Pacmanhattan: Mixed Reality at Its Finest, p.s. Wikipedia is Dead

It's Pacman. It's Manhattan.

It's ... PACMANHATTAN!

Thanks, dpstyles of flickr. I'm going to fair use your photo for news purposes:



Holy geez.

Totally, totally mixed reality

So, what does this have to do with Second Life, my faithful readers?

This is mixed reality events. For each ghost and for Pacman, there sits a person in a room with a laptop and cell phone. They use GPS relay their position via cell phone, so the people in the main room can monitor and update the situation from the game interface that resembles your typical Pacman map. Only, this one is 24 square blocks large.

As we do mixed reality events in SL, it's not enough to simply make them bigger or with bigger names. We should aim to make our events more interactive between worlds. A big concept that came from the "RL in SL" panel at SLCC was that SL is not seperate from RL, but an extension. This works just like the Internet; yes, there are online games, but yes, there's also e-commerce, blogging, and weather.

Simultaneous Isn't Enough

It is not sufficient to simply have an event in the real world, time it with an event in a virtual world, and call it a mixed reality event. Sure, it's cool, but the real thing that's interesting is when two world-spaces affect each other. One-way interaction is standard. That's anything in a virtual world. It's when you get people interacting across the meatspace to bitspace gap that you actually do something special with real-time virtual worlds.

So, here's to you, Pacman.

P.S. Wikipedia is Dead

And, here's me thumbing my nose to Wikipedia. There used to be a wikipedia page on mixed reality events that I would have normally posted in an entry like this, but some admin named "KungFuAdam" deleted it. No warning or nothing. Seriously, how ridiculous is it to be censored by some unknown guy named "KungFuAdam" with no warning? Thanks, "KungFuAdam", your l33t censorship skills really show your martial arts prowess. Thanks also for deleting my appeal request on your talk page without contacting me. You're super. You're practically Neo. You're "The One".

Wikipedia is dead as a dynamic source of knowledge. Mark my words. Wikipedia's content is only as good as its links to other sites or the ferocity of people willing to babysit pages to make sure content remains unaltered. Between politicians trying to erase scandals from their pages, to China's censorship, to Wikipedia's own internal moderators, it has become so rigid and standardized that the spirit of "anyone can come and add to it" has been completely obliterated.

They Spoke Too Soon?

I still remember the Wired article where the creators talk about how people on the Internet were generally good-spirited, and that's why Wikipedia worked. You spoke too soon. Its only use now is a place to post links, which seem to be the things least moderated.

I've had multiple posts deleted, and for what reason? Is it so bad that I only want to spend half an hour creating a page with related info and links, and not the full two hours which Wikipedia seems to demand to comply with all of their standards and regulations?

It seems to me that the whole point of Wikipedia was to make it easy for users to add data to a common knowledge base. That's gone. To me, that means the soul of Wikipedia is dead.