Head to the Heart - Register ActiveX

I've continually come up with an issue while building the Head to the Heart powerpoint slides in my MSOffice 2007 Virtual Machine. It keeps complaining when I open it that an ActiveX is not registered, but doesn't say anything else past that. There are shockwave flash objects used in the powerpoint, but they visible on the slides as flash objects and listed as registered in the developer tab of ActiveX items. Seems tied to them though as the music or filmclips they should be bringing in disappear if you save the powerpoint once opened with the registration error.

Turns out Flash is NOT registered in Internet Explorer (since it's a custom VM just for Office), so the fix was to simply reinstall Flash into IE.

GameLog 155 & 156

Civ4: BtS (20h) - Fall from Heaven II game with the Grigori. Took a while to claw into 1st place, but fell by the wayside once I got there.

League of Legends (20h) - Picked up an 8/5 win/loss record in Season 1 before they tossed out everyone under level 30. Picking up a couple of games a night to run up the XP.

Cosmic Supremacy (15h) - another Free-to-play web based strategy game. Has a really interesting AI builder to help administer the planets & fleets, but was a little too sanitized to keep me going. Was in 2nd of 20 probably due to the AI programming.

Puzzle Kingdoms (15h) - Sandy managed to finish it, so apart from helping out Cameron, it time to move on. Bit disappointed you don't get to build an army larger than the 60 points initially given. Seems an arbitrary limit and I'm not sore whether we just missed something. Playing the quick battles there are MUCH lager point armies that are fielded.

King's Bounty (10h) - Got a hankering to play through this one again. More or less done the first island again with little to no losses.

East india Company: privateer (8h) - Another cheap steam purchase. Seems very lightwweight for a Paradox game. Even the expansions offer a different game type on top of the core game rather than cleaning up the interface.

Team Fortress 2 (2h) - Tester for the megapatch.

Trackmania nations (2h) - Back at TrackMania for Competitive Computer Games at School.

Thresh and Fatal1ty in Hall of Fame

Fatal1ty and Thresh have been inducted into the gaming's Hall of Fame amongst a assortment of American-centric gamers and games.

lol season 1: interview

PC Games - E3 2011 - League of Legends: Clash of Fates

Lotta hype, but the league structures (especially draft mode) are shaping up to be awesome. I really hope it catches on for large scale leagues and tournaments (like the upcoming WCG demonstration event), but I also hope mini tournaments are able to be pumped out to whet the appetite. Simple ones like 8 team beginner tourneys with a new skin as a prize (or simply riot points). Getting very VERY interesting.

GameLog 153 & 154

Civ4: BtS (33h) - 1 LAN while LoL servers were down, but I've been keen on getting Fall from Heaven II mod working in the steam version. Started a couple of games, but I'm very pleased at the moment about a Grigori campaign ona tiny map with 6 other AIs and barbarian cities. The place feels more alive right from the start.

Uplink (22h) - Whole introversion pack for $5? done! Mainly wanted to play multiwinia, but uplink downloaded first and it's been great getting back into it. More or less setup at the moment apart from a beefier system to crack LANs before being booted off.

League of Legends (15h) - Game of choice for LANs and multiplayer over the net.

Grepolis (8h) - Helped in a merc war, but an analysis of the 'fantasy of Labour' by Naomi Clark in 'Another Castle' made me sit up and take notice on what the game meant to me. Seems like showing up is all the skill you need in it too if you're not attacking or being involved in an alliance.

Puzzle Kingdoms (7h) - More fiddling around with Sandy and Cameron

For the Glory (7h) - Tinkering more, but fallen by the wayside to ffh2.

EVE (5h) - Victim of a massive steam sale.

Trackmania nations (2h) - more Cameron making maps than actively racing.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (1h) - Showed Ben how to win without the other player having a go. took a bit to remember the exact sequence, but managed to beat every ship he had without him getting a turn.

FaceBattle.net to put real names into forums

Blizzard announced earlier today that their RealID system will be even more integrated and will enforce people to use their real names (first and last name) when posting in their forums. Initially RealID was posited as a way to have all Blizzard related games combined under one account, but recently expanded to allow a mutual swapping of RealIDs to see your real friends playing on any game or any toons. Now the net has spread to make your real name your default public handle on the only outward-facing part of the game (so far).

Reminds you of Facebook-like failure of privacy? That's funny, they just announced facebook integration a couple of weeks ago.

