|
| Thursday |
the Nineteenth of June, 2003 |
Inexplicable
Mobs are beautiful - large crowds of people agreeing
to converge on an arbitrary location for a spurious reason ("We are
here to buy a rug"), only to suddenly disperse ten minutes
later.
The organisers went to some arcane
lengths to keep the venue and mission a secret until the last minute, after
a concerned recipient of the previous email had invited the police. By
loosening and anonymising the guidance, though, the system becomes
vulnerable - it'd be quite easy for a group of outsiders to pretend to be
the trucker-hatted leaders, and either dissolve the proto-mobs into
I'm-Spartacus confusion, or successfully drag some of the groups away
elsewhere. A truly invulnerable mob must be either completely autonomous
or completely, unambiguously, follow-me orchestrated. But both of those
extremes seem to join up at the back, somewhere. Must read more on this.
[via Erik]
[ Comments? ]
|
|
|
| Wednesday |
the Eighteenth |
Technopoly
is a trading game that Ben and I were kicking into shape a while ago - it's based on a much simpler
simulation game called Bounty, and partly inspired by the arbitrary
thought exercise Technology, both of which were part of a page of
somebody's Six Simulations.
The other simulations are varyingly abstract and theoretical - Bloc
stands out as the strongest, though; "a long-term simulation played out over
a number of months", where initially neutral players are casually but
forcibly recruited into one of two teams, and can then go on to recruit
others. It works by people flashing coloured "chits" at one another, but
would be great with tiny coloured lapel pins, worn inside or outside the collar.
(I'm sure there's an Instant Messenger variant in there somewhere, the
physical safety-in-numbers being replaced by whoever's online at the same
time...)
[ Comments? ]
|
|
|
|
