What’s wrong with this photograph? (Answer in the extended entry.)

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I started reading this post by Chris Bateman about theories of play and got sucked in despite the jargon, and I’m quite happy about it. It ends up framing a very interesting discussion about games in a light I’d never considered before.

Imagine that “play” is a continuum stretching from freeform, imaginative anarchy (“paidia”) at one end to rules-based order (“ludus”) at the other. As children, we start out with a natural tendency towards paidia — we play nonsense games with dolls, we build worlds out of Legos, we bat about aimlessly with sticks, with no rules or direction in mind. (Although one theorist mentioned in the post argues that the unspoken cultural ‘rules’ underpinning these games are stricter and more elaborate than those you’d find in an instruction manual.) Paidia tends to be short-lived, generally evolving into ludus. As we play with our dolls and our Legos and our sticks, we start developing more and more rules and logical structures for our play. The dolls start acting out a scenario. The sticks find a target and a purpose.

As we age, we tend to skip paidia altogether and head straight for the ludus. Adults play card games and sports and board games with rulesets that are complicated from the outset. And the geeks among us prize those games with incredibly Byzantine engineering — turn-based role-playing games, for example. These are games that have been carefully designed to incorporate many different patterns of play — strategy, chance, competition, mimicry — into a seamless whole.

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Grant McCracken riffs on three models for how the Net is changing the world: 1) It’s cutting out the middlemen. 2) It’s allowing microcultures to flourish. 3) It’s reforming the idea of the idea. The post isn’t really dense or light, but slightly abstract and pretty interesting. McCracken doesn’t necessarily contend that all or any of these models is actually true.

This post is putatively to mention that NYU journalism professor Mitchell Stephens, author of the rise of the image the fall of the word, has begun a new blog tracking the history of atheism. (He’s writing a book on the topic.)

But really this post is just a way for me to mention that once you figure out how to configure it for Movable Type, the Performancing extension for Firefox is pretty hott.

What do you think? Knowing that none of these faces belongs to a human, do you find them freaky, or actually kinda hot? Do any of them work for you? How about when you compare them to this set of faces? Does it help if they’re not looking at the camera? Are you wigged out yet? (Ferreterrific.)

Excellent. They’ve apparently made a movie out of Tristram Shandy. Er, sort of. And we say the film industry doesn’t take risks anymore.

… starts a blog. Go thank him for the Internet. (Waxtastic.)

Jay Bookman tells it like it is:

Think back a little more than a year ago, to the political campaigns of 2004. One of the hottest issues in presidential debates and congressional campaigns was the threat to traditional marriage posed by gay people seeking the right to wed. …

But a year later, it seems pertinent to ask: Have you heard or read a single word about a federal gay-marriage amendment since the election?

Many of you may have already caught this Nature article posted on Boing Boing. Nature conducted a peer review of 42 entries from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The results:

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

I’m pretty darn awed by that.

If you’ve been watching Romenesko’s letters this week, you might have caught Karen Heyman’s letter about Wikipedia’s problems. A snippet:

Unless you already know a field, you can have no idea that an apparently definitive entry presents only one side of an ongoing fight between specialists. That it may be changed, and changed back again, hardly helps matters. This, btw, is the best explanation as to why simply sitting back and saying, “It’s okay now, it’s changed,” ultimately would not have worked for Seigenthaler. Chances are high that later somebody would have come along to “fix” the correction.

Wikipedia is a fantastic idea, a wonderful service, with entries that often reflect great effort and care. Unfortunately, inevitably, as it’s grown, the flaws built into its original design have become more obvious. Egalitarian editing may be a noble goal, but the reality is that if Wikipedia is to truly fulfill its promise, it needs a way to vet contributors, to let users know whether an entry on neuroscience was written and edited by a senior professor, a student who just took Psych 101, or a layperson who’s paraphrasing an old issue of Scientific American. Certainly prankster Brian Chase’s initial belief that Wikipedia was a joke site says a great deal about how some of its entries appear to the general public. If Seigenthaler’s complaint actually leads to more accountability, far from hurting Wikipedia, he may ultimately have saved it.

I’ll cross-post my reply to Ms. Heyman below:

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I’m totally scared of this dude. (Via 3quarks daily.)