Amidst the outcry, a moderator showed it was Ok to post his real name and got eaten alive by 10,000 posts in 6 hours detailing just how easy it was to get to his facebook page, his phone number, his address, a streetview of his house, what he paid for his house and what it's worth now, his recent felonies, etc.

For all the hullaballoo about stalkers, prospective future employers digging up their posts, etc, for me I'm more concerned about a degeneration in our ability to communicate...


Establishing an Online Identity
Ever since I set up my handle on IRC back in 1990, I have made a deliberate distinction between an online identity and my real life name. I have been fortunate that no-one's ever used my handle online, so I can maintain the same 'name' throughout many games and online communities. My handle IS my online identity, my real name is nothing online.

This isn't to do with anonymity, quite the opposite. My handle remains more or less unique while my real name would not be. There are a select few times when these 2 identities are interchangeable, and that is only while playing with my immediate family online while skyping. Even attending LANs I'd rather know people by their handle than by their real name.

Facebook's insistence of using your real name has been the start of the rot, and with Google profiles following suit, there's definitely a move to quash online personas. While there are certainly asshats happy to hide behind an anonymous nick to troll away, the vast majority of people I know have used the ability to have different handles to promote different aspects of their life. This more directly mimics what our intent is within our minds, and as such is a BETTER form of communication than just simply plonking your real name onto something. Think of the conversation style, the attitude and social context used while at work compared to at home, and at the golf course with mates, and online inside forums. Many may wish to lump all these together (as I do for all my online presences), but there remains no need to mandate it. You're destroying something that's important to the conversation, an idea of identity within context of the conversation.

Next thing you know they'll require people to have their own pictures as avatars. Some people do already by choice (hi trog), but forcing everyone to do it limits people's ability to emphasize their identity in a new space. Allowing people to express themselves more easily means that I don't have to read as much to get an impression of whether someone's worth following, or is simply a troll.



Identity is relative?
This news comes in only a couple of weeks after another article I read that identity is relative on the internet and that too many people place too much trust in the personas people create. Right, you may not know if BobTheBuilder is a guy or a girl, a troll or someone genuinely looking for answers, a person being truthful or someone intentionally being deceitful for the lulz, but to say that we should not trust people on the internet is once again ignoring conversation's greatest assets; context. We assume many, MANY things while having a conversation because it allows for a more efficient flow of ideas from one person to another. We don't always get it right, but we have also adapted many verbal and non-verbal queues to aid in conveying whether there has been too much or not enough information provided to set the right context of the conversation for optimal transmission of information.

In an online space you miss out on a number of those tools, but a consistent name and avatar aids in the bonding of those cueues to your impression of who the person is. I'd more likely start out at a higher level of conversation with someone called ProfessorX because even though their handle could have been chosen by anyone watching X-Men, the people who would choose ProfessorX over, say, Wolverine are unconsciously (or possibly consciously) placing more emphasis on scientific reasoning and thought. I would be surprised if they turned out to be a teenager who could not spell, but not shocked.

Trust is more or less the same as building assumptions. We trust that the sun will rise tommorow as it has a lot of evidence to point to that being the case, but it is still an assumption about a future event. People may be intentionally deceitful online, but our experience with people offline and (more importantly) in other online areas should give us an appropriate starting point for how much we can trust what they say will be correct. To say we should not trust at all would mean that every conversation would start with pure, verifiable facts, and be built from there. No conversation is like that, not even scientific ones. There is ALWAYS context to aid in the quicker transmission of information. Even in programming (a conversation between programmer and machine) there is context. Do the assumptions come back and bite us? Sure, but the benifits of quicker coding vastly outweigh the failures.


So back to FaceBattle.net. Their problem is that trolls are ruining their forums, and they believe that they will remove all the trolls by forcing everyone to use their real names. By doing so you also toss out all that expressive context associated with a handle and avatar and replace it with all the baggage that comes with people's real names (like gender & race).

Everyone right now has the ability to call their avatar after their real name and project their actual identity into the forums, but I see none. It would then seem that this option would place EVERYONE at a disadvantage by commnicating under a non-preferred handle.

I'm currently not a battle.net member as my WoW account has lapsed, but these issues really are questioning whether Cataclysm and SC2 are worth the pain of putting my name out there. It's not just the forums that I'm worried about, but the pace at which it's spreading to everywhere else.

From the Facebook integration official post:

This new functionality will START OFF by allowing you to quickly import Facebook friends into your Battle.net friends list, and ADDITIONAL FEATURES will be added over time.

DO .. NOT .. WANT!