Back in Copenhagen - here are some misc links that I have picked up from mail and the conference meanwhile:

A Scandinavian alternative to YouTube (in Scandinavian languages) has spread to both Sweden, Norway and now Denmark: Bubblare.dk .

On the website of crime author and forensic anthropologist (how cool a job title is that?) Kathy Reichs (one of whose books I read on my way home from Sweden), there is a small "forensic" detective game, where you can try to solve a mysterious death, using various lab analysis as part of your search.

However, the puzzles of this game is nothing compared to the Notpron puzzle, that Ulf Hagen - who solved the entire puzzle himself - talked about at the Virtual 2006 conference. 139 levels of pure puzzle fun. Ulf also gave us a link to the wikipedia page on Online Puzzles, where you can find a list of online puzzles. I've been thinking a bit about what makes online puzzles as a genre different from on the one hand, ARG games (Alternative Reality Games) and Flash games like Samorost. What defines online puzzles seem to be that you a) know that they take place in a purely fictional and constructed world (no doubt whether the page or screen you are visiting are real or not), and that you have to jump from webpage to webpage (screen to screen) to solve the puzzle, compared to the Flash Game, that often takes place on the same website or in the same universe. Am I right? Borders seem to liquid though.

Must read: Martin Jay's Songs of Experience (mentioned in McCarthy's Keynote)

Shup Up & Dance Machinima movie (WoW) - Game On (Volvo Competition) machinima (nice mix of RL and GTA) - Anna Machinima (flower story) (from Jon Manker's list of favourite Machinima)

B. Flynn: Geography of the Digital Hearth (from Daniel Pargman's and Peter's presentation)

Theyrule.net (visualisation of relations and doubles in the Fortune 500 companies - mentioned in Mary Flanagan's talk)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:05