I found this website http://www2.yk.psu.edu/learncenter/acskills/kinesthetic.html and i thought it was useful to realise a grounding in the term kinesthetic learning. I feel that this will give me a sufficient basis for my project.

Characteristics of Kinesthetic Learners

Kinesthetic learners learn best by moving their bodies, activating their large or small muscles as they learn. These are the “hands-on learners” or the “doers” who actually concentrate better and learn more easily when movement is involved. The following characteristics are often associated with kinesthetic learners.

1. Kinesthetic learners often wiggle, tap their feet, or move their legs when they sit.

2. Kinesthetic learners were often labeled “hyperactive” as children.

3. Because they learn through movement, kinesthetic learners often do well as performers: athletes, actors, or dancers.

4. Kinesthetic learners work well with their hands. They may be good at repairing work, sculpting, art, or working with various tools.

5. Kinesthetic learners are often well coordinated and have a strong sense of timing and body movement.

According to the Australian Parliament the definition of Digital Divide is:

‘The lack of access to information and communications technologies by segments of the community. The digital divide is a generic term used to describe this lack of access due to linguistic, economic, educational, social and geographic reasons.’ – http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/

Feenberg first states that the internet is not a fully developed technology and that it was only ARPANET that would fund the project in the start as it was lavish and speculative. The outcome was not guaranteed and no-one could predict what the technology would bring. Ironically, this issue of being unfunded and no-one would invest is exactly what the people affected by the Digital Divide have to deal with. The government struggle to invest money into the lower classes as the output that they get from them is low.

In the paper, there are a few issues which Feenberg describes, in his conclusion he lists a few example of areas which the internet has played a vital role. When considering the digital divide in medical terms you can clearly see the benefit, especially for those seeking medical advice but can afford the fees. This is not usually the case in the UK but if there is a problem one can Google a query and find at least a good estimation if not the answer they were looking for. Sites like Wikipedia provide a vast amount of information which can be read by anyone, there are no registration fees or limits to the amount of information available. This in turn provides a cheaper alternative for those seeking advice. Social communities have been set up. From experience migraine sufferers have their own space where they talk about remedies and what works for them as well as other options which they might not have heard of before.

Music sharing has had an incredible rise since the start of the decade. Feenberg writes that “between an $18 album with one good song and a free or 99 cent download of that same song, there is no competition.” In my opinion this is very true, everyone has bought an album before where only half if not less is worth listening to. Some term these poorer tracks as filler tracks, just to make up for the rest of the album. iTunes is at the top of this unsteady market, it tackles the money issue as well as provide users with a cheaper alternative. Some listeners enjoy the thought of physically holding and album where as others are just interested in listening to it. Ultimately it comes down to buying something. With the music market spanning thousands of different artists it would be almost impossible to buy every album that you liked, some people just cannot justify it. Now with the availability of the sites like Rapidshare and of course Napster which really kicked off this shift in the music industry, it has been at the top of the record labels agenda to combat music piracy.

The list that Feenberg has listed is all about money or the lack of in some cases. The digital divide was first used by the U.S. administration and U.S. journalists to describe the social gap between those involved with technology, particularly between children and their schools. Speaking of a mobile computer lab in a truck, Al Gore said, “It’s rolling into communities, connecting schools in our poorest neighborhoods and paving over the digital divide.” In the paper it is clear that people were very skeptical in using the internet for any sort of education. With the internet being so vast no-one could predict how deep it would integrate into everyone’s lives. School computer access was always going to be an issue. Rich schools were much more likely to provide their students with internet access so ultimately even though the internet is a free resource but the equipment needed to have the internet was not. There are a few projects which try to tackle the global digital divide where poverty is refine in poor underdeveloped countries. However, One laptop per child and 50×15 rely heavily on open source software. The projects were developed to bridge the gap in the digital divide and also a term called the knowledge divide. The Knowledge Divide is where a lack of technology causes the lack of useful information and knowledge.

David Noble wrote:
“Visions of democratization and popular empowerment via the net are dangerous delusions; whatever the gains, they are overwhelmingly overshadowed and more than nullified by the losses. As the computer screens brighten with promise for the few, the light at the end of the tunnel grows dimmer for the many.” (Noble, consulted Nov. 11, 2006: 12).
I think Noble was making the point that where there are profits there will equally be losses, and in most cases where someone gains someone else losses out. Feenberg also points out that:
“some argue that the digital divide excludes the poor from participation while enhancing the well to-do people. others complain that the internet people are able to segregate themselves and other argue that the internet is so thoroughly colonized by business that it is little more that an electronic mall. without face-to-face contact, it is said, people cannot take each other seriously enough to form a community.”

4D: Project Proposal.

