Random Thoughts on Architects and Game design

Just a few thoughts I had and partly shared at a gallery talk at the Print Screen festival for digital culture on 18/4/2013.

Short version:

1. Architects build buildings, game designers build worlds. (duh)
2. Godwin's law.
3. Architects should be less creative and be more like game designers.
4. Israel is home to quite possibly the best real life example of open-world game design.
   It's Skyrim meets Ultima Underworld in the Levant.

Click past the break to find out more.

Analyzing Analogies: Prologue

Several years ago, in a different life almost, when I was trying (and ultimately failing) to do innovative and interesting stuff in aerospace, I had an interesting conversation with an older and wiser aerospace entrepreneur.
At one point he remarked that satellites have been getting cheaper because they're like computers, while space launch rockets are like airplanes and that's why they're not getting any cheaper.

I agree with some aspects of this and disagree with others, but the important thing I took from the conversation is not about rockets and spaceships. It's about comparing things.

The question is:
What makes an analogy meaningful?

"We especially enjoyed the appendix"

Project White Dragon has reached an important milestone, unfortunately the milestone is being selected as a winner in the USAF competition and I didn't win.

I did however get a great review, snippets of which (like the confusing title of this post) are after the break...

Mark Zuckerberg is a...

...capitalist fascist pig in hipster clothes!

Oh yes I got censored on facebook!
The awful awful (truly) awful comment I made is past the break.

The Insignificance of Ideas

A few years ago my friend and partner O and I had an argument over some idea which I considered a potential solution but which was according to him "an idea for an idea for an idea". (FYI Hebrew has no word for "concept")
This annoyed me a great deal, not only because he was putting down our idea but because I felt there was something inherently flawed with this regression, lacking any definition and clarity, beginning or end.

Some time later I realized the key to this unease lay in my knowledge of TRIZ and the way it links problems and solutions.

Metaverse Rising: The Global Economy

Continued from Passover and the Freedom of the Metaverse.
In the previous post I discussed how Steam allows people to be the common thread uniting different online virtual worlds.

Now let's talk about the other element which connects virtual worlds to each other and to the real world: money!

While I'm off sick...

I'm off sick but Valve is restless... it seems the company which is featured in my ongoing case study of the evolution towards the Metaverse is taking more definite steps towards immersive VR: Valve reveals mystery hardware project: wearable computing

Now I wish I had stayed in touch with John Carmack when I was still in the rocket business... I'll have to find the archived emails from before Gmail came along... *groan*

I'll be back soon with the rest of the metaverse story. Don't go far!