Monthly Archives: August 2012

Could playing 'games' help safeguard our planet?

via cycling.com

The success of the London 2012 Olympics shows that our enthusiasm for ‘The Games’ has not waned since our earliest civilisations battled to become Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

As the sun sets on the Games of the XXX Olympiad and we head off to XXXI in Rio, the next 4 years have been deemed crucial by some organisations for addressing potentially one of the biggest issues facing our planet – global warming.

We are just 2 short months from the onehundredmonths.org half way point and the remaining 50 months will take us up to the next ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ in Rio 2016.

London 2012 has been described as the ‘greenest games ever’ and this article debates quite nicely just how true this is. Regardless of the efforts that have gone into building the venues from recycled materials and creating new wildlife habitats, the article points out that …
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Ender's Game – 35 years on …

When Orson Scott Card first wrote his novelette Ender’s Game in 1977, I was 10 years old – the age at which Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin was in the midst of saving the human race from *evil* aliens in the story.

Coming to this Sci Fi classic 35 years after it was first published and before a new blockbuster film based on a fusion of two of the ‘Ender series’ books is due to be released in 2013 has been an interesting and timely experience.

As with many Sci-fi novels from the last 100 years it prophesied how some aspects of our society could developed over the subsequent decades.

The full novel was published in 1985, predating the web and a time when the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the peak of home computing and gaming.

The ‘newsnets’ that the story refers to were no doubt based on Card’s understanding of the rudimentary communication structures on the Internet at that time, before Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext mark up language that made the environment accessible to everyone.

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