• I’m looking for some users for App A, and it would help if you lived in the Seattle or Portland area and had Celiac disease for this one to be helpful for you (and for you to provide useful data for me.)
• I’m looking for some users for App B, mostly for people who travel a lot. If you’re traveling by air this holiday season, you’re welcome to give it a shot.
• I’m also testing a game for the iPhone. For this, it would be handy if you lived in the Capitol Hill region of Seattle and liked fun. As strange as it seems, some people don’t like fun. This should be fun.

All of these are useful and/or fun. Android versions will be coming relatively soon after the iPhone versions, ideally.

I actually have another version of the same code that puts a URL in the debug log that can be used to click directly to google maps. Why? I don’t know. I’m beginning to value Aptana Studio’s remix of Eclipse more and more as time goes on though because I now have Java, PHP, and Ruby/Rails all in the same highly (mostly) performing IDE. The alleged iPhone mode doesn’t work on my computer but I have CRAZY LIBERRIES installed at the moment and I suspect that that’s in large part my own fault — the apple tools still work.

  def geo_desc ( geo_loc, extended = false)
     #
     #  specialized pretty printer for address types.
     #  note that there is pretty much a standard mixin for geo stuff and
     #  this works across all the geocoding packages and model types.
     #
     return "[nil location]" if geo_loc.nil?
     desc = "[" 
     desc < < geo_loc.country_code.downcase unless geo_loc.country_code.nil?
     desc << "." + geo_loc.state.downcase unless geo_loc.state.nil?
     desc << "." + geo_loc.city.downcase unless geo_loc.city.nil?
     desc << "." + geo_loc.zip unless geo_loc.zip.nil?
     desc << "] "
     desc << "["
     desc << geo_loc.lat.to_s unless geo_loc.lat.nil?
     desc << ","
     desc << geo_loc.lng.to_s unless geo_loc.lng.nil?
     unless geo_loc.precision.nil? or geo_loc.precision == "unknown"
       desc << " (" + geo_loc.precision + ")" 
     else
       desc << " ?"
     end
     desc << "]"
     if extended
       desc << " " + geo_loc.full_address unless geo_loc.full_address.nil?
     end
     return desc
  end

I saw Corprew today
outside the window of my bus.
He was standing at the corner
stuffing a laptop or something like that
into his compact bag.                                       5
He looked intent.

This is my favorite non-ovary related poem written on, by, or about mass transit in Seattle.

It IS a fine morning. I was coming from a consulting gig I currently have going with folks whose offices are in the University District, and I’d just bought a plastic hardshell for my MacBook Pro.

To some extent, it was a marketingish presentation, although as you can see JW is particularly rife with geek cred.

So, the notes:

ARGs tell stories interactively. The premise began for them, based on the Kubrick/Spielberg movie AI, because they’d been licensed to make a number of games based on the product, but the movie wasn’t particularly given to making games. Instead of making games based on the movie itself, they made it based on the universe that the movie took place in.

Their question was, how to tell that story. But they came up with an idea based on the narrative structure organic to the web.

I’m not sure I didn’t replace Jordan’s point with one of my own here: Different models of disseminating information have different methods of telling stories that are organic to them; bards, epic poetry (e.g. Iliad, Odyssey); books, novels; television, sitcoms; movies, summer blockbusters; What is the native activity of the internet at time circa now? JW says looking through a ton of crap looking for relevant partial pieces of information.

What if one were tell stories through scattered shards of information? Deconstruct a narrative, create all the evidence that the story had taken place, and then hide the evidence and throw away the story.

What is the device on which this story will be told? The ‘media sphere,’ which JW describes as ‘all devices with electricity and some without,’ but I think it’s easier to say all information-bearing objects, here, which is a metaphor from InfoSci that is similar in scope.

This is essentially a community effort, the people who take place in the exploration form a ‘hivemind‘ in response to finding shards, and tell stories to each other. The story goes from being the original narrative to being a consensus narrative that comes from the audience’s experience.

The community effect produced is that the hivemind has every skill on the planet, and it can go everywhere and do everything and anything. It has essentially any skill on the planet. It is also, by that same factor, smarter than the people writing the game.

Sample: Ilovebees

• Use life as a game board — it took place all over the world.
• radio drama told on payphones — fragments of the story were released as people talked
• Name of game… campaign for prerelease of Halo 2

This is, in its essence, pop culture hacking, it’s about about the audience crwating fiction and inseminating your references into their everyday consciousness. However, this is against the everyday experience of marketing staff — they want to put up as much collateral as possible and advertise it’s existence as widely as possible to get as many people to notice as possible. But that turns out to not work well with getting people to want to experience this, what you want to do is draw people down the rabbit hole.

How to get audience in? Spend time creating content, not telling them about it.
Allow communication about shards of content to draw people in… People will start looking with a few small clues.

highlights of their work
All of their big campaigns have led to marriages, because collaborate and share rahter than compete, story drives communities, competition drives individualism. This is, to a large extent, their goal — the building of a temporary community, possibly tied to awareness of some product or service that people make them make the game for. It’s an interesting balance between entertainment, advertising, and ‘using the real world as the gameboard.’

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson

William Gibson’s Pattern recognition was a tip of the hat to I love bees. I’m wondering if WG’s perception of ARG makes this a must-read for anyone interested in ARGs. I’m probably going to pick up the book in the next couple of weeks to find out. If anyone has any opinions on that, please feel free to let me know via email or comment.

One thing that JW mentioned at the end of his talk, and I suspect that this was a deliberate seed effort of his, was to say that if you were in front of the Bellagio during CES on 1/6/2007, you might see something interesting in the fountains. Anyway, in the spirit of thanking him for coming to the event, I thought I’d pass this on.

Technorati Tags: alternaterealitygames, community, deconstructednarrative, dorkbotsea, ilovebees, rabbithole, socialengineering, storytelling

Get Your Daily Plague Forecast:
A new website mashes health data with Google Maps to track global disease outbreaks. By Seán Captain.

It’s an interesting mashup because epidemiology information is very hard to assemble into a coherent picture, being based (as it is) on data about people in particular locations and suchlike. Reports linked to maps is probably clearer than the old agglomeration of report style that it used to use, especially given that you’re talking about locations on a global scale.