New Wall.E Trailer

A New Trailer is out. And the film looks more stunning every time I see it.

Dates For Your Diary 2008

If you where wondering when the big industry events where taking place next year, I got you covered.

January
Consumer Electronics Show (Las Vegas) 8th to 11th

February
DICE Summit (Las Vegas) 6th to 9th

March
Game Connection (San Francisco) 5th to 6th
Games Developers Conference (San Francisco) 5th to 9th

April
MCV Awards (London) 19th

May
Northern Exposure (York) 10th
Nordic Game (Sweden) 15th to 16th

July
E3 (Los Angeles) 15th – 17th
Develop Conference (Brighton) 24th to 26th

August
SIGGRAPH (San Diego) 5th to 9th
GCDC (Leipzig) 20th to 22nd
Leipzig Games Convention (Leipzig) 23rd to 26th
Penny Arcade Exhibition (Seattle) 29th to 31st

September
Austin Games Conference (Austin, Texas) 5th to 7th

October
GC Asia (Singapore) 9th to 12th

Awesome Lecture: Copyright and Fair Use

I have been reading some stuff on Copyright and all the discussion that I have read so far feels beneath my understanding. Most of the time it is like watching two kids fighting over who gets to play with a tennis ball. And I owe that level of understanding to a lecture I once watched by Lawrence Lessig titled Is Google Book Search "Fair Use"?.

I am linking to this now because I only just realised how thankful I am that I watched this lecture. It is one of those things which I was happy with seeing at the time and have re-thought about again and again since.

Lawrence is an awesome speaker with excellent presentation skills. If you have ever had a passing interest in Copyright or Intellectual Property then I highly recommend watching this lecture because he covers the basics and then takes the debate to a much higher level.



[Direct Link]

Tuesday's XBox360 Dashboard Update

On Tuesday a new version of the 360's dashboard is going to be released. In this release the big new features are "Friends of Friends" where you can view who your Friends have as Friends on their Friends list. A timer so that parents can dictate how long their offspring can play games for. And the much requested DivX and XviD video codex support is being added so that you can brows and stream AVI video from a PC to whatever large television you might have connected to your 360. If you want to see the complete list of changes Click Here.

GamerScoreBlog (which is run by Microsoft PR) has put together a rather good video preview of the whole thing.

Inclusive Vs Exclusive Groups

As Humans we are programmed to seek our place in the world, to question ourselves and to never be happy with what we have. So that's why groups be them religions, political, school fraternities or people of similar ideals like Neo Nazis come together because it makes them feel apart of something and more whole than if they weren't in that group. This is partly because Human instinct is towards running in a pack rather than alone, but ideologically it makes us feel less alone.

In my life I have experienced many such groups and is occurred to me while watching Accepted that exclusive groups where membership is filtered to only allow the "right sort of people" in normally feel hollow because when you join such a group you are buying into the group founder's vision and not something you can influence yourself.

Inclusive groups are groups of people who all try to get along. And since everybody in them puts effort into getting along, being part of the group feels more whole as everybody has a viewpoint that is heard. A lot of inclusive groups like sports clubs, music and other groups are so inclusive that they transcend any physical place and become an idealogical movement like Wikipedia (the open source encyclopedia), The Skeptics Movement (critical thought in search of exposing truth), Parkour (be strong to be useful) or any number of civil rights movements.

However the biggest inclusive and exclusive groups in the world is society itself. In some parts of the world people actively segregate themselves in order to find their place in the world and in other places people pay for services like national health so that everybody is more equal.

So what I am trying to say is that there are a lot of people in the world that try to find their place in the world by excluding other people or ideas. Even to the point where they suppress freespeech and commit hate crimes against people who they consider to be apart of another group, this is probably a natural instinct for Humans, but I think if we all tried to be a little bit more inclusive by helping others, listening to others and giving others our time then the group that we are already in, society, becomes a much better place.