Plutopia News Network

Dr Richard Bartle is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK. He co-created the first virtual world, MUD or multi-user dungeon, a progenitor of the Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game industry. His 1996 Player Types model has seen widespread adoption by MMO developers and the games industry in general. He’s the author of Designing Virtual Worlds and How to be A God: A Guide for Would-Be Deities.

Prior to the interview, he told us “I regard games as a medium of personal expression by their designers. I simply want better games.”

Richard Bartle:

I was always a gamer and I’d always been creating worlds, paracosms. When I went and got to the University of Essex I was planning to make a world implemented in software. But I saw that Roy [Trubshaw] had just started like a week earlier work on this game MUD and I thought no, there’s no point in me writing my game if Roy’s doing the same thing. So he was a year older than me so he was more experienced programming, he knew all the stuff from that. So I started helping him with content and eventually Roy had to do his family of projects so he handed over the code ownership of MUD to me. That’d be 1980 and that’s when I started working with it. But the reason that we were working on it, at least in part Roy was working on it through curiosity because he was just interested in computers, he wanted to know and wanted to do things. But the real, the under libraries for it was because we wanted to make our own world because the real world sucked.

The post Richard Bartle: Virtual Worlds first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Renshin Bunce is a Soto Zen Buddhist Priest who received Dharma transmission in 2013. She worked as a hospice chaplain from 2010 until she retired in 2022. Her latest book is Remembering Myogen Steve Stücky.

Renshin Bunce:

The impetus for the book was, I am, as you said, a Zen teacher. And Steve Stücky died ten years ago. At the time of his death he was one of the Abbots at San Francisco Zen Center. When he was made Abbot, he had not lived at Zen Center for, I don’t know, 20 years or something. So he was quite a surprise. He was Abbot for seven years when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And that was enough time for people to, I would say, begin to get to know him. His death was an enormous shock. So I have found in the years since his death that I was repeating stories about Steve to my students. So the point to the book was to gather those stories in the hopes that some kid who has become so curious about Zen that they’re coming around one of the Zen Center buildings. And they go in the bookstore and they’ve heard about this Steve Stücky. Who was he? So what I was hoping for, this is good. This never occurred to me before. What I was hoping for was to concretize his – make permanent his – teachings.

The post Renshin Bunce: Remembering Myogen Steve Stücky first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Brenda Laurel is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a pioneer in developing virtual reality, a public speaker, and an academic. She is known for her work on virtual reality and her advocacy for diversity and inclusiveness in video games. She founded Purple Moon, a company that created computer games for girls, in 1993. Purple Moon was bought by Mattel in 1999 and eventually shut down, but Laurel’s work has had a lasting impact on the gaming industry.

Link to Computers as Theater at Amazon.

Brenda Laurel:

Our thought was to try to do some research to figure out how we might get girls engaged with technology so they wouldn’t be afraid of it. That was the initial impulse. And then as we went around, we interviewed like 1,000 kids all over the country, several years of research. We started learning things that we could do with those games that might be actually relevant and liberating for girls between the ages of 8 and 12. And so our mission became twofold, really. One was a computer literacy attractant. That was the initial impulse. But as we got into it, it was about – oh, shit, man, we can do some things for little girls that might make a big difference in their lives. And as I was raising three of them at the time, I was closely related to the problem space.

The post Brenda Laurel: Games for Girls first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

joey lopez phd loves media, all kinds of media. That love of media was confirmed at UT Austin’s ACTLab, where he was teaching assistant for Sandy Stone, the legendary academic and media theorist. In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, we discuss ACTLab, high-end audio gear, and joey’s work at Texas A&M’s Media and Gaming Lab.

joey lopez:

When I took soundscapes Sandy was like, production’s important, but why are you making this? What are you making? What’s the story? What is sound? Why does sound matter? What was sound and what will sound be? Oh, it was just intoxicating. So I just really latched onto that to the extent that I ended up taking a plethora of classes with her on multiple topics. And it’s also where I learned HTML. I learned HTML and notepad at the ACT Lab. And by the second semester, I was making websites for hi-fi companies. And that would end up being like a $500 to $1,000 a month side gig that I did all the way through my PhD. I was hosting either dealer or importer level websites for gear that they were selling. And that was really fun. And I learned it all in the ACT Lab.