1: Title
The Philosophy of Time

2: Project Summary:
The Philosophy of Time Travel is a fascinating fictional accompaniment to the film Donnie Darko. It is entirely fictional but underpins terminology and ideas which people think time travel constraints to.

The idea of space and time travel is fascinating. There is a scene in Donnie Darko where a trail (Liquid Worms) of the subjects’ future protrudes from their body in front of them. The protrusion is the subjects’ future and in this case it’s the main character Donnie who finds out where he is going to go. He can potentially see his path and where he will be going. So his choices are already predefined even though he is blissfully unaware and obtains what he thinks is free will. Heroes season 3 also had this style of trail (Watery Ooze), where Daphne was so fast that she left this trail behind her indicating that this in some way is her past as technically her physical body was ahead of herself.

“Donnie becomes able to see time lines in front of his family–semi-transparent liquid arrows that seem to lead them into the future. He becomes fascinated by the theory of worm holes, and discovers that a key book, The Philosophy of Time Travel, was written by a neighbor, Roberta Sparrow” – http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011026/REVIEWS/110260302/1023

Upon reading about the philosophy of time travel I came across a project of the same title. The project was hyped up by this… ‘The past and future flow through a monumental collaborative installation at The Studio Museum in Harlem’

I was also watching The Mothman Prophecy and there is a scene where there is a Psycologist explaining what these visions are and he paints a picture to the main character, Richard Gere, that if there is a car crash a few blocks down the road which you cant see, but if someone is up high they can see further down the road. In other words just because you cant see it doesnt mean its not happening or there.

Its a great idea to blend together with Space and Time.

Theoretical Research:
I came across some theorys’ related to space and time. Metaphysics is a fascinating subject to study and one could get lost for hours thinking about different possibilities and outcomes. Common-sense tells us that objects persist across time, that there is some sense in which you are the same person you were yesterday, in which the oak is the same as the acorn, in which you perhaps even can step into the same river twice. Philosophers have developed two rival theories for how this happens, called “endurantism” and “perdurantism”. Broadly speaking, endurantists hold that a whole object exists at each moment of its history, and the same object exists at each moment. Perdurantists believe that objects are four-dimensional entities made up of a series of temporal parts like the frames of a movie.

Perdurantism or perdurance theory is a philosophical theory of persistence and identity. The perdurantist view is often defined as being the claim that objects have distinct temporal parts as opposed to endurantism (endurantism is the view that an individual is wholly present at every moment of its existence). The use of “endure” and “perdure” to distinguish two ways in which an object can be thought to persist can be traced to David Kellogg Lewis (1986). However, contemporary debate has demonstrated the difficulties in defining perdurantism (and also endurantism).
For instance, the work of Ted Sider (2001) has suggested that even enduring objects can have temporal parts, and it is more accurate to define perdurantism as being the claim that objects have a temporal part at every instant that they exist. Zimmerman (1996) has said that this won’t work, as there have been many self-professed perdurantists who believe that time is ‘gunky’ and that for every interval of time, there is a sub-interval. Consequently there are no instants,[dubious – discuss] and Sider’s definition must be altered to admit of this fact. Currently there is no universally acknowledged definition of perdurantism (see also McKinnon (2002) and Merricks (1999)).

John McTaggart acknowledged that events seem to be ordered in time and that time’s passage can be understood in terms of events moving from the future to the present to the past. He then set out to demonstrate the unreality of time by discussing two conceptions of time:

1. A:One where events find their ordering in time in virtue of instantiating different temporal properties at different times and,
2. B:One where events bear an unchanging (static) temporal relation to all other events (e.g. if event M is earlier than event N at any time, it will always be earlier than N.)

McTaggart set out to demonstrate that time is an illusion by first showing that (B) alone (without A) will not guarantee the passage of time. He then shows how (A) (and its combination with (2)) lead to contradiction. Any attempt to avoid this contradiction leads to an infinite regress. He concluded that time was not a real part of our physical world.

The A-, B-, and C-series

John McTaggart proposed that time could be described by three series, the A-series, the B-series, and the C-series. The A-series corresponds to conception (1) above, while the B-series corresponds to (2). He defined these as follows:

The A-series: “..the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future..” McTaggart further declared that “the distinctions of past, present and future are essential to time and that, if the distinctions are never true of reality, then no reality is in time.” He considered the A series to be ‘temporal’, a true time series because it embodies these distinctions and embodies change.

The B-series: “The series of positions which runs from earlier to later..” The B series is temporal in that it embodies direction of change. However, McTaggart argues that the B series on its own does not embody change.

The C-series: “..this other series — let us call it the C series — is not temporal, for it involves no change, but only an order. Events have an order. They are, let us say, in the order M, N, O, P. And they are therefore not in the order M, O, N, P, or O, N, M, P, or in any other possible order. But that they have this order no more implies that there is any change than the order of the letters of the alphabet…” According to McTaggart the C-series is not temporal because it is fixed forever.

