how societies operate and looking at a post capitalist world, post industrial post feudal. That my second gate.

Tags:GamesSilver ProjectGPSSilver ProjectPeer2PeerSilver ProjectDavid and Goliath