What is wrong with this picture?
In an interview with the BBC [President Bush] said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it. [He also] insisted the US still occupied the moral high ground worldwide. (Guardian)

BBC iPlayer to hit Macs in 2008

The BBC will launch a download version of its iPlayer online video service for Apple Mac users by the end of 2008. Well its about bloody time, the question is why has it taken this long?

Explaining the decision to launch for just Windows users, Mr Thompson said it had been about "making the service available in the shortest time frame to the greatest amount of users".


Hmm, hasn’t he heard of flash players? Why the hell did the BBC have to use a proprietary windows player anyway??

Please take my survey.

If you have come across this blog I would be very grateful if you could click on the following link and take the survey.

http://users.aber.ac.uk/ram05/survey.html

You do not have to be a serious gamer to take part. all you need to have done is played a videogame. The survey is very short and should not take more than a few minutes of you time.

I am interested in why playing games is such a different experience from watching them, and from watching other kinds of media like TV and films. I have a theory that the feeling of greater involvement players experience with videogames is to do with the way people model the layout of their environment in their heads, which then gets applied to videogames as if they are real environments. This faculty is not so engaged when watching a film or TV because from a very early age we learn that we cannot interact with these kinds of media, so we tend to sit back and scrutinise them instead. I don't want to say more than that because I don't want those taking the survey to have their expectations micro managed.