Journal tags: werewolf

It’s just gone 4am here at Alexandra Palace. There are still plenty of hackers gathered ‘round their laptops, scheming their hacky schemes.

The gaming hack continues apace. Super-smart people are working ‘round the clock to put this together. It’s been a real journey of discovery: a mixture of game theory, APIs and maths. Everyone’s pretty frazzled at this stage though. I think my brain has ceased to function. I blame Tantek.

It probably didn’t help that I stopped to play Werewolf. It wouldn’t be a proper geek gathering without a good round of organised paranoia and suspicion.

It hasn’t bee all keyboard-tapping and accusations of lycanthropy. There was a perfectly judged entertainment break earlier, courtesy of Doctor Who.

Of course it would be completely illegal for somebody to record Doctor Who and play it back to hundreds of people assembled together for Hackday. That would contravene BBC licensing agreements. I’m sure the BBC (and Yahoo) would never do such a thing… officially.

Unofficially, it was a good episode; cheers, Auntie Beeb and Uncle Yahoo.

It’s been a good day at BarCamp. I’ve seen some great presentations.

Gavin Bell gave a great presentation called History, Time and the Internet. He packed in a ton of ideas and I’d love to follow some of them up some time. Marvelous stuff!

Jim Purbrick from Linden Lab gave a good in-depth look at some of the neat things you can do in Second Life with a bit of code. There’s definitely some cool stuff to be done using Web Services to tie items in Second Life to things in the real world.

Oh, and Jim announced the official location of the next Linden Lab office: Brighton.

Tom compressed his talk from The Future of Web Apps in San Francisco into a whirlwind of ideas around social software.

I left Tom’s talk to hear Aral talk about how he’s hacked together some extensions to the API for Twitter. Of course I twittered that I was going to the presentation and that notification appeared on-screen so it was all very meta.

There was a whole bunch of other good stuff including a well-prepared presentation from Andy. But eventually the talks had to stop and the pizza and beer had to begin.

Right now the BT Centre has become Werewolf Central. There are two or three concurrent games running at any one time. It’s three in the morning now and the games show no sign of stopping.

I must go now. A game is starting.

I am not a werewolf.

BarCamp London is over. I had a really good time, for which I would like to thank Ian, Ben, and Murray ‘Gizzajob’ Rowan. I’m excited and energised by the stuff I saw over the weekend.

Niqui led a great discussion on Flash and accessibility… not an oxymoron. This discussion will continue long after BarCamp, I’m sure. Both Aral and Niqui are doing great work from within the Flash community and it’s important that the accessibility community can reach out to liaise with them.

I never did get ‘round to doing any more podcasting on the Sunday. I was too busy enjoying the presentations and talking to the other attendees. In the course of talking to people, I found some new APIs and saw some great mashups. By far the most fun mashup of the weekend was a hybrid of Pecha Kucha and del.icio.us.

Pecha Kucha is a presentation format that forces presenters to show twenty slides with twenty seconds per slide. Each presentation is exactly six minutes and forty seconds long. I first saw it in action at Reboot 8.

There was a Pecha Kucha session on the first day of BarCamp. On the second day, there was a session of Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha. This involved taking the last twenty links from someone’s del.icio.us account and displaying each one on the screen for twenty seconds while the account owner frantically tries to explain why they bookmarked it. Oh, and you’re not allowed to peruse back through your links beforehand.

I couldn’t resist so I just had to bear my online soul to the room. It was loads of fun. Watching other people run their links was equally fun. This was by far the most enjoyable Pecha Kucha experience I’ve had yet.

Still, my overriding memory of BarCamp will probably be of mob justice lynchings and murder in the night. Simon returned from FooCamp wildly excited about a social (or possibly anti-social) game called Werewolf. I won’t go into all the rules here but suffice to say it involves paranoia, psychology, lying, and treachery. What a great way to get to know people. We played from nine in the evening to five in the morning. So much for having a mini mashpit.