joey lopez phd – joey lopez phd is an Associate Professor of the Practice at Texas A&M and Director of the Department of Communication’s Media & Gaming Lab. joey is a polymath of sorts whose works range from Chicana Feminism to automotive journalism to hardware and software development cheerleading. He is often described as a degenerate who is looking for other degenerates to cause “otherness” with. He is a co-founder of the Convergent Media Collective, a group of “stuff makers” who span multiple disciplines and geographical spaces. He is also a co-owner of a High-End Audio shop called Dremonoid’s in San Antonio, TX. He is a fellow of the ACTLab Program which was founded by tech goddess Sandy Stone.

The post joey lopez phd: Making Media first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, we discuss the various technologies and sites that comprise the Fediverse. Johannes Ernst and Tom Brown have explored the Fediverse since the early days of the movement for an alternative to big social media.

Johannes Ernst:

Think of social media as this one linear feed that somehow streams by you. The best we can do, all we can do, can be to organize this differently, for example, or have different kinds of friend classes, like the Google+ used to do back in the day. There’s so many innovations and innovative things you could do if you could innovate as an innovator, which you can’t do on top of Facebook or on top of Twitter or any of these things. But you can in the Fediverse. One of the big problems that the world has is that so many of our communication channels from mass media to social media are fundamentally manipulated by interests that we cannot see and we cannot understand, and we would probably disagree with if we knew what they were. And so one of the premises on the societal level that the Fediverse has is that we are building a communication network that at least can’t be manipulated by unaccountable third parties, which is a huge proposition as far as I’m concerned.

Johannes Ernst (@[email protected] on Mastodon)is a technologist, entrepreneur and community organizer. At Dazzle, he works on technology and governance enabling people to get back control over their on-line lives including their identity and their personal data. He is also co-organizer of the Fediverse Developer Network and FediForum, a twice-yearly unconference for the people who move the Fediverse forward.

Tom Brown (@herestomwiththeweather on Mastodon) is a software developer and beer league hockey player.

Links:

The post Johannes Ernst and Tom Brown: The Fediverse first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Attorney Ed Cavazos specializes in technology and intellectual property law. He joins the Plutopia podcast this time as we explore artificial intelligence, content moderation, and telemedicine. Ed feels that lawsuits to stop AI programs like ChatGPT and open AI will likely fail.

Ed Cavazos:

There will be temptation to overreact. And we could lose some real valuable benefits of these technologies if we do that. I don’t know if this is a great place to be, right? I mean, the world may have been better the day before they unleashed this stuff, but it’s out there now. And I actually am optimistic that there will be more benefits than harm. But the harm is real. The dangers are real. And I mean, we could just go down a list, right? And we could get things wrong. We could get bad medical advice. It could be used to scam you – you think it – email scams and voice scams, the Nigerian prince type thing – you think it’s bad now? I think wait for those guys to start leveraging AI to make it really hard to know if you’re talking to someone real or someone fake. And all that’s coming. I know that’s out there. I know that’s bad stuff. But I think the legal system is just going to have to deal and try to keep up with it. I don’t think we can kill it.

Ed Cavazos’ previous Plutopia interview: https://plutopia.io/ed-cavazos-cyberlaw/

The post Ed Cavazos: AI and the Law first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Gus Hosein worries about data, everyone’s data. As executive director of Privacy International, Gus has a long history of fighting to protect people’s data from exploitation by companies and governments.

