I managed to get the old blog migrated. Didn't use a nice script or anything: I just worked up an MT template that turned the entries into INSERT statements and then dumped it in.
I didn't have many comments, and most of my trackbacks were spam, so I left them behind. I probably should have been more conscious of these, and of my categories and stuff. I'm lazy. I do want to take advantage of the more robust comments capability in Drupal, though, so please feel free to solicit a login from me if you want one.
So, anyway, I think this gets us to beta. I'll be browsing and tweaking the old entries this weekend, pulling out old internal links and replacing images (should have automated that).
I like keeping it close so I don’t ever have to hunt for it again.
<!– The Identity Transformation –>
<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″ xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”>
<!– Whenever you match any node or any attribute –>
<xsl:template match=”node()|@*”>
<!– Copy the current node –>
<xsl:copy>
<!– Including any attributes it has and any child nodes –>
<xsl:apply-templates select=”@*|node()”/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
from this XSL/Identity page.
Victoria Regina Tarot – [del.icio.us]
Madinkbeard – Castle of Crossed Destinies: Review – [del.icio.us]
I’ve been thinking a lot about tarot cards recently. Calvino used the tarot as a story-generating machine, which sounds impressive at first mention but, as Derik Badman says in his review of The Castle of Crossed Destinies, “What else is fortune-telling?” A tarot reading is an organizing system for turning one’s reality into a story. It’s also a game, an arena of play circumscribed by ritual, where the activity, shared by reader and querent, is the negotiation of a plausible narrative from the randomly-chosen cards.
All of which is pretty obvious, I guess. But what fascinates me is the idea of the tarot as grand explainer, as the generator not of “play” but of “truth”: a game that functions in part as a discrete activity within the magic circle, but exceeds those boundaries as a system that enforces a structure, a fictional lens, on that outside world.
Mindy and I had a good conversation at lunch yesterday… touched on a lot of topics, one of which being accessibility of virtual worlds. This prompted me to take another look at the IGDA Accessibility Whitepaper and to think about a number of talks I had with my diss supervisor John about this very same thing… the discussions I’ve had about accessibility and virtual worlds have always left me radically ambivalent: thrilled about the potential in virtual world systems for providing experiences in multiple modes for users, and daunted by the constraints and limitations current clients present in terms of, specifically, non-visual accessibility.
The lo-fi beginnings of an approach: relegate the operations of a 3D virtual world client to text. Most mmogs output all kinds of world occurrences in the text output already: expand the number of operations that get messages, dump to a simpler and more assistive-technology-reader-friendly application. For input, enrich the command language to allow the user to express in type the operations that currently rely on mouse and keyboard motion actions. Voila, you have… in essence, a text MUD, maybe not a great one in terms of its description, but hopefully functional.
But does this really present an equivalent experience to a 3D virtual world? Are there ways in which it can be made more analogous to what a sighted player experiences? I think it’s reductive to talk about an MMOG as just a MUD with a graphical client — this argument elides the spatial, quasi-kinesthetic experience of a interacting with a client that represents motion in real time. The information presented is largely visual, but it’s certainly not an experience of watching, and it’s more visceral an experience than a text application would provide. This experience of 3D gaming is stimulated visually, but it is translated cognitively into something more.
In my opinion, there are two approaches to replicating this experience. The first is to figure out ways to enable this visceral experience with non-visual information: sound, and especially, I think, some kind of next-generation force-feedback. The second, which sounds more fun to me, is to start toying with pervasive gaming and computing models that translate real-world experience into gameplay. GDC 2005’s upcoming ConfQuest lays the rules of an mmog over lived experience; PacManhattan translates the actions of Pac-Man to urban space. Mobile computing devices in this scenario could enable communications between these “virtualized” lived experiences and the digitized spatial experience of the virtual world.
I like the idea of reversing the common model: instead of presenting an interface with less multi-sensory richness to disabled users, blow open the interface so that the standard client is itself the less rich experience of the game.
I’m taking my first steps into developing in LSL within Second Life, so I’m looking forward to seeing what it ideas it can stimulate along these lines.