Just as a quick NOTE:
Water and metal are two key components in Donnie Darko. Water is the key to allow travel between the Primary and Tangent (worm holes or Time Portals, or the tunnels created of liquid in the movie). Metal is the substance of the item that created the time rip to begin. These are known as “Artifacts” (the jet engine). Donnie can see the tunnels of water coming out of people’s bodies throughout the movie, predicting what they are going to do next. While typing this up I also thought that in the movie Constantine, the main character uses Water as a gateway to hell. There are many groups in real life that believe in these portals

3: Development:
I will be looking for inspiration from movies, papers and books. My initial thoughts were to create an installation but I want to explore as much of the subject as possible. I will explore and innovate the field of digital time-based audio/visual media with consideration of:

• the historical conventions of film and television production

• experimental innovative approaches to these forms by artists/producers over the century

• the opportunities offered by new media forms, synchronous/asynchronous media, multi-location, telematics, etc.

4: Plan of Work:
Gather research while the lectures are going on. Once the workshops start, I will start to think about the outcome.

5: Output:
Seminars will be to explore concepts behind 4D/timebased work, historical perspectives, and design strategies. I shall be using the seminars as a good reference points which will enable me to further think about my output from these references. I will be taking my own view of the project, I dont want to re-invent the wheel but I need to keep it realistic with the time I have to complete the project.

6: Criteria:
My research shall be as concise as possible. Only when I am comfortable with my research I shall procede further with my final outcome. I will be in contact with my peers and the module leader to ask for assistance to ensure i’m keeping on the right track of ticking all the boxes for the module criteria.

7: References:
I have a few references already:
McTaggart, John Ellis, 1908, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17: 456-73.
Donnie Darko – Movie
The Philosophy of Time Travel (Fake Publication)
The Mothman Prophecies – Movie
The Butterfly Effect – Movie
Memento – Movie
Heroes: Season 3 – Series
The Studio Museum in Harlem – 144 West 125th Street, New York, New York.

8: Visual Material:

from wired.com…

Skinny Oscar-winner Adrien Brody will break type to play an alien-fighting action hero in Predators. The latest installment of the sci-fi franchise, which is being executive-produced by Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), casts Brody as a mercenary hired to fight creepy monsters.

Variety reports that Brody soon begins shooting Predators in Hawaii and at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas. 20th Century Fox plans to release the flick on July 9, 2010.

Given that Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the original 1987 Predator, this gig marks a major re-invention for Brody, who picked up an Academy Award for The Pianist and starred in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Nimród Antal (Kontroll) directs.

Sweet

…is a motto by a number of political, cultural, and religious groups to express their wish not to conform; it may be used to express a radical view against established common beliefs and organisational structures accepted by the majority.

Can this be said by all aspect of Art?

Derren Brown style twist:

In the recent advert with Derren Brown, he is moving forward (as in time) with some objects and some are in reverse. This would be great to manipulate space in a more practical or clever way.

Degradation:

“Those photos always get damp, though, even when they’re in plastic. They rot or they fade, like thoughts and memories – and people in the ground.” – Ian Rankin, A Cool Head

Technology now is not letting this happen, photos aren’t fading they are only been erased. Memories are being stored on hard drives and thoughts are kept on a blog. The degradation process has changed.

Seeing the future in physical form:

The Philosophy of Time Travel is a fascinating accompaniment to the film Donnie Darko. It is entirely fictional but underpins terminology and ideas which people think time travel constraints to.

The idea of space and time travel is fascinating. There is a scene in Donnie Darko where a trail (Watery Ooze) of the subjects’ future protrudes from their body in front of them. The protrusion is the subjects’ future and in this case it’s the main character Donnie who finds out where he is going to go. He can potentially see his path and where he will be going. So his choices are already predefined even though he is blissfully unaware and obtains what he thinks is free will.

Upon reading about the philosophy of time travel I came across a project of the same title. The project was hyped up by this… ‘The past and future flow through a monumental collaborative installation at The Studio Museum in Harlem’

Here is an Excerpt which describes the project better:
NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2007 – What if history had a mind of its own, moving from the past, through the present and into the future? A team of five artists is exploring this idea with a large-scale installation, Philosophy of Time Travel, opening April 11, 2007, at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The installation evokes the work of modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), forcefully and dynamically pushing his massive 1938 work, Endless Column, through the Studio Museum’s gallery space. The result is a fictional world in which history comes to life, crashes through the exhibition space, and traverses through histories of art and museums.

