topical media & game development

[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

Dust or Magic

Secrets of successful multimedia design

Bob Hughes

Addison-Wesley 2000

Alan Kay (the great evangelist of personal computing) said

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

but although we do invent the future, the effects of our inventions are unpredictable.

mechanized multimedia

Various artists in the 1920's built contrivances to give an immersive, multimedia experience

Laszlo Maholy-Nagy -- The Light-Space Modulator
Kurt Schwitters -- rooms (Merzbau)

Some think that the operatic composer Richard Wagner was the first artist in cyberspace.

1876 -- state of the art opera house in Bayreuth

to integrate all existing art forms: music, dance, poetry, painting and architecture.

Engelbart -- the man who invented the mouse

flash-1: we are in trouble (human mankind)
flash-2: we need to boost man's ability to deal with complex and urgent problems
flash-3: aha, graphic vision surges forth of me ...
flash-4: hypermedia -- to augment the humen intellect
flash-5: augment workstation -- portal into information space

History

Vannevar Bush -- Memex
Douglas Engelbart -- Augment
Ted Nelson -- Xanadu (hypertext/hypermedia)

(cyber) literature

William Gibson -- Neuromancer
Neil Stephenson -- Snowcrash

everything is intertwingled (Ted Nelson)

Then it seems, he realized that this intertwingularity was totally at odds with the education system he'd spent so long in and had been so uncomfortable with.

there is a friction between art and science

A curriculum promotes a false simplification of any subject, cutting subjects' many interconnections and leaving a skeleton of sequence which is only a charicature of its richness and intrinsic fascination.

some history

playworlds -- Spacewar (1962), Adventure (1976)
taming the world of text -- hypertext writing tools
physical involvement -- artificial/virtual reality
visualizing abstract ideas -- Sketchpad, fractals
exploring musical space -- MIT (Csound)
building minds and exploring them -- Eliza, game AI

Hamlet on the Holodeck (Janet Murray)

Interactive Video

IV is not TV -- corporate kiosk disasters
IV's greatest hits -- education and training

interactivity sucks (Max Withby, 1992)

Multimedia's promise is horribly generalized: it simply lets you do anything
CDROM/CD-I: far from making a killing, it looked as if the big boys of Seedy Rom had killed the industry itself by glutting the market with inferior products
if multimedia is comparable to print, then yes, we'd been crazy to expect it to mature in a mere ten years

shovelware, multimediocrity, ...

human languages (Vilerski)

meta-languages
symbols, iconic languages
artificial languages
natural languages

main action is down here

musical & color codes
emotional conditions -- movements, images, gestures, postures
functional asymetrics indicator (?)
directions at actions, selections, perception

storification: from the path to the landscape itself

from perfection to workmanship

[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

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Dust or Magic

Dust or Magic

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Engelbart -- the man who invented the mouse

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History

(cyber) literature

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