At FutureSonic 2008 I managed to talk about many of the things that I’ve written about, including games I’ve written like Jewel Thief, surveillance blogging such as Pigeon blogging and the distributed brain power of Human computation

Meanwhile, PMOG is getting busier and busier. If you want an invite, sign up and you should get one the same day.

Come February, I’ll be in Oakland and San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference (where PMOG will be officially demoed), among others. If you want to chat about massively casual games, passive games, surveillance games or even the concept of making the internet into a game engine, then please come and say ‘hi’ :)

Here’s what I look like (in daylight, mind):

Come March, I’ll be back in the US, namely Austin for PMOG SXSW and Oakland for more PMOG meetings. Again, if you want to talk, I’d be more than happy to do so.

On Askville and Questville:

On Browser-based Gaming:

Visit Passmult to read more from Cap, Justin, Merci and myself. Or better yet, come join us!

I should, however, pay some respect to the articles that sparked all this. Football365 is part of the 365 conglomerate of websites that covers the most important sports. In general, their coverage is much better than P.A. affairs like Sporting Life, and less behind the times than BBC Sport. Their ‘mailbox’ feature is a good reflection on what fans think of the game, much more so than the pull-quotes on the BBC site, for example. In comparison with the BBC, perhaps the F365 mailbox compares favourably with the better slices of 606. Be warned, though, both are examples in baiting the audience to get some cheap content. Every now and again, though, the better emailers and callers make exemplary points. Often, within an episode or web-page you’ll find a soundly expressed opinion that puts to shame anything else from Match of the Day or Sky Sports, both of which sports fans are paying for.

A recent, regular feature on Football365, has been its review of the sports pages of our national newspapers. The idea being to find out which is the best. Reading those over the last month or so, has been the spark to write about fantasy newspapers. In this recent edition, for example, comes the revelation about The Daily Star:

Oh shit. Not only is that a depressing statistic, but it’s also a damning indictment on the majority of sports fans:

The good news is that BBC Radio 5Live still has the best coverage by far, despite there being no serious competition and the fact that they lapse into taking cheap shots with Alan Green and fill up the aftermath of games with a phone-in. If you’d like to read all of the newspaper reviews, and they are all well worth a read, then follow these links:

• Daily Star
• The Sun
• The Daily Mirror
• The Daily Express
• The Daily Mail
• The Independent
• The Times
• The Guardian
• BBC Radio 5Live

Now that you’re read that lot, why not come and help me setup a British, Online-only, Quality Newspaper focussing on Culture, Media & Sport?

It’s all significantly out of date as soon as it’s printed, and a combination of BBC news, Google news and special interest websites (football365.com, slashdot.org, thedailyshow.com, etc) provide just as good alternatives.

Combine this with iPods, Zunes, Nintendo DS’s, iPhones, Nokia N800s, smart phones and so on, and it’s pretty clear that within 5 years most people will be reading news on devices. As the lack of jet-packs shows, the future isn’t at all like the predictions, so I think we can ignore the need to wait around for smart, internet-enabled paper, and focus on devices for reading. Most likely this is devices for reading whilst on the move, so it’s not a leap to imagine GPS directional units like the Tom-Tom to be a part of this. Toss in podcasts and reading isn’t such an issue, either. Podcasts have brought back the spoken word, and vodcasts have proven that there is a healthy amount of people of want to produce and present them.

Now, America has the Huffington Post, but in the UK there’s not a lot of competition in terms of online news. The UK as a news gathering location still has plenty of goodwill as currency, with papers like The Guardian earning favourable glances from liberal Americans. However, the Guardian has spiraled out of control since it’s switch to a Berliner format, for a multitude of reasons, significant among them is the same fear that all newspapers have at the moment. That is, ‘how long have we got left?’.

There’s a wild, free-for-all, cover-mounted, giveaway, world-cup-special, glossy, recyclable and free whirlwind tearing through the tabloids and broadsheets right now. They patently don’t know what’s hit them and which way to fight back. The BBC news website is a mammoth and rightly popular success, however it has no personality. The Guardian online is a CMS driven wreck, with no coherent identity and an even bigger split form it’s parent, the print newspaper. Mourning the uselessness of it all has got me nowhere, it’s time to play Fantasy Newspaper Editor.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Location: Manchester. For obvious Guardian-related reasons, but also because the BBC will soon move a lot of staff up there. Manchester is well served for good pseudo-neighbours (Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham) meaning that it provides a different perspective on the country, whilst tapping into mindset of the North. Even more importantly, though, it is *not* London. That alone will make a huge difference, even if London continues to be the source of so much news.

Motto: Quite simply, this is a paper of Culture, Media and Sport. As Johnny Vaughan once said, “I do all three in the bath”, so that’ll do for me.

Sports editor: This isn’t going to be a react-to-the-news kind of online newspaper, rather a reflect-on-the-news one. There was a time when you could laugh at people who read newspapers back-to-front, sports first, news later, but now, in the face of so much vapid or sensational journalism on the front pages, starting at the back looks like a wise choice. So, to reflect on the state of sport, well, football, I’d have to pinch John Nic from football365.com. He would dictate the tone of the entire sports output. Added to that any sports journalist from BBC Five Live who might want a bit of freelance and you’d have the strongest football output online.

