The Best Sentence of the Day

This blog is a cut-up of a dissertation in progress. Each day, I will post my favorite sentence that I have newly scribed. Everything out of context, but suggestive. I hope.

My Photo
Name:
Location: San Francisco, CA

I'm a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. Learn more here in my bio or get my contact information on my contact page.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Best Sentence #50

Back from New York City, where I was able to interview two of the designers I'm writing about in chapter 4.

I've been doing more editing than writing. But here we go, back to generating novel combinations of words. To make up for not blogging for a few days, a few sentences strung together. I won't say which games I'm talking about here, but if you know the area and have a guess...

*

Note that for both ubicomp games, even as they represent the turn of digital gaming back toward physical reality, the very “reality” of each project’s gameness is challenged. Questions from would-be players--‘Is this a real thing they are doing?’ and ‘When will it be turned into a real game?’--perfectly capture the performative nature of ubicomp games research. After all, an emulation is not really the thing it emulates; it is a convincing, mimetic reproduction. So, too, are the games that emulate the future of ubiquitous computing.

1 Comments:

Blogger italianesco said...

Nice. I like these sentences and what they say.

I notice a pattern here, though.
You're using "ubicomp" when you need a modifier as in "ubicomp games" and "ubicomp games research" but you're using the full expression in the last sentence - "the future of ubiquitous computing."

In the last best sentence, though, #49, you don't use "ubicomp" as a modifier:

"It is a tangible act of flag-planting in the name of ubicomp—only in this case, the flags are chips and sensors."

Why not "in the name of ubiquitous computing" as in "the future of ubiquitous computing"?

In a way, every writer makes an implicit promise to every reader: "I'm going to make this pleasant for you to read by laying out some groundrules for myself and sticking to them so that the written expression of my thoughts may be clear and consistent to you." I think this implicit promise makes both the writer's task of writing and the readers task of reading easier for everyone...

But that's just me! :-)

I keep saying to my blog readers that blogs are "counter-chronological" (first post in at the very bottom) and that blogs should be read "counter-post-wise" (from the bottom up). I started reading your last post yesterday (#68) and then started going down the page at random (in violation of my own observation :-) So I don't know what patterns you have established with your readers from your first post. If I have misread you, my apologies!

Here's a all this for what it's worth!

10:38 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home