http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless. And the story cannot have the player’s full attention. So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way. The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating… ]]> Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:53:57 -0700 http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker/a-history-of-violence Steven Pinker Edge Master Class ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:52:32 -0700 http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker/a-history-of-violence http://www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/ There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. ‘In mitten drinnen’ corresponds to German ‘In mitten darin’, which means ‘in the middle of it’ or ‘in the middle of things’. Actually, in common use, the phrase might be more idiomatically rendered as ‘right in the middle’: though this is a bizarre-enough phrase in itself. If it is really right in the middle, dead centre, as we also sometimes say, then why does the word used to signify this seem to have a list, in etymologically leaning to… ]]> Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:49:58 -0700 http://www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/ http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate… ]]> Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:27:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html We make a mistake when we think of cancer as a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Your body is probably cancering all the time. What keeps it under control is a conversation that is happening between your cells, and the language of that conversation is proteins. Proteomics will allow us to listen in on that conversation, and that will lead to much better way to treat cancer.

Hillis continues..."We misunderstand cancer by making it a noun. Instead of saying, "My house has water", we say, "My plumbing is leaking." Instead… ]]> Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:06:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ... Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. Technology… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:55:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html