Matilde asks me all the time how large the internet is. I keep telling her it’s not about the size, rather about traffic and people connected. Anyone with a connection to the internet, can easily expand the size by hosting their own webserver, or any other service. I am personally responsible for several gigabytes of the internets size. But that is not important. It is the amount of traffic my content is generating, and the number of people downloading it, that is interesting.

In order to put some internet sense in her, I am going to give her this book when I meet her later today. It is called “Hva er Internett?” and is written in Norwegian by internet guru Gisle Hannemyr. I read it myself, and it is very informative about the more technical parts of the internet, without being very technical at all. The book is for those who use the internet on a daily basis, but don’t know much about the finer details. It’s not going to teach you how to use email, it’s not that basic.

Another fun-fact is that speed also is irrelevant on the internet. Electrons move the same speed trough copper cables today, as they did back in 1995. There is difference in speed with different technologies, such as fiber optic cables, and wireless networks, but even that is not the most important stuff. Bandwith is the measurement used for how much data you can move trough a network, often measured in kilobits per second (kbps). We perceive this as speed, since higher bandwith allows you to download files faster. Still, it is not speed.

Imagine two people standing on opposite sides of a lake. They both know morse code, and one of them has a flashlight. He is communicating with the other person, sending morse code with his flashlight. The other person is standing on the opposite side of the lake, looking at the flashlight in the middle of the night. Depending on his skills, he might be able to understand only a certain amount of morse code per second. This is not the speed of the communication, it is the bandwith. The morse is transmitted with light, which moves at a constant speed. What we might think of as speed, is realy bandwith, and is how much morse code that can be understood per second.

The next time someone brag about their fast internet connection, you can tell them that your own connection is just as fast. What may differ, is the bandwith.

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Some friends at the university and I had this discussion the other day, regarding the proper means of opening a banana. As the internet somehow seemed to disagree with me, I had to make some disagreeing on the internets for myself. This is the video I made to prove my point:

The song is a work in progress, and everything is filmed by a crappy compact camera. I’ll post the song I used later, if there is demand. Now it is time to sleep.

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The Graveyard is one of the shortest, yet most beautiful games I have played in a long time. The beauty lies in the refined graphics and sublime sound, and the extreme unnatural limitations on the gameplay. I think the sound is sublime, because it indirectly tells you about the environment and the mood. The only difference between the demo and the full version, is that the possibility that the old lady can suddenly die.

Picture from Tale of Tales: The Graveyard, post-mortem

Beside the obvious beauty, the game has serious flaws any gamer could point out: the lack of gameplay. The unnatural limitations of the gameplay is the fixed position of the camera, pacing and extremely limited number of options you have. There are hardly any interaction at all. You controll the old lady with the cursor keys, and the gameplay is based on walking up and down a relatively short path and sitting on a bench. Your own skills don’t affect the course of the game, and as mentioned it is very slow paced. You are never rewarded or measured.

The Graveyard definetly talks the same language as other interactive computer applications intended for play, also known as games. But because of the limitations, you might not consider The Graveyard a proper game if you don’t find it fun. Games have to be fun, right?

What if play is more than fun? I saw an interesting talk about this yesterday, and discovered that my definition of play probably is flawed. Dr. Stuart Brown talks about this at the TED conference. Click the link or the picture to see the talk.

A short summary of the talk is that play is essential, and that play is not necessarily just fun. I think games are a form of play, and after the talk I realized that games don’t have to be fun in order to be a form of play.

Play for me is some sense of exploration and wonder, much like you might get from pieces of artwork. I consider games to be an interactive way of playing, often with goals or some way of measuring my skills. This means that I probably can call The Graveyard a game of sorts, because after all it does offer some level of interaction, and it gives me a sense of exploration and wonder. If you don’t like looking at art, listening to music and such, The Graveyard propably isn’t something worth your time. However, if you are like me, you should at least try the demo.

Download The Graveyard demo here. It’s for Windows and Mac OS. The full version is only 5$, and is worth it to give the developers respect and support, if you want to.

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This is it.

I should probably let you know that Microsoft Songsmith is a tool for autogenerating accompaniment on recorded vocals. It can be argued that it already has  achieved legendary status, not only by being so bad but also a rather frightening infomercial

which in turn spawned remixes

Oh, the hilarity!

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