ORA ETech '06
2006-03-07

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contributors:
Gabe Hollombe - http://avantbard.com/ - gabe@avantbard.com
Leonard Lin - http://randomfoo.net/ - lhl@randomfoo.net
Leon Chism - leon@chism.org
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playSH - the playful shell
presented by Matt Webb & Ben Cerveny

Matt Webb - wrote Mind Hacks with ORA (http://www.mindhacks.com/)
    - interaction designer
    - Schulze + Webb design firm (http://www.schulzeandwebb.com/)

Ben's Intro
    - neb (as in nebulous), originally involved in prototyping GNE (Game 
Neverending)

The Sea of Knobs & Buttons
    - where will we live where the techno revolution is over? a soup of 
potentialities
    - working with primitive tools, barely squiggling around in browser
      - browser still finding its legs
      - preserving state, providing narrative arc
    - we are in a "field of mud"


All that is mashable recombines
    - how can we frame all these different apis/feeds in a way that makes sense to 
us personally?
    - mashups are mediated by a third party, still in between what it means to you

Culture emerges on objects
    - culture is a consensually constructed conceptual model
    - each year we try a new framework to see if it helps solve our 
problems/issues.  
    - frameworks are our conceptual models = our culture; shareable language

Collaborative play transforms culture
    - GNE's idea: you had all these people in the blogosphere beginning to share 
their experiences with eachother. why not build a space to share their experiences 
in another persistent world?  
        - they liked exploring questions about how you create a virtual community 
and how you extend permissions to others in that realm
    - achieve state of communal flow where everyone is offering up ideas
        what a functional community of development achieves

A History of Fabric
    - frameworks are like fashions
    - MUDs became MOOs
        - MOOs transform the environment so everyone becomes content creators
        - break down the barriers between the users and the programmers
    - critical advance that was planned but never materialized was a project called 
Fabric
        - take the codebase of the MOO and integrate the idea of collective 
production of narrative objects into the OS functionality
        - write narrative frontends to the OS using a metaphor like you would have 
on a MOO.  (editor's note: reminds me of Shakespearian programming language)

now demoing an IF game that Matt wrote
    - traditional IF interfavce, but looks like he's letting the user twiddle with 
the environment more than a normal IF game (like a MOO)

    a moo-like substance, running on his machine.
    all objects/places have urls.
    
    turns rss feeds into rooms full of doors with titles.
    
    verbs get attached to differnt kind places
        - example: in html place: grep img for jpg -> yields img tags in source
        - example: in a TV place, tbvvc1 -> yields programs on bbc1 (surprise)
    
    he can drop into python to instantly change parts of the source to change 
behavior

    multiple people can be in the same place/room (Neb has joined him)
    
    can switch the metaphor, example: from rooms to a card game
        - play north -> dealer gives you new cards, blah blah
    
    hey, it has a shared python interative shell, too! namespace shared amongst all 
people in the room
    

APIs all-the-way-down
    - let's get the APIs accessable to the wannabe mechanics/tweakers
    - APIs allow hiding of sins

Animal Crossing slide
    - different interfaces inside the same environment
    
Internet Banking vs Telephone Banking
    - calling phone banker isnt helpful because you don't see what they're doing to 
help you
    - better to get shown how to do something

playSH lets people get together to write code

flow calcifies into artefacts (now Ben/neB is talking)
    - MOO-like multiuser interaction puts you into a place of play but also lets 
you play with the place
    - people have tradition of dropping out of state of play to do work/task
    - start a system in total play/chaos, a lot of times order will emerge because 
people will settle upon common metaphors
    - when tech is first introduced, it gets a half-life of play while we all 
understand how to relate to it and use it.
    - we're addicted to that moment of play; the social experience of helping to 
define new things

flickr is a glidr
    - flickr came from GNE 
    - flickr is the stable crystalization of the play that was GNE
    - cellular automata states settle into a glider state where one part of the sim 
will keep going because it's having a stable conversation with itself.  
    - flickr became a formalization of a relationship between image sharing 
functionality and its application in the social space

1 function, n metaphores
    - room metaphore;card metaphore; etc.
    - playSH lets you play with a vibrant set of objects that you use to refer to 
the multitude of services exposed to us.  
    - to each his own metaphor

object oriented?
    allow diff users to see the same object is different ways

The Three Steps: the history of physics and the fuuture of computing
    - id resolves to properties
    - properties actualize to the object
    - actualizers late bind

remodeling spaces
    - playground foundation in amsterdam. about making urban areas playful
    - threads of investigation for play transforming into crystalized structures
    
playsh.org
BSD license.
internonnected.org