Film editor: Mark Kermode. Quite frankly, he could handle the entire Arts output for my Fantasy Newspaper, but let’s stick with film to start with. Mark Kermode podcasts once a week with Simon Mayo on BBC Five Live and that, in itself, is a hugely popular event. None of these podcasts are archived, in typical BBC blind-stupidity, and none of Mark Kermode’s work for them is committed to text, put online in a searchable format. In a textual format, for heavens’ sake. So, pinch Mark, put his content online in a semantically correct format, and then I’ll have the most quotable, most impassioned film section online in the UK.

News editor: This I haven’t decided yet - who to govern the tone of the daily output? George Monbiot would be ideal for a feature or two, but this is a difficult choice. Given that there is so little jumping out, it’s an indication of the problem this fantasy newspaper is set to solve. In that case, then, the answer is simple. Pick a blogger. Pick seven. Rotate them daily or weekly and let them decide the tone of the news, which stories are picked up, and which are given prominence. That’ll shake things up.

As for the design, that’s simple. Black text, large fonts, white background. This is going to be read by people on monitors, tvs, mobiles, whatever. Make it legible, readable and breathable. Use whitespace, web standards and don’t fuck with the hyperlinks. Ads? No. I want an audience not a demographic.

Lastly, the name? I’m stumped. Some kind of folk-reference would be ideal. Suggestions?

– David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), via

Justin has been hard at work, making a PMOG badge for every player in the game. It’s a simple thing for anyone to install, just a javascript include, no doubt we’ll complexificate it later.

As always, it’s alpha code, and as the site says, “that means it probably won’t work. If it works, it’s luck. And it will probably be broken, on purpose, in the near future.”

Thanks Alice, thanks Phil!

To that list you can add all the browser based MMOs, like torncity, kingdom of loathing and travian, of course. However, Gaia is kooky and squarely aimed at the tweeny market, and that seems to be how Casual MMOs should be perceived.

There’s one recent interview floating around, here, but if you’re interested in the technical aspects of running an lightweight MMO like Gaia, you can do worse than read through this thread about the customisation of phpBB by Gaia Online. It’s only going to be of interest to other developers, but you can see how far back Gaia stretches. The thread is from 2005 and the developer was already caching and rewriting custom code to keep up with the load. It’s obviously a very familiar story for anyone who has built or maintained websites that get hit with viral bursts or sustained high levels of traffic, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

And, if that doesn’t interest you, then consider this - you’re not an MMO until you can fish. Fact.

Firefox happily evolved along this path and the newly released Firefox 2 offers built in support for both multi-tabbed homepages and session saving. These two features are a huge help and play an active role in reinforcing my current web browsing behaviour. For homepages I have a couple of site, like Gmail and Ecolocal stats, that I’ll always want open. However, with the session restore feature I have a much more resilient browser. Should it crash, drunk on twenty of so tabs, I can relaunch and pick up where I left off. If my laptop crashes, same thing. I can even drag and drop tabs around to sort them into a vague semblance of order - with high priority tabs to the left, like Gmail, calendar, stats and so on.

However, my browser is now being taken over by multiple ever-present tabs. The left hand side of the Firefox tab bar is taken up by four or five fixed tabs, and that’s becoming redundant.

Elsewhere, there’s a big push for offline desktop apps that sync when a network connection is present. To me, the Apollo idea for desktop apps seems vaguely silly. I wonder how this can get pitched with a straight face at a time when wireless connections are become more noticeable. In London, for example, you’re never really more than 10 minutes from a wireless connection point, so what’s the advantage of desktop apps and offline syncing?

But, plucking web-apps out of the tab bar and into a separate window, I’m rapidly becoming a convert to that. Using Pyro to break out the Campfire chat from Firefox and give it a separate mindshare on the desktop works well. There are other web apps like Gmail and Google calendar that could benefit from that same process too. Widgets were meant to do something similar but they’ve just evolved into a world of ‘Hello World’ demonstration apps - clocks, rss readers, parcel trackers, etc.

So, is it time to pluck out those homepage tabs and have them as desktop apps-cum-widgets? I’m a big fan of Gmail because of the asynchronous way it makes email work. With desktop email clients, like Apple Mail or Outlook, every new email results in a alert. With Gmail, there’s no visual or audio cue that new mail has arrived. You can install alert-apps to do this for you but I find email has become much more useful now that I can check it when I want to, not when new email has arrived. Making sure that the same system works on the desktop, then, a Gmail desktop widget would be a great first candidate. I’d want to pluck that tab out of Firefox, have it rollup into a small, dockable window with no audio/visual cues and then use it as a single windowed chrome-less browser window, for checking email and nothing more.

Since there are only three or four sites I’d consider doing this for, I’m inclined to think that the idea has got potential.