links for 2010-05-26

  • Some pret­ty dis­turb­ing news from Swe­den about youth gangs. (If you like me don’t read Swedish, Google does a pret­ty good job of trans­lat­ing this.) The arti­cle posits that the way kids get caught up in these gangs is through abu­sive games such as ‘slave deck’ but I think that is tak­ing it too far. If there’s any play at work here, it’s young peo­ple mim­ic­k­ing the dog-eat-dog world of busi­ness. That might be a cyn­i­cal read­ing of this piece, but there you have it. More like­ly than some evil rule­set sub­vert­ing kids into becom­ing mafiosi.
  • URBLOVE is a ser­vice that in an inno­v­a­tive way com­bines urban explor­ing and games, with user-cre­at­ed con­tent. It is both a ser­vice for loca­tion based mobile games main­ly in urban areas, as well as an online com­mu­ni­ty where these games are dis­trib­uted. On the web com­mu­ni­ty users can cre­ate their own games and share their expe­ri­ences with each oth­er.” I had a chat with one of the girls behind Ozma recent­ly and what I liked the most about the plat­form they’re build­ing is the decid­ed­ly low-tech approach they’re tak­ing. Urblove is text mes­sage dri­ven, mak­ing it very acces­si­ble to young peo­ple who tend not to car­ry around iPhones and the likes.

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.