So, anyway. I heard about this gadget a few years ago, but it kind of rolled off my brain. I saw some documentation about it again for this summer’s SIGGRAPH, and then I saw the Device Art article in Intelligent Agent a week or so ago and I decided I should get one — it was resonating with a bunch of stuff. I figured plugging it into my television would help me figure out why.
Well, I think this is just about the neatest thing I’ve seen in, I dunno..a few weeks or something. Something about the single-mindedness of the device which simply plugs into an available video in on your television and that’s it. You watch Bitman scramble around a side-scroller style pixel video world. Low-res, two-color, panicked rout all about your television. It’s brilliant in a really simple way.
I know what it is. This reminds me of what a 1980s version of Animal Crossing might’ve looked like. No specific end-game, just activity. Wouldn’t it be great if you could plug gadgets like these into your USB port or whatever, that would then play small games for you, or render some kind of playful, game-like representation that summed up your 1st Life activites over the course of the day, or the course of time since you started using the gizmo. Little wearable charms that took stock of what happened during your day to share later privately or with your friends simply by plugging into a standard port.
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