The five artists involved in the project, Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros, Rodney McMillian and Matthew Sloly, studied together at CalArts and have been involved in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions around the world. They work in different media, from sculpture to photography to digital technology, but often find common ground. In this case, the 2001 cult film Donnie Darko, which features an imaginary book called The Philosophy of Time Travel inspired them to think about how art history bends back on itself.

I’ve never really thought of creating an installation but after reading a bit more in-depth of the term Philosophy of Time Travel has really spurred on a few ideas. Lets run this past a few people first and see what happens.

Here is a picture of the Studio Museum installation:

Philosophy of Time Travel

Note: Heroes season 3 also had this style of trail (Watery Ooze), where Daphne was so fast that she left this trail behind her indicating that this in some way is her past as technically her physical body was ahead of herself.

Donnie Darko Links:
http://www.mjyoung.net/time/darko.html

Heroes Links
Youtube clip briefly showing the watery ooze from Daphne from Heroes Season 3.

I’d just like to add incase anyone is wondering where my dissertation research is. I will be posting my research when I finalize my ideas. I have been doing research its just not on wordpress. I dont like the idea of people being able to have a wee peek. Its down to a select few but that cant be helped and im not risking it. Once the proposal has been verified and an idea is fairly solid I shall start posting my thoughts.

Philip K Dick

Books by Philip K Dick:
Neuromancer*:
- Not specific predictions
- General themes of paranoia
- Fragile Reality
- Need for empathy

The Cosmic Puppets**:
- Deliberate manipulate of consensual reality

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
- an immense disaster followed by a continuing struggle against the android menace (A good metaphor for the story of the 21st Century West since 9/11 with the initial horror of the WTC attack followed by a continuing, slow burning campaign against terrorism.)

Film, Released. Source Work(Original Date)
Blade Runner, 1982. Do Androids Dream of Sheep (1968).
Total Recall, 1990. We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (1966).
Confessions d’un Barjo, 1992. Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975).
Screamers, 1995. Second Variety (1953).
Minority Report, 2002. The Minority Report (1956).
Impostor, 2002. Impostor (1962).
Paycheck, 2003. Paycheck (1953).
A Scanner Darkly, 2006. A Scanner Darkly (1977).
Next, 2007. The Golden Man (1954).

The Golden Man/Next:
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future, where the existence of potentially powerful mutants has become a reality. The mutants are seen as dangerous and have been hunted to death by human beings for years. A golden-skinned mutant called Cris is captured by the government, which attempts to execute him. However, his appearance and abilities to see into the future allow him to escape. The end of the story implies that this golden mutant race will replace humanity.

Dick wrote the story during a time when mutants were being depicted in science fiction as benign and in charge – the future leaders of humanity. The movie Next, released in April 2007, was very loosely based on this story. The movie was directed by Lee Tamahori, with Nicolas Cage as a fully sapient, non-feral Cris, Jessica Biel as his love interest, and Julianne Moore as the government agent that is tracking him.

Information was taken from Wikipedia and BBC Focus Magazine, 174 March 2007.
“The Death of the Sun”

ADDED
*
Literary and cultural importance

Neuromancer is considered “the archetypal cyberpunk work,” and its winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards legitimized cyberpunk as a mainstream branch of science fiction literature. It is among the most-honored works of science fiction in recent history, and appeared on Time magazine’s list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. The novel was also nominated for a British Science Fiction Award in 1984.

The novel has had significant linguistic influence, popularizing such terms as cyberspace and ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). Gibson himself coined the term “cyberspace” in his novelette “Burning Chrome,” published in 1982 by Omni magazine. It was only through its use in Neuromancer, however, that the term Cyberspace gained enough recognition to become the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. The portion of Neuromancer usually cited in this respect is:
“ The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson 69.) ”

In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson’s vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks “[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?” (269).

Norman Spinrad, in his 1986 essay “The Neuromantics” which appears in his non-fiction collection Science Fiction in the Real World, saw the book’s title as a triple pun: “neuro” referring to the nervous system; “necromancer”; and “new romancer.” The cyberpunk genre, the authors of which he suggested be called “neuromantics,” was “a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology,” according to Spinrad.

**
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Puppets

Cyber Addiction:
In 1995, New York, a psychiatrist called Ivan Goldberg declared in an online post that he had discovered a new addiction. People were abandoning their familial and societal obligations in favour of sitting glassy-eyed in front of a computer screen, endlessly surfing the net and playing online games. He dubbed the condition Internet Addiction Disorder. The idea took hold, particularly online where habitual internet users recognized aspects of their own behaviour. However, Goldberg’s post was a spoof intended to satirize our obsession with addictive behaviours, and our tendency to classify and behavioural abnormality as an addiction. He had simply taken the description of pathological gambling from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and applied it to internet users. Many scientists and behavioural researchers believe that Goldberg had hit on something. Symptoms include patients thinking obsessively about being online, or getting that hourly Facebook fix for fear of feeling disconnected from the world. In extreme cases, relationships, work and personal hygiene can be neglected, even leading to unpleasant physical responses when internet access in disabled.

