Things as They Are.?

Beyond Beyond Good and Evil

An excellent article on Beyond Good and Evil, Ubisoft's extremely creative (and extremely ignored) sleeper that has since gained some much-deserved reappraisal since Peter Jackson pegged it's creator to make a King Kong game to coincide with the release of his film (both of which are supposed to be quite good). The article deals with everything from code to character design to cinematic perspective to narrative framing, and although I don't agree with all it says (I think the gameplay is pretty inspired at times), this is a prime example of how intelligently mainstream discussions of gaming should begin. And go buy BG&E. Many papers will be written on it. And it's cheap.

Charting the Memex Trail

I've long argued that many of the comparisons made between the Memex described in Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and the current incarnation of the Internet are somewhat myopic, with my primary objection being that hypertext protocol does not create trails like those envisioned by Bush himself (trails many have said correlate to human-cognitive structures). Sure, we can look at the History files of our favorite web browser to get a sense of where we've been, but nothing in these links allow us to reconstruct any thought processes associated with our browsing. Until now, that is.

Enter How'd I Get Here? [HIGH], a free Firefox 1.5 extension that allows you to much more literally trace your steps through the web. As well as being just plain cool, I can already see some invaluable ways that this can assist with online research, . It also forces us to deal with one of the unspoken questions of Bush's essay-- is it access or organization that will usher (or has ushered) a new way of thinking?