When the Bush administration introduced the US-VISIT system, we were the only organization on the planet that opposed it, saying, this is ridiculous. You shouldn’t be fingerprinting kids coming to visit people in the US. But Americans didn’t really care. Although it was funny, because at that time, the Brazilians were a little bit rebellious. And they decided to retaliate against Americans by fingerprinting all American visitors. And Colin Powell was Secretary of State at the time, and he was on his way to Brazil. When he was asked about that, he said he was going to make his displeasure clear to the Brazilians that that was not a good practice. He couldn’t even imagine that this was standard US policy. I was working at the time campaigning against that system, and the Japanese government had also introduced its equivalent system. And the EU was very much on our side, saying, no, you should not be collecting data on EU citizens who are just visiting the US. And the data collected in the US-VISIT system, the fingerprint data is kept for 100 years.

Gus Hosein is the Executive Director of Privacy International, a London-based charity that works across the world to protect people and their data from exploitation by governments and companies. He has worked at the intersection of technology and human rights for over twenty-five years.

The post Gus Hosein: Technology and Human Rights first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Science fiction author and undisputed Queen of Cyberpunk Pat Cadigan joins this episode of the Plutopia podcast. We explore cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, and her recent novelizations of classic sci-fi movies and Japanese anime. Pat tells us she has no plans to write her own movie scripts…

I am probably the wrongest person in the whole world to ever consider writing a screenplay, because apparently, you have to pitch this stuff. And my idea of a pitch is studio executives come to me and explain why I should give them time of day. I don’t make 30-second pitches on elevators to guys who can’t read. I’ve had just enough of Hollywood over the years to know that I’m probably not a good candidate for writing, for a studio. The other thing that they all seem to have is industrial strength ADHD, where they’re all excited about one project. And it’s all they can talk about. And then suddenly, you don’t hear anything about it, and everyone’s on to something else.

Previous Plutopia interviews with Pat:

Photo by Andy Miah. License

The post Pat Cadigan: The Queen of Cyberpunk first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Andy Cohen is a blues musician who, when he’s not on the road touring, resides in Memphis Tennessee. He plays mostly southeastern music that he found on old 78 RPM records. Andy’s performances include blues, gospel, country dance music, fiddle tunes, ballads, classic rags, country songs, and boogies. If there’s one thing Andy loves as much as playing blues, that would be talking about the blues.

I lived in Asheville, North Carolina in the mid 1970s. And I met a man there, his name was Walt Phelps, and he could play a little bit of guitar. And I asked him where he was from, and he said, I’m from Lawrence, South Carolina. And he was born in the same year as [Reverend Gary] Davis. He was in his close to 80 when I met him. I said, when you were a kid, did you know a blind kid that could pick his ass off? And he said, yeah, you’re talking about Gary Davis. I knew him, and I knew his brother, Buddy Pinson. I knew them both. And then he proceeded to take my guitar and he played “Candyman” just exactly like Reverend Davis taught me.

Reverend Gary Davis:

Andy Cohen, “Franklin Blues”:

Ray Fisher, singing Willie’s Lady:

The post Andy Cohen’s Blues first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Plutopia’s own Jon Lebkowsky was an early adopter of digital technology and the internet. On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, Jon presents a personal history of digital tech, life online in the 1990s, the internet, and much more.

Jon Lebkowsky:

So I heard that you could get a pretty decent computer, personal computer, an IBM PC clone from a company that was called PC’s Limited. And PC’s Limited was actually a DBA for a company called Dell Computers. So I bought one of the first Dell computers, which was through PC’s Limited. And carted it home and I had this computer and this amber monitor, no color, just amber, that was it. And a stack of manuals like this [holds hands to suggest size], huge stack of manuals, one for each computer program and one for the computer itself and one for the monitor and all this stuff that I had to read through and learn. And I started kinda banging away on the computer and then it’s like, okay, Marsha, now what I wanna do next is I wanna log in via long distance to this system that’s out in California and it’s gonna be about 10 bucks an hour. And this led to a rather tense discussion. And of course, acknowledging who wears the pants in the family, we squashed that idea.

Currently cohost of Plutopia News Network, Jon was formerly CEO of FringeWare, Inc. and editor/publisher of FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer for Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; and blogger at Worldchanging. A member of the online community The WELL for over 30 years, he cohosts three WELL forums: VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

The post Jon Lebkowsky: A Personal History of the Early Internet first appeared on Plutopia News Network.