Note: ‘Cyber Addiction’ BBC Focus Magazine – 204 July 2009 – p65 “How to live forever”

What is the most important website?

Initially I thought Wikipedia or a site which actually stores a vast amount of information. However I then thought that these sites would never be found unless the option of searching the site was there beforehand. Google’s caching technology has defined how we search for keywords and websites for the past decade. So the website I would choose as most important is www.google.co.uk/.com. It has become the hub, the first port of call when searching the internet and without it we/I would struggle of things to think of to look for. Granted there were already millions of websites already available way before Google had started. It is just the culmination of hours worth of searching can be done in less time. The internet has to have the tools which make it fast and easy to use; Google is one of these tools. They provide a simple but complex service which cuts hours of endless searching in no time at all.

Key terms to look up:
Determinism*
Social Constructivism**

Books:
The Minds Eye
Potential Space – Donald Winnocott

Sci-fi created a space for thought.

Cultural Developments:
1440 Gutenberg Printing Press
Information became available for the first time quickly and relatively cheaply.

18thC Industrial Revolution
There was the idea and introduction of mass production which looked to create more products but in a cheap manner. Travel also became more assessable across all classes. This revolution brought cultures together and a fashionable way.
The industrial revolution led to the deterioration in diet, often short of fruit and vegetables in the cities, with corresponding health problems such as scurvy and rickets.

1980 Digital Revolution
The rise of the internet, the idea of the earth united. Live 8 connecting the world in ways which have never been done before.

The internet is a virtual space just like the creation of science fiction; it allowed room for adventure in a controlled environment. We have different interfaces to access the internet just as different authors viewed science fiction just in a utopian environment.

ADDED
*
“Cultural determinism is the belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioral levels. This supports the theory that environmental influences dominate who we are instead of biologically inherited traits.”

**
“In recent decades, constructivist theorists have extended the traditional focus on individual learning to address collaborative and social dimensions of learning. It is possible to see social constructivism as a bringing together of aspects of the work of Piaget with that of Bruner and Vygotsky (Wood 1998: 39). The term Communal constructivism was introduced by Bryn Holmes in 2001. As described in an early paper, “in this model, students will not simply pass through a course like water through a sieve but instead leave their own imprint in the learning process.” – Both wikipedia (sorry, but it sums it up)

Well i’m back at University for my Final Year. I need to start getting used to blogging sensibly again.

Outside the giant Yodobashi-Akiba department store in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, hundreds of gamers gather each day, crowdsourcing the hunt for rare creatures and virtual treasure.

They stand, packed together in a cordoned-off area reserved for them, as store employees attempt to keep the sidewalk clear, ushering the players behind safety barriers. Everyone is holding a Nintendo DS and playing this year’s hottest new game: Dragon Quest IX

It’s a cartoony, easy-to-master role-playing game about grand adventures, but these players aren’t off slaying dragons. They’re swapping character data to meet other avatars and quite possibly collect valuable treasures.

Call it a massively multiplayer offline game.

“They get here pretty early in the morning,” said a 26-year-old player named Kawamura who stood away from the massive crowd but remained glued to his DS. It’s a scene that’s been repeated daily, albeit on a smaller scale, at hundreds of game stores, train stations and other convenient meeting spots all around Japan ever since the game’s July release. By harnessing a simple gameplay element to a previously existing capability of the Nintendo DS, developer Level-5 has created a sensation capable of drawing gamers together.

The items the Dragon Quest players are exchanging are treasure maps that lead them to hidden dungeons filled with monsters and treasure. When a player finds a map in the single-player game and then passes it along, his name will be attached, perhaps making him a mini celebrity.

Players seek several notorious maps in particular, said Kawamura. The “Masayuki Map,” named after the player who found it, leads to a dungeon full of nothing but King Metal Slimes, enemies that give the player copious experience points when they are defeated. Another map, called “Kawasaki Locker,” leads to a dungeon full of treasure chests packed with high-powered items.

The Dragon Quest players are mostly adults, although a few kids have cajoled their parents into bringing them to the meetups. Deo, a 9-year-old player, wandered back and forth between the cordoned-off area and his dad, who was sitting on a nearby bench — also playing Dragon Quest IX.

“You can meet a lot of interesting people,” Deo said, “and get items that you don’t already have.” The boy said his favorite item so far is the “Chiyoda-ku Map of the Gods,” named after the area of Tokyo in which Akihabara is located.

