It’s a little late on in the evening for me to be saying anything particularly intelligent, so I’ll go with some vague ramblings my brain touched on briefly during the day. See, we were planning to watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly this evening (and did), and this reminded me of Rilla saying she’d watched some of it on an airplane. This led to thinking about the correspondence between the movie and sitting in an airplane seat watching a tiny screen. Appropriate, maybe even evocative.

Anyway, this makes me think about the assumptions we now have about how we’ll be consuming our media, particularly video games. It’s seems pretty oriented toward either a small screen or, more “desirably” (in some sense) a big-ass, high resolution screen. So games are being designed with this in mind. As such, they’re frequently presented with the pretty straightforward view that the screen is a transparent portal into the world of the game.

But something like watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on an airplane TV, and the potential that would create for an interesting viewing experience that would influence how you felt about the movie, makes me think that it would be really interesting to create games with a more explicit understanding of the medium of presentation. (You do get this a bit, of course. I remember Metal Gear Solid, for instance, playing with the idea it was displayed on a television.) What about a game that was meant to be played on a freaky washed out and over-used CCTV monitor? Could be spooky. What about a game designed to be played by looking through a door’s peep-hole?

And so on. Clearly these are kind of impractical and a good thing about the ol’ “big-ass screen” is that that’s what people mostly have, so you can count on lots of people have the experience you want them to have. Less people have some kind of game system hooked up to their door. Some, but less. All the same, it does seem like it would be worthwhile just pursuing a little more in the way of an awareness of the display device itself and the way it necessarily influences our experience of a game or other media, even as it perhaps is designed quite specifically to efface itself.

That’s what I’ve got left in the tank. Night.

I recently got a chance to see “the internet at work” when I posted a link to my “skeptical fridge” comic on the xkcd forums. I posted it there because I’d found it funny that there had been an xkcd comic similarly critical of something JFK once said. Didn’t really think much about what would or wouldn’t happen – then the internet stepped in.

The above image if of the traffic to stimulusresponse over the past week. I am unashamed to say that it normally has very low traffic. Guess which day I posted the link to the JFK comic? Amazing. It amazes me, I think, because it’s just a link in one post in one forum topic in one forum for one webcomic. In my mind, such a thing would have to be incredible obscure, a small corner of the internet. To register as a stat in the above graph a person has to wend their way through all those little unlikely steps and then they have to bother to click on the link at all. The sheer volume of people that the numbers above suggest is amazing, because I think we can all rest assured that most people who saw it didn’t click on the link, most people who read the thread probably didn’t pay attention to my post, most people who read the comic don’t read the forums, and most people don’t read the comic.

Anyway, it was fun to experience such an impressive and short-lived surge of popularity, even if 90% of the people only looked at the JFK comic and departed. Reminds me of the Obama-Sonic-Flowers bag going viral-ish a while back.

Ah, the internet.

I continue to think about Chat Roulette and wanted to pitch a couple of uses of it that seem like they might be good. Or bad, potentially.

The first one would be to invite Chat Roulette for dinner. You could set up your laptop at one of the settings of your dining table, maybe fish-eye the lens so that it can see the people to either side and also its own plate. And then kind of just have it there at the dinner party. Of course, that would probably entail a bunch of dudes jerking off at your dinner party, but maybe it would somehow be great apart from that.

The other one is to use it as a kind of video conferencing tool – to say to a friend you want to talk to: “See you on Chat Roulette!” And then you both fire it up and quietly next people until you get connected with each other. Hopefully you don’t instinctively next your friend as you get into the rhythm of it, they might be swept away into the internet until they come around again.

There. There’s two ideas for you. Chew on that.