Just Imagine.

 

Imagination is a wonderful gift; and make no mistake, it is a gift.

 

Imagine

 

A cardboard tube becomes a telescope, a folded sheet of newspaper becomes a tri-cornered hat, four chairs and blanket become the quarter deck of a three mast schooner sailing the Caribbean.  It is just as easy to imagine that the gift that allows such a miraculous transformation is increasingly rare, being a casualty of Marshall McLuhan’s global village  made reality. Yet even before the advent of the age of Internet, Playstation and Nintendo, whatever ephemeral process that allows creativity to flow often gets lost somewhere between Saturday morning cartoons and the Monday morning rush hour of adult life.

God rest ye merry gentlemen

 

Somewhere between the cartoons and rush hours some fortunate few of us where able to take a marvelous detour provided by Gary by Gygax and Dave Arneson. For me, the roadmap to that particular detour took the form of three booklets packaged together in a box with the words Dungeons and Dragons on it. When I was younger I spent many hours co-authoring a world that was a collective effort existing simultaneously in the minds of a room full of people. Yet those days, like the world they created, fade to the dim recesses of our minds as the world of the Monday morning rush hour looms ever larger.

 

ars gratia pecuniae

 

As much as we here at NPNM love MMOs (after all we wouldn’t spend so much time writing and podcasting about them if we didn’t) they often exacerbate the issue by acting as a catalyst that confounds creativity. As much fun as they can be, MMOs only provide a product of someone else’s imagining in which to play. Even when the virtual world is cast by the imagination of someone else, there is still room for creating your own stories and sharing them with others – the chief among these being role-playing. Even this process is a lot like the weather…everyone talks about it, but few ever seem to do anything about it.

Singled Out

 

If MMOs at least provide a medium which caters to a degree of creativity, many single player games are closer to an aspect of gaming that digs a hole and throws creativity in the grave. As much as I enjoyed games like Half Life and Portal that leapt out of The Orange Box and on to my computer screen, such games are little more than a ride on rails. As witness to this I relate the fact that I got stuck in a water filled basement in Half Life 2 with no apparent way out – bringing an abrupt end to my participation in the half life series, and turning the game into an expensive door stop.

Playing in the Sandbox – Sandbox games provide many an enjoyable hour of entertainment, letting lose the bonds of scripted game play. Yet taken by themselves,  a sandbox game is still only an MMO with only one person in the world.

 

Light at the end of the Tunnel

 

There are times when the light at the end of the tunnel could very well belong to an oncoming train – this is not one of those times.  One of the brightest, though sometimes poorly travelled, paths to creativity are those provided by game developers with enough foresight to put the tools of the trade in the hands of the community. Such is the case with Bethesda’s GECK that allows the community to breathe new life into the game. Fortunately few are the developers that look on modding tools as a crutch, enabling a somewhat diminished understanding of the phrase “finished product”, leaving the community to finish the job (at the moment only one recent case comes to mind).

Re-imagined

 

It is said that the only constant in the Universe is change.  Sometimes that change brings us a new set of tools – cardboard tubes, chairs, blankets and folded paper hats get replace with a graphic user interface. For those fortunate few who are able to step back from the office cubical, the tools may change, but now they allow us to build a world of the imagination that persists beyond the moment.

And that can be magic.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

No Pandering to Pando

 

If you have been having mysterious problems with your internet slowing to a snail’s pace, the place you need to read is Syp’s post here. The culprit in Syp’s case is a program called Pando Media Booster (pmb.exe). A quick check of both Windows Explorer and an “oh yes” moment later as I remembered wondering what the program was, found the same program lurking on one of our hard drives.  As Syp points out, the intent of said program is to help with downloading large files. I search the net and a short while later found  this over on the website belonging to the producer of said software:

How, why, and when was Pando Media Booster installed on my computer in the first place?

Pando Media Booster was installed on your system when you chose to download, install or stream a large media file from one of the many publishers who use Pando to enhance your speed and experience. 

The company quickly goes on to point out that Pando Media Booster is not “Spyware, Malware, Adware, Virus or SPAM.” My point of view is much more practical – anything that takes up residence on one of our hard drives without our permission ismalware, no matter what the intent of the programmer.

Taking a dip

As our regular readers already know, Brad McQuaid recently announced the start up of a new company. Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys feels that the company will produce Facebook games. If so, Richard Garriott seems to agree.  As we discussed on an earlier show, even if that particular ship hasn’t sunk it just may have already sailed – at least Game Politics.com  seems to think so. But don’t tell that to Playdom who is still busy buying up Facebook game developers for some big bucks.

And while we are on the subject of Facebook one of the blogs that we regularly read, Q Blog, belonging to Dr. Richard Bartle, had an interesting entry this week on the subject called Early Re-adopters. (Yes I will admit sometimes I just like to take a peek over the virtual back fence and see what’s going on).

(posted by The Webmaster for Julie Whitefeather)