Reserved Area

Since the release of the original game in 1986, Dragon Quest has become a household name in Japan. It’s one of the country’s best-selling game series, and has moved close to 50 million copies worldwide. It’s played by kids, teens, parents and grandparents; the long-awaited release of a new Dragon Quest game is something of a national holiday here.

Except for some spinoff titles, the games have previously only been released for home consoles; the announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be released for the portable DS raised some eyebrows at first. But the crowds of people still milling about Yodobashi playing the game nearly three months later suggests that it was a savvy business move on the part of publisher Square Enix.

The game mode that’s fueling the Japanese crowds is called sure-chigai tsuushin, or “passerby communication.” It’s a brilliant concept for densely populated cities like Tokyo: If a player sets his DS on communication mode, then puts it into his pocket or bag, it’ll automatically search for other DS systems while he is walking around, riding the train or eating lunch at a coffee shop. When he opens his DS later, the player might find that the device has located other players that passed by during the day, and automatically exchanged virtual hellos. In a game like Dragon Quest, that means he’ll see the other player’s character, read a short message they wrote into the game and perhaps receive an in-game treasure from them.

The genius of sure-chigai, then, is that you don’t have to seek out other people who own the game. But the hundreds of people outside Yodobashi-Akiba know that you have to meet as many people as possible if you want the best treasures in the game.

Passerby communication has been around since the early days of DS. In the 2005 game Nintendogs, it was called “Bark Mode.” Another player’s virtual dog would join yours on the screen, and perhaps bring a present, like a chew toy. It’s been used in many other games since then, but nothing has ever caused a reaction like the Dragon Quest crowds.

After the game’s release, players quickly surmised that they were likely to collect more maps if they milled about in locations where other gamers would be. Since Yodobashi-Akiba boasts one of the biggest gaming sections in Tokyo, players began collecting around the Nintendo DS demo stations on the store’s 8th floor. Soon the crowds grew so large that they were practically taking over the floor, and Yodobashi set up an official area outdoors (and banned playing the game inside the store).

Banned from playing indoors

Players also established an extensive wiki on the subject, logging various maps and their benefits. The wiki also lists locations where players can expect to find others using sure-chigai — and tracks shops that have banned it. Dragon Quest IX is currently so ubiquitous, though, that picking up new virtual pals just while walking down the street is easy. I couldn’t walk more than a block down the street in the Shibuya entertainment district without my DS filling up with new visitors.

As befitting a new Dragon Quest release, promotional activity is all over Tokyo. If you bring your DS to a McDonald’s restaurant, you can download a red clown wig, just like Ronald’s, for your character to wear. Square Enix has also been quick to jump on the popularity of sure-chigai tsuushin.

A new television commercial (embedded), which can also be seen playing in Japan’s subway cars, shows a guy and a girl hooking up because they both happened to be in sure-chigai mode. (”Oh, your birthday is next week?” he says when he sees her transmitted data.)

They’re soon joined by two more giggly Dragon Quest players, and they all become pals.

On the streets of Tokyo, I didn’t observe anything nearly this social happening in real life. Most players kept their heads down, filing new data away on their DS and scooping up more after seeing what maps they’d been given. While every player I talked to said they were interested in the game because you can “meet people,” nobody seemed to actually be meeting each other.

Then again, in a culture where randomly introducing yourself to a stranger is something of a breach of etiquette, perhaps there really is a deep appeal to being able to virtually encounter other people, if only in passing.

James Camerons Avatar

Background and details about Avatar:

The story’s protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. Jake is selected to participate in the Avatar program, which will enable him to walk. Jake travels to Pandora, a lush jungle-covered extraterrestrial moon filled with incredible life forms, some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also home to the Na’vi, a sentient humanoid race, who are considered primitive, yet are more physically capable than humans. Standing three meters tall (approximately 10ft), with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na’vi live in harmony with their unspoiled world. As humans encroach deeper into Pandora’s forests in search of valuable minerals, the Na’vi unleash their formidable warrior abilities to defend their threatened existence.

Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na’vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies that are controlled by a human “driver” through a technology that links the driver’s mind to their Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Sent deep into Pandora’s jungles as a scout for the soldiers that will follow, Jake encounters many of Pandora’s beauties and dangers. There he meets a young Na’vi female, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched only by her ferocity in battle.

Over time, Jake integrates himself into Na’vi’s clan, and begins to fall in love with Neytiri. As a result, Jake finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Na’vi, forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar. Cameron said his inspiration was “every single science fiction book I read as a kid”, and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series. Cameron saw his story as being about how advanced civilizations supplant indigenous cultures, in either actively genocidal or more unpremeditated ways, and was influenced by the story of Pocahontas. In Avatar, humanity extends that practice to entire planets. The premise of a paralyzed man whose mind is remotely controlling an alien body is very similar to Poul Anderson’s 1957 short story “Call me Joe.” In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of “synthetic”, or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles “who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world”. Special effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a 1999 release. However, that was not to be, due to the special effects he wanted ran the budget up to $400 million, which made the film impossible to be made.

In June 2005, director Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled “Project 880″, concurrently with another project, Battle Angel. By December, Cameron said that he planned to film Battle Angel first for a summer 2007 release, and to film Project 880 for a 2009 release. In February 2006, Cameron said he had switched goals for the two film projects – Project 880 was now scheduled for 2007 and Battle Angel for 2009. He indicated that the release of Project 880 would possibly be delayed until 2008. Later that February, Cameron revealed that Project 880 was “a retooled version of Avatar”, a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones. Cameron had chosen Avatar over Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.

Cameron’s early scriptment for Avatar had circulated on the Internet for years. When the project was re-announced, copies were subsequently removed from websites. In June 2006, Cameron said that if Avatar was successful, he hoped to make two sequels to the film.

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script. Working with Paul Frommer, linguist and Director of the Center for Management Communication at USC, he developed a whole language and culture for the Na’vi, the indigenous race on Pandora. In July, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a summer 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film’s designs. In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.

Filming and effects

Avatar was filmed using newly developed 3D virtual cameras, which would produce stereoscopic 3D images simulating human sight. In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous performance capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors’ motions have been captured, Cameron’s new virtual camera allows him to observe directly on a monitor how the actors’ virtual counterparts interact with the movie’s digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; “It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.” Cameron planned to continue developing the special effects for Avatar, which he hoped would be released in summer 2009. He also gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology. Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.

Other technological innovations include a performance-capture stage, called The Volume, which is six times larger than previously used and an improved method of capturing facial expressions. The tool is a small individually made skull cap with a tiny camera attached to it, located in front of the actors’ face which collects information about their facial expressions and eyes, which is then transmitted to the computers. This way, Cameron intends to transfer about 95% of the actors’ performances to their digital counterparts. Besides a real time virtual world, the team is also experimenting with a way of letting computer generated characters interact with real actors on a real, live-action set while shooting live action.

In January 2007, Fox announced that the studio’s Avatar would be filmed in 3D at 24 frames per second. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. “Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at,” Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. Principal photography began in April 2007, and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. The live action is shot with the proprietary Fusion digital 3-D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. According to Cameron, the film will be composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures. The performance-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand for another 31 days.

To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which will be replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI. Around 1000 people worked on the production.

Music

Composer James Horner will score the film, which will be his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na’vi in March 2008. He is also working with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race. The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in the Spring of 2009.

What a fucking joke that game was. I think the referee is a United fan. What a big load of biased pish. The FA is a disgrace, stop fucking spending money on holidays and sort the discipline of football out. These referees are shit and start embracing technology.

The Bubble Nebula

Located 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, the bubble is about 6 light-years in diameter and glows pink because of the red, hot gas that surrounds it. The first clear picture of the Bubble Nebula was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1997, and this new image was captured in July by the South Common Observatory in Britain.

Here are 10 things you may not know about our favorite video game character Mario:

* Mario was first seen in the video game Donkey Kong, but he was called “Jumpman.” He was also a carpenter then, not a plumber.

* Mario was named after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo of America’s office, who barged in on a company meeting demanding an overdue rent.

* Shigeru Miyamoto drew Mario as wearing a cap because he found drawing hair difficult. He also drew in the moustache, because it was easier to see than a mouth in the crude video game screen resolution back then.

* Mario and his younger brother Luigi are known as the “Mario Brothers.” This means that Mario’s last name is also Mario, so his full name is Mario Mario.

* Mario is voice-acted by Charles Martinet, who crashed the audition for “an Italian plumber from Brooklyn” character. Here’s an interview with the man:

* Mario’s nemesis is Wario (a combination of “warui”, the Japanese word for bad, and Mario). Similarly, Luigi’s rival is Waluigi. Both are also voiced by Charles Martinet.

* Mario has appeared in over 200 video games so far, has sold over 193 million units of games (all of the Mario series) and even has his own TV cartoon show. Super Mario Bros. 3 alone grossed over $500 million in USA.

* TV Schmeve, you’re nothing till there’s an opera done on you. In 2003, Jonathan Mann of California Institute of Arts created The Mario Opera, a rock opera:

* Super Mario Bros. theme music, written by Koji Kondo, is known worldwide. It has inspired countless fan-renditions, including one played by Zack Kim on two guitars (viewed over 4 million times on YouTube!), played by Jean Baudin on 11 string bass, beatboxed by Greg Patillo on the flute, and played by the Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra on the trombones.

But my favorite is this one by Play! symphony orchestra:

* Mario is the most famous character in the history of video games, and perhaps is the most famous character ever. In a 1990 poll by Marketing Evaluations, Mario was found to be more popular (and recognizable) among children than Mickey Mouse.

Courtney Love, the widow of former Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, has threatened to sue publisher Activision for breach of contract over her late husband’s appearance in Guitar Hero 5.

“For the record this Guitar Hero shit is breach of contract on a Bullys part and there will be a proper addressing of this and retraction,” Love said on her Twitter account, later adding: “WE are going to sue the shit out of ACtivision we being the Trust the Estate the LLC the various LLCs Cobain Enterprises.”

Activision has since issued a statement to various news outlets, including Kotaku, defending Cobain’s depiction in the game. “Guitar Hero secured the necessary licensing rights from the Cobain estate in a written agreement signed by Courtney Love to use Kurt Cobain’s likeness as a fully playable character in Guitar Hero 5,” the publisher said.

Activision vice president Tim Riley also told the Guardian: “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos. She picked the wardrobe and hairstyle, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes – some subtle, some not so subtle.”

However, Love’s attorney, Keith Fink, told VG247: “Activision’s statement is not accurate in suggesting that they were given an unfettered use of Kurt’s name and likeness. The agreement Activision has with the trust doesn’t grant them the right to use his name and likeness in ways that denigrate his image. We are demanding the trust take appropriate action to protect Mr. Cobain’s image and would hope Activision would do so on its own accord and prohibit users of the game from singing songs of others.”

Former Nirvana band members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl have also expressed their unease over the use of Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5, telling the Associated Press: “While we were aware of Kurt’s image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn’t know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants. We urge Activision to do the right thing in ‘re-locking’ Kurt’s character so that this won’t continue in the future.”

As the new Halo game is due for release I thought I would troll the tinterweb and pull some facts about the upcoming game Halo 3:ODST:

Halo 3: ODST is a new standalone expansion for the legendary first-person shooter video game Halo 3. Players assume the roles of human UNSC soldiers known as Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODSTs) during the events prior to Halo 3.

Bungie initially conceived ODST as a small side project to produce in the lull between Halo 3’s completion and Halo: Reach. Instead of featuring recognizable characters such as the Master Chief from previous games, the developers focused on the ODSTs. Story director Joseph Staten penned a detective story utilizing film noir settings, design, and characters. Composer Martin O’Donnell abandoned his previous Halo themes to create a quieter, jazz-influenced sound. During development, the game grew in scope to that of a full-sized game.

One thing which is apparent is that Halo 3 has created a multiplayer sensation, luckily ODST packs them same and then some:

ODST’s multiplayer offering is identical to Halo 3’s, and will ship with a total of 24 maps. Maps consist of the original eleven Halo 3 maps (Construct, Epitaph, Guardian, High Ground, Isolation, Last Resort, Narrows, Sandtrap, Snowbound, The Pit, Valhalla), the Heroic map pack (Foundry, Rat’s Nest, Standoff), the Legendary map pack (Avalanche, Blackout, Ghost Town), the “Cold Storage” map, and the Mythic map pack (Assembly, Orbital, and Sandbox) as well as three new maps (Citadel, Heretic, Longshore). The exclusive maps are also counted as “Mythic” maps and are tied into Halo 3’s achievements. The Halo 3 multiplayer does not require Halo 3 to play and ships on a separate disc.

ODST also contains a new game mode called Firefight, wherein players take on increasingly difficult waves of varied enemies. Firefight will include new medals as well as the ability to co-op with up to 4 teammates over Xbox LIVE or System Link. Each player has a set number of lives and the game ends upon their depletion. There is no time limit, no limited number of rounds and no maximum number of kills. Skulls will be incorporated into Firefight as a means to increase the difficulty and provide variation. The maps used in Firefight will be unlocked as the player progresses through the ODST campaign. It is also noted that the enemy characters appearing in each wave are generated at random, thus the player will be unable to anticipate the strength of the next wave prior to its arrival.

ODST is a first-person shooter. Although the gameplay of ODST bears a strong resemblance to previous Halo titles, the player does not assume the role of the enhanced human supersoldier Master Chief. Instead, the player controls a lone UNSC soldier, known as “the Rookie”, in the city of New Mombasa, East African Protectorate (formerly Kenya). Since the soldier, known as an ODST or Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, does not possess Master Chief’s advanced armor, reflexes and strength, he is more vulnerable to gunfire; players are forced to act more cautiously. The soldier HUD is different from the previous series, with red outlines for the enemies thanks to a new feature called the “VISR” (Visual Intelligence System, Reconnaissance). The “VISR” also gives you a compass and outlines important items in yellow, but has no radar. However, the aiming reticle remains. It will